Baroness Louise Casey calls on government to take immediate action to tackle urgent reforms needed in dementia and motor neurone disease care and adult safeguarding.
The government must appoint a dementia tsar as part of six immediate actions needed to tackle reforms urgently needed in social care, the leader of the Independent Commission on Social Care has said.
In her first speech as chair of the social care commission, Baroness Louise Casey also called on ministers to scale up dementia trials, set up a new National Safeguarding Board to protect vulnerable adults, and introduce a new fast-track, social care passport system for people diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
She also set out the call in a letter to the Health and Social Care secretary Wes Streeting outlining the six immediate actions ‘due to the urgency of the reform needed in these areas,” according to a Casey Commission statement released following her speech to the Nuffield Trust Summit today.
Baroness Casey also used her speech to call for a “national conversation” to get public backing for reforms to a social care system held together by “add-ons, work arounds, sticking plasters and glue”.
“Unlike the NHS or indeed the benefits system, social care has never had its own creation moment. No moment when the nation decided what it was for, what people should expect or who should pay, and how.
“Instead, we inherited a system shaped for a very different age, held together with add-ons and work arounds, sticking plasters and glue. Without ever having the moment of reckoning we now need,” she said.
Baroness Casey and Commission colleagues have met with more than 400 people with lived experience of receiving or delivering care, and visited councils, social care providers and NHS workers across the country since the Commission formally launched in April 2025, according to the statement.
It added the Commission has also hosted evidence sessions with people working across adult social care including unpaid carers, frontline practitioners, providers, local authorities, NHS workers, and sector representative organisations.
People interested in submitting their views on social care reform can also submit their views and ideas via an online evidence portal on the Commission site, said.
Baroness Casey’s first report is set to be published later this year, with the final report due in 2028.
