Meet our new chair!
06/06/2025
After 15 years as a trustee, including three as Chair, Trish Davies has now stepped down as Chair of Care Rights UK. We are very grateful to Trish for everything she’s done for the charity over that period, and we wish her all the best for the future!
This means we now welcome our new Chair, Richard Hawes, an existing trustee of the charity. We asked Richard some questions to get to know him better.
Richard (Chair) and Helen (Director)
What made you want to be Chair of the charity?
I spent 40 years working in health and social care battling to make a difference and I’m not ready to stop! I started out as a care assistant and trained as a registered nurse, working in mental health for a few years with people living with dementia. Then I moved to the independent sector, working for a small care provider which is now one of the biggest in the UK. After that I moved to the charity sector, where I took executive level roles including director of care services, and most recently as Chief Executive of Elizabeth Finn. I’ve been on the Care Rights UK trustee board for six years. We’ve been through a very positive period of change, with new people and fresh ideas and with that I wanted to offer some continuity to the charity. I’m hoping over the next three years we can bed in those changes for a stronger future of financial stability and security in what we offer.
Why do you think advocating for the rights of older people is important?
I’ve always had an affinity for older people and their services. They have tended to get the rough end of the deal, often with less funding for their services, and it’s hard to provide good quality care for older people on a small budget. In my career, I’ve worked for charities which were private funded, which helped us to provide really good care, which would have been challenging to do on local authority budgets. It’s always been important for me to focus care of people, prioritising wellbeing of the staff and residents. Older people need people across the care sector to stand up for them.
What do you want to see change in social care?
Many of us will end up in social care at some stage, and it needs to get better. I want to see integration of health and social care, which is properly funded and thought through, ending the pattern of the Government not putting money aside to repair the sector. Currently there is a two-tier system with privately funded residents often paying more than the local authority. Local authority funding often means lower staffing levels, as it’s difficult to have enough staff and pay people well with stretched budgets, and this can correlate to a poorer standard of care. There’s no simple answer to care funding, but it can’t be kicked into the long grass anymore.