ADASS’s new President Phil Holmes inaugural speech

Phil Holmes’ first speech as ADASS President at the Spring Seminar 2026.

When I stood on this stage closing last year’s Spring Seminar I had the words of my old boss Cath Roff ringing in my ears. Cath is so dry. “Try to be a better Vice President than JD Vance” she said. So who I need to measure up to in my Presidential Year?

I’m not sure but I definitely intend to pick a fight with the Pope at some point. I may not get the chance though because I’m saying a bit about the Casey Review in this speech and Baroness Casey is over later for dinner. Somebody should pop out at lunchtime and buy a lettuce to see whether I can outlive it.

For as long as I last my imposter syndrome in taking up this role is absolutely massive. Perhaps I can legitimise myself by listing the disadvantages I have had to overcome? To begin with, I went to a comprehensive school and furthermore….oh…. that’s it actually. Gritty, right? I am so, so proud of being the first ADASS President from a northern council since 2012 (get in) but I can’t even do a decent northern accent. The comprehensive school I went to was in a leafy part of Surrey.

So this plastic Yorkshireman has no alternative but to be honest with you. What you see in front of you is privilege. If I reach up, there’s no glass ceiling and there never has been. What I’m going to do as President is what Isaac Samuels told me to do when we were planning how to co-chair the Think Local Act Personal advisory group. I was umming and aahing like Hugh Grant circa 1994, muttering that my privilege should be in the background, that Isaac’s living experience should be in the foreground. Isaac didn’t want that though. Of course the relationship needed to be equal – more on coproduction later – but they said “I need you to use your privilege”.

One of the things I am most proud of from my year as Vice President was co-authoring a blog with Jess called “Leading in Troubled Times”. That blog used the privilege of our positions to extend allyship and solidarity to people working in and receiving care and support. This was a response to local and national narratives which seemed to pit disenfranchised groups against one another as if happiness and success was some sort of zero-sum game: you can only have it if that other group of people doesn’t. The blog Jess and I wrote repudiated that and as ADASS President I’ll continue to use my privilege to promote equity, diversity and inclusion. This isn’t about loudly fighting a culture war, it’s more about quiet competence. Competence to uphold the human rights enshrined in legislation, competence to recognise that it is impossible for adult social care to be effective if it is not being inclusive, competence to make sure that everybody working in and benefitting from adult social care knows we have their back because our communities and our economy utterly depend on them.

Following Jess as ADASS President is definitely a privilege but maybe a bit of a challenge as well. I probably wouldn’t have chosen to step into the shoes of the DASS of the first council in England to be rated by the Care Quality Commission as Outstanding for adult social care. Neither would I ideally have followed such an amazing public speaker and someone who is so generous in spirit, who lives by her mantra “to love is to act”.

It just may be that Jess goes down in ADASS history as the President of Love and that got me thinking about how I should aim to be remembered. Doncaster colleagues will say I should stay true to myself: Phil Holmes, the President of Rage. Less ADASS, more badass. Anger at injustice is definitely motivational but Jess has shown how love is represented through action, and how compassionate action builds bridges, connections and shared purpose. I’ll continue down that road, the road Jess also took connecting with you all and celebrating the transformative impact of adult social care in councils up and down the country. I’m looking forward to dropping in to a place near you over the course of the next year.

It’s been great to be part of the Presidential Team with Jess and also with Mel as the previous Immediate Past President. Hard yards that Mel has done supporting ADASS over a number of years have paved the way for all of us who follow. Mel’s leadership in national work on preparation for adulthood is also going to leave a lasting legacy. And I’ll miss the good cop bad cop dynamic in the Presidential Team, Jess modelling inspirational compassion and Mel chopping me off at the knees whenever I get too big for my boots.

Mel has hugely advanced ADASS’s approach to coproduction and that’s another hill I will happily die on as President. Working in equal partnership alongside people who receive care and support as well as unpaid carers to help them plan and live life on their own terms isn’t just good ethical theory underpinned by the Care Act (although that ought to be enough). It’s good practical design.
The name of the groundhog in Groundhog Day was Punxutawney Phil. At times my career has felt like an endlessly repeating cycle of centrally driven initiatives informed by top-down, command and control, knowing-the-cost-of-everything-and-the value-of-nothing, deckchairs on the Titanic leadership that insisted on starting from the same ivory tower and repeating the same old results. (That was a bit rage-y wasn’t it?).

