Care Crisis: Could Volunteer Teenagers Fix The System? (Paul Sagar)

Amol Rajan (0:08)

Hello, and welcome to Radical. Often on this show, we hear from people who have a radical idea, or who have chosen to live a radical life. This is slightly different. Our guest today is someone whose life has been altered in the most radical way imaginable, not because they chose it, but because of something that happened to them.

Paul Sagar is an academic, a political theorist at King's College London. He studies the interplay of politics with issues such as liberty, equality and fairness. In 2023, while rock climbing in Scotland, he suffered a catastrophic accident that nearly killed him. He survived, but in an instant, a significant portion of Paul's liberty was taken away from him. It left him tetraplegic, more or less paralyzed from the neck down. He's now reliant on full-time care. And he has an idea about how to address one of the most pressing and knotty political issues of our age, the crisis in adult social care. As fate would have it, we recorded our conversation a couple of days before the Prime Minister announced a radical overhaul of the care system in England. Paul Sagar's idea is less wide-ranging, but perhaps in its own way, no less radical.

Paul Sagar, welcome to Radical.

Paul Sagar (1:35)

Well, thanks very much for having me on.

Amol Rajan (1:37)

Thanks for coming in. Could you just, in brief, before we learn more about you, outline what is your radical idea?

Paul Sagar (1:45)

So my radical idea is that at the moment in Britain, we have a series of problems, but they come down to that we don't have enough people working in the care sector, and we don't have enough high-quality people working in the care sector in part because it's not well-respected and it's not well-paid.

Amol Rajan (2:02)

Adult care.

Paul Sagar (2:03)

Adult care.

This is something which is going to require many different aspects of a solution. But one potential way to address several of these issues, I think, is to encourage university-age students, people who potentially would have an offer to go to university, to take a year, maybe two years, as part of a nationally-organized scheme to volunteer in the care sector, working with adults, for example, in nursing homes, in care in their own homes, organized by local authorities. The idea here would be that we would ask them to put on pause going to university for maybe a year, maybe two, and in exchange, we will give them a discount on their final fees. For example, 50 percent off of their final tuition fees. If they spend a year working in the care sector first.

Amol Rajan (2:51)

A sort of voluntary national service?

Paul Sagar (2:54)

Basically, that's kind of the idea. What we are aware of from looking at multiple studies and much historical experience is that people don't really like doing national service unless there's a war on.

Then you can motivate them through patriotism and shared endeavor and the threat of the enemy to volunteer. But when you don't have that scenario, it's much more difficult to get people to just volunteer out the goodness of their heart. Some people will, but not that many will. So what we need is a different approach where we encourage people to do something which is like a voluntary national service, but isn't organized around, for example, the military, but is organized around other pressing social needs and isn't based either on straight conscription, which is like, do this or else, because all you're going to get then is very miserable people who don't do a good job because they don't want to do it.

And we incentivize them, but we don't want to make it, I think, strictly just, well, we're going to just pay you to do this because then it becomes a job and people should be able to choose what jobs they get. And that's a wider question, but I think that's quite important. But we should also recognize that if we ask somebody to do a difficult, demanding job like care work, which is a very difficult and demanding job, there should be some kind of incentive and some kind of compensation for them at their end. So not only would they be appreciated as being part of a voluntary group, a voluntary workforce that is helping the country, but they're also going to get something out of it themselves. It's the best of both worlds in that regard.

Amol Rajan (4:14)

Well, there's no doubt that there is a problem in social care, and it's a very live topic in politics even this week. But the basic problem is there are not enough carers. If you look at the numbers, and these numbers come from Skills for Care, which is basically a charity that does the workforce planning for the care sector, there's about 110,000 job vacancies in the adult social care sector now.