Introduction

Abstract

Policies for ‘community care’, as Finch and Groves point out in the article reproduced here, are not particularly recent phenomena. However, in recent years there has been a considerable growth in attention given to such policies, both from politicians and policymakers and from feminist commentators. On the one hand, politicians and policy-makers have come to recognise that there are inevitable problems, now and on the horizon, arising out of demographic trends and the inexorable growth in the proportion of the population who are elderly and dependent (see Family Policy Studies Centre, 1984, for a useful summary of these trends). At the same time, politicians have also recognised that there are sources of manpower, and more particularly womanpower, that have traditionally provided caring services for the dependent population for nothing, either ‘informally’ within the family or within the context of the voluntary social services that use volunteers. During a period of severe cut-backs in social service expenditure, at a time when there are also increases in the ‘need’ for social services, it is clearly in the politicians’ and policy-makers’ interest to encourage the provision of these free services and to persuade even more people to come forward as ‘informal’ and ‘voluntary’ carers.