Co-production is about starting somewhere different, about designing out poor experience and wasteful use of resources and creating the right conditions alongside our residents and our workforce that will help them flourish. Let’s keep going with this: if we do we’ve got a real chance of waking up to some different music. And if you draw on care and support or you’re an unpaid carer and you’ve been giving your time alongside ADASS or alongside individual councils, thank you so much for sticking with it, thank you for showing us the way.

When I was first elected as Vice President I got a lovely, complimentary message from a DASS who had voted for me and was very soon to retire in a part of the country that is just about as distant from Doncaster as it is possible to be. Two thoughts immediately went through my head –it’s fantastic you are too far away to know how mediocre I actually am and it’s even better you’re going to retire before you have the chance to find out. Alongside helpful advice and a scary amount of hope invested in my Presidency they told me they wanted adult social care to get out of what they called the “crouch position”.

When I think about this year so far I can personally relate to the sentiment. All the hunkering down and waiting for the Better Care Fund guidance and then the Neighbourhood Health guidance and when each finally arrived simultaneously feeling grateful that nobody had thrown the baby out with the bathwater while feeling frustrated that there was still such a lot of bathwater. And even more curiosity and trepidation, about Baroness Casey’s interim report whenever it lands later this year. That instinct to crouch, to wait to hear what it says.

We’ve already heard a bit from Baroness Casey. We know she believes in the fundamental importance of local government. We know she recognises the unequal relationship adult social care has with the NHS. We know she has a lot of time for ADASS. I strongly suspect she’s not expecting us to assume the crouch position and wait for her reports to save adult social care. She’s expecting us to crack on, to use our privilege and make sure people experience the best current version of adult social care, wherever they live or work.

But if we’re not going to crouch, what should we do? How do we organise ourselves? I’ve heard some angst that the adult social care sector is not speaking with one voice and making things difficult for national policy-makers. I think that’s a bit lame to be honest. I doubt if Beveridge was worried about whether the health sector was speaking with one voice before he pressed ahead to lay the foundations for 1948. I doubt even more that Baroness Casey is sitting somewhere agonising over what she might say later this year or in 2028 because what she really wants to do is keep all the current stakeholders super happy. I think the past work of Beveridge and the current work of Casey is driven by a belief in what might be described as “mission-led government”.

But when should we speak with one voice and when might we be more relaxed about differences emerging? Baroness Casey’s speech to the Nuffield Trust Summit at the start of last month prised open at least a couple of cracks in the idea of a unified sector.

Firstly her focus upon dementia and upon motor neurone disease provoked a fair amount of whataboutery in subsequent conversations, as if highlighting people living with those conditions diminished other people that adult social care works alongside. There’s understandable fragility here from people who draw on care and support, from carers and from voluntary and community organisations who need to be seen, acknowledged and supported, not passed over because they don’t have right condition for the zeitgeist. That wasn’t the intention of course, dementia and MND were highlighted as emblematic conditions that already have a public profile and therefore provide a way in to what Baroness Casey has described as the need for a national conversation about adult social care. She already seems to be finding resonant ways into this national conversation that have eluded her predecessors, but it is essential that we keep everybody who draws on care and support in the tent. Adult social care reform is not about health conditions, it’s about human rights.

Secondly Baroness Casey compared “small providers barely keeping the show on the road, at risk of toppling over at any given moment” with “powerful, sometimes private-equity owned providers…. extracting maximum profit from the public’s purse”. Clearly there are shades of grey between these two stark extremes but perhaps councils need to think harder about relational commissioning that will better support local care providers who think locally and act personally, and national government needs to think harder about whether it is or it isn’t intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich when it can literally be at the expense of good quality and affordable public care.

