The care of elderly people is a matter of both increasing urgency and major uncertainty. Community care policies have come under increasing scrutiny over the past decade, and three factors have been particularly influential: an awareness of an ageing population, allied with other demographic and social changes that are likely to reduce the supply of carers; a general criticism over the reality of community care; the emergence of a managerialist critique of inefficiency in the organisation and control of publicly funded community care. These issues, along with the prospects of community based care, are explored in this paper.