Martin Walker, TLAP’s policy lead asks us to get involved in conversations about improving self-directed support with the help of some short films.
For those of you who are space aficionados, you’ll know there have been momentous developments in the SpaceX Starship programme. Building on the success of being able to land and reuse their current rocket the Falcon and its boosters, they are now able to do this with the Starship craft they hope will take people to Mars one day.
Rocket science is complicated, very difficult, very risky and very expensive. And Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX talks about it openly – the successes, the failures, the hard stuff and the joys. What’s that got to do with direct payments? Well, for something that is nowhere near as difficult as landing a spaceship safely, we do seem to be making things very hard for ourselves.
We wondered whether, like Elon, getting people to talk about some of the difficulties would help us all to understand how to make progress. So we’ve made four short films to help start conversations. We invite and encourage you to get involved.
Direct payments: working or not working?
Recently we published a report Direct Payments: working or not working? – a result of bringing together people and organisations to help government with COVID-19 guidance that would be useful to direct payment recipients, organisations supporting them, councils and clinical commissioning groups. We kept coming back to the key issues: that the Care Act is clear on how direct payments should work; and that many people involved in making them work are frustrated that they can’t get them to for people in the way they want them to.
Personal budgets and individual service funds
This is the starting point for other forms of self-directed support: personal budgets in the form of Individual Service Funds and as ‘notional budgets’ where people benefit from the services commissioned by Local Authorities. It seems even more difficult to get to a place where most people feel in control of their support with these other options.
Conversations about self-directed support online
We thought we’d try to get some people to talk about their experiences, frustrations and ways they’ve found through to making direct payments work.
That’s been hard. People didn’t want to talk. Rather they didn’t feel free to say what they thought. Some brave souls have helped us make four short films from their conversations. We think they put their finger on some of the key issues that will help people trying to make self-directed support work for all to make progress and bring to life the Care Act
We want to hear what more people think. What are your frustrations about this? Are they similar to those in the films? Have you found other ways to make progress? Can you share your own experience?
Watch all the conversations on self-directed support films in the series here….
Please join us on the hashtag #SDSconversations and watch the films or comment below.