Regardless of whether we are speaking with one voice or not, we are making progress. Three years ago, under Sarah McClinton’s Presidency, ADASS launched its Time to Act roadmap for reforming care and support in England. Ok it’s not quite sorted, but we can see the right plates are starting to spin. We have a National Workforce Strategy. We have the foundations of a Fair Pay Agreement – which we must continue to back strongly in principle and help the government deliver sustainably in practice. The roadmap also highlights the importance of diverse and accessible housing underpinned by appropriate regulations and it seems increasingly likely, after a long period of lone voices howling in the wilderness, that housing is actually going to have a moment. We must be fully engaged when it does. And I’ve already mentioned that Baroness Casey is clearly prioritising the explicit roadmap aim to ensure public dialogue that resets the social contract for care and support.

But let’s not get too giddy. Andrew Cozens once described me as the most dour DASS in Yorkshire and Humber. More dour than all the actual Yorkshire people. So it won’t surprise you that I don’t feel optimistic about the part of the Roadmap that describes the need for imminent funding reform. But I do know that we’ll carry on building on the foundations we’ve already laid together. We’ll carry on doing our jobs both individually and collectively to help our mission-led government do theirs.

Famous last words but I do feel lucky. The Director General of Social care in the Department of Health and Social Care quite plainly sees the wood for the trees. We couldn’t have a better person than Sally Warren to help us navigate these complex times. We’ve got brilliant and values-driven ex-DASSs in prominent national positions: Sarah McClinton, Chris Badger, Iain MacBeath, James Bullion. Not forgetting Sir David Pearson – that man is everywhere. We’ve got ADASS sponsors who have been alongside us for the long haul, Associates whose expertise is only rivalled by their commitment, and a superb ADASS staff group, both influential and respected, helping us to punch well above our weight.
And we’ve got a cacophony of DASSs, Principal OTs, Principal Social Workers and extended members working in councils up and down England. Cacophony is the right collective noun I think. The Time to Act roadmap describes the essential importance of local transformation led by DASSs and colleagues working in councils and that’s where I want to end this speech.

I’ll start by talking about Doncaster Council. Like most of you I am lashed simultaneously to two trucks straining in opposite directions, one labelled “improvement” and the other one labelled “overspend”. And, like some of you, our local politics changed quite a lot last May and can now best be described as spicy. But fundamentally Doncaster’s elected Mayor. Lead Cabinet Member, Chief Executive and Executive Director of Resources all understand and value the regenerative impact of adult social care not only in Doncaster’s communities but also in its economy. The stability that has provided over the last seven years I’ve worked there has also nurtured the most amazing adult social care leadership team represented here by Annika, Margaret and Leonie. Heaven only knows I will need them over the year ahead.

Stability feels pretty important doesn’t it? I don’t know how many of my 152 DASS peers have experienced the same privilege that Doncaster has afforded me. I do know that the DASS in the council that CQC have scored highest has been in the role there for well over a dozen years, and the council that CQC have scored lowest burned through 4 DASSs in 5 years. And now a number of you are facing Local Government Reorganisation where everything is moving very fast right now but nothing quite as fast as the goalposts.

Nobody said it would be easy did they? What I love about ADASS is the framework it provides for us to come together, to learn from each other, to support each other. I’ve definitely experienced that in Yorkshire and Humber even though my regional colleagues have relentlessly trolled me since I’ve been lined up for the Presidency. And as much as I love my home region, as a regional chair I saw self-effacing, ego-free leadership from every region. As a policy lead I saw colleagues drawing on both passion and expertise to do essential work that benefitted all of us.

Please don’t under-estimate your power. When I attended a meeting with Wes Streeting on behalf of ADASS, there were representatives from other Local Authority professional bodies there too but it was adult social care leaders he mentioned as being visible to him, using your local grounding to help bring grip to national work.

When adult social care works well in our local places it has a clear mission, it has clear policies but ultimately it’s a network of relationships in which every person plays a part. Adult social care at its best nurtures strengths and finds solutions, getting alongside people, learning and growing together. As with adult social care, so with ADASS. It’s an absolute honour to be part of this, to serve this. Thank you.