Care Homes Policy

Abstract

There is significant interest in the puzzle of how decentralisation of social policy, with responsibility moving from the national to a sub-national tier of government, affects levels of entitlement. Often, this is bound up with questions of whether decentralisation leads to some sort of “race to the bottom”; it is frequently argued that, at times of pressure on public finances, it becomes attractive to national policy-makers to shift responsibility for social policy, as part of a blame avoidance strategy. In this chapter, we look at the change in responsibility for laws regulating care homes in Germany, which transferred from the national government to the Länder in 2006. At the time, the change was controversial: in particular, several state politicians but also care home providers warned of a “race to the bottom”, as well as of the risk of excessive complexity. Our puzzle is simply: what impact did decentralisation of this legal responsibility have? This is useful in informing debates about the impact of the 2006 federalism reforms, but also in understanding the impact of decentralisation on social policy more widely.