Panorama reveals the failings of our social care system, as our population gets older and more of us need help with day to day living. In the first of a two part series, the BBC's social affairs correspondent Alison Holt has filmed in Somerset for a year, focusing on four families, all exhausted by the demands of caring 24 hours a day for their loved ones, and desperately trying to get more help. She also follows the fortunes of the county council who, like local authorities everywhere, are fighting to balance their books after years of budget cuts.

In the second of a two part series on the social care crisis, Panorama exposes a chaotic system on the brink of crisis. With more and more care homes closing, and a national shortage of carers, social affairs correspondent Alison Holt meets vulnerable people threatened with selling their homes to pay for their care, and their families battling the funding system. She tells the devastating stories of elderly people with no-one for fight for them and asks why successive governments have failed to reform a system experienced by so many as unfair, confusing and sometimes cruel.