  Current demographic trends in the UK include a fast-growing elderly
population and dropping birth rates, and demand for social care amongst the
aged is rising. The UK depends on informal social care -- family members or
friends providing care -- for some 50\% of care provision. However, lower birth
rates and a graying population mean that care availability is becoming a
significant problem, causing concern amongst policy-makers that substantial
public investment in formal care will be required in decades to come. In this
paper we present an agent-based simulation of care provision in the UK, in
which individual agents can decide to provide informal care, or pay for private
care, for their loved ones. Agents base these decisions on factors including
their own health, employment status, financial resources, relationship to the
individual in need, and geographical location. Results demonstrate that the
model can produce similar patterns of care need and availability as is observed
in the real world, despite the model containing minimal empirical data. We
propose that our model better captures the complexities of social care
provision than other methods, due to the socioeconomic details present and the
use of kinship networks to distribute care amongst family members.
