Thirty years in care. One problem he could not stop thinking about.

Jeremy spent thirty years inside UK care. Shaw Healthcare, the company he founded in 1996, became the country’s largest staff-owned care provider. By the time he stepped back from the day-to-day at Shaw, he had spent a working career seeing the same problem from different angles, in different homes, in different parts of the country.

The problem was this: families above the council means-test threshold were expected to fund their parents’ care, and the home was the asset everyone reached for. Families sold homes that had been in their families for decades, often hurriedly, often at below-market values, often without understanding that anything else was possible. By the time the inheritance was gone, so was the home.

The career that came first.

Jeremy started in residential care in the 1980s. The sector was different then: less professionalised, more variable in quality, more obviously a public good. He worked his way through operational roles before founding Shaw Healthcare in 1996 alongside a small team committed to a particular idea: that a care company could be staff-owned, properly run, and still grow.

Shaw grew. By the time Jeremy stepped back, it operated dozens of care homes across England and Wales and employed thousands of people. The staff-ownership model was the defining feature, and Jeremy spent the better part of three decades proving that it worked at scale.

He carried two things out of that career. The first was a deep understanding of what residential care costs and what it’s worth. The second was the recurring conversation with families.

“You hear it often enough, you stop being able to ignore it.”

The conversation that kept repeating.

Care homes have conversations with families that other businesses don’t. The conversation about how to pay for care is among the hardest. Time and again, Jeremy heard the same shape of it: family arrives, parent needs care, savings won’t cover it, council won’t help, home is the only asset left. Families sold homes, lost inheritances, and left a difficult moment carrying the weight of a financial decision they hadn’t had time to think through.

It is not that selling is the wrong answer for every family. It is the right answer for some. But Jeremy kept meeting families for whom it was clearly the wrong answer, who had simply not understood there was an alternative because nobody had built one.

“I kept meeting families who’d been told there was no other way. I knew there could be. The Plan was built to give them the choice.” Jeremy Nixey

Building the Care and Home Inheritance Plan.

The Plan’s structure took years to put together. It needed to sit outside the FCA regulatory perimeter (because it is structurally not a financial product), satisfy independent legal advisers acting for the family, and be commercially viable enough that it could be offered without subsidy. It needed to be transparent enough that families could read every clause and understand it.

The lease arrangement at the heart of the Plan emerged through several drafts. Independent legal advice was tested at each iteration. The charity ownership structure was deliberately chosen so that the company’s purpose sat above commercial return.

The first Plans went live in the late 2010s. Each one is reviewed by an independent solicitor acting for the family. Each one is built around the specific care needs and circumstances of the family it serves.

“The point of the Plan is that the family keeps the choice.”

What Jeremy does day to day now.

Jeremy is involved in every new Plan. He talks to families directly when they want to talk to him, and he sees the property and tenancy operations at first hand. The team handles most of the day-to-day; Jeremy holds the long-term direction of the company and the relationship with the parent charity.

He is also one of the most direct routes to a clear answer about whether the Plan is the right fit for a particular family. He has the longest history of these conversations of anyone at My Lifetime Care, and he is the person most willing to say no.

How to talk to him.

The phone number at the top of this page reaches the team. If you ask for Jeremy specifically, he calls you back, usually the same working day. The first call is brief, free, and committing to nothing.