Page 15 - TLAP Beyond Direct Payments

Individual Service Funds
Direct payments remain a viable funding route for many people, however direct payments are still only used by a minority and there is a narrow view of how they can be used.
Other approaches will be required for the bene ts of micro-enterprises and other community support options to be extended to include the following situations:
• people who are unwilling to take on the responsibilities of managing a direct payment
• people who cannot manage a direct payment and lack any allies who are also willing or
able to take on its management
• people who need personalised and exible support, but where a direct payment would be inappropriate or unduly risky
• people who want support, but not from a regulated support provider or from an organisation that is on a restricted list of local services.
The good news is that it is possible to give a person or organisation a personal budget to manage for someone else without using direct payments (Fitzpatrick, 2010). The bad news is that this is still an approach that most funders are either unaware of or currently unwilling to develop further (Duffy & Sly, 2017).
In this section we set out this alternative approach, which involves the use of Individual Service Funds (ISFs).
Conceptual confusion
Unfortunately personal budgets are often confused with direct payments. But in fact a direct payment is not the only way to manage a personal budget. It is quite possible for a statutory funder to use a contract and provide resources to an organisation to work on behalf of an individual (TLAP, 2015)
Beyond Direct Payments
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