Family Matters. Dutch policies and left-wing political discourse on citizens’ responsibility for the care for their elderly relatives from 1970 until present

Abstract

The Dutch government is currently in the process of implementing a major overhaul of the elderly care. It primarily aims to provide less care itself and rely more on the provision of informal care (mantelzorg). This study explores which role informal care provided by family members has played in Dutch elderly care policies since 1970. Moreover, it explores how the left-wing political discourse on this topic has developed in the same period. Lastly, it aims to analyze these two developments in the context of economic and social developments in the Dutch society. To these ends, seven major policy documents on elderly policies and discussions about them in parliament have been analyzed.

The study has found that whereas informal care played virtually no role in the policies of the 1970s, the Lubbers and Kok cabinets promoted and imposed the use of informal care in the 1980s and 1990s as a means to save money. In 2005 the second Balkenende cabinet placed more emphasis on enabling informal care through providing support for informal caregivers. This policy has largely been continued by the second Rutte cabinet.

Whereas the PvdA opposed the imposition of informal care by the Lubbers cabinets, it supported the Kok cabinets’ policies and since then has always supported, along with D66, an increasing reliance on informal care. The SP, of which the opinions have been studied as of 2002, fiercely argued against the plans of 2005, but in 2014 seems to have implicitly accepted an increasing reliance on informal care as well.

All those developments took place in an increasingly individualized society with weakening family ties. It is likely in this light that in 2000 the government and political parties realized that maximum reliance on informal care is only possible with appropriate support for caregivers.