Automating adult social care in the UK: Extracting value from a crisis

The UK appears fixed in perpetual care crisis propelled by austerity-driven funding cuts and the country’s intensifying care labour shortage. Austerity in the UK has generated an operating environment that has accelerated privatisation and incentivized and necessitated private innovation. In this writing, we examine how the infrastructure and delivery of social care in the UK is being radically reimagined through technology. Promising to deliver critical efficiencies and cost savings, new automating technologies are being tested and introduced to reorder how and where care is managed and delivered. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with local authorities in the UK and the executives of private companies, our task is not to assess the efficacy of new technologies; rather we examine how these public-private partnerships raise difficult questions: Who will deliver caring futures in the UK? Who is absorbing the fiscal risk of technological innovation? Who is profiting? And what are the limits of technology as a response to our care crisis?