Page 23 - TLAP Beyond Direct Payments

Combined with these changes in role, local funders could start to think of their role as funders as a form of investment. It is people, community groups and local services that will be best at managing and using the funds. Investment is not management, it is the process of ensuring resources are going to the best people to solve a problem or create a solution. This will usually be the people most directly involved.
If commissioners worked to grow community resources then it would be even easier to make the case for supporting micro-enterprises and using Individual Service Funds.
Place-based work
As austerity has sharpened and local funders have had their funding cut, many have felt the need to make tough choices: increasing eligibility thresholds and pulling back from community development work that has long-term bene ts but isn’t necessarily focused on immediate needs. However, several funders have gone in the opposite direction and have started to invest more signi cantly in upstream solutions – responses that reduce the need for more expensive, crisis-driven, services downstream. For example:
Local Area Coordination – This approach embeds an individual within a local community and enables them to work to help people avoid crisis and develop community solutions (Broad, 2012; Broad, 2015).
Social prescribing – Health and local services are starting to see the advantages of connecting people, who might otherwise need healthcare services, to local community resources. Sometimes this is combined with the use of small personal budgets.
Local commissioning – Places like Barnsley have started to shift commissioning decisions down to wards and areas and to encourage councillors to work in partnership with local people and community development of cers (Duffy, 2017).
Again, when we start focusing more on small geographical areas and natural human communities then new opportunities and solutions emerge. This is the scale at which micro- enterprises ourish and it is how people use their Individual Service Funds.
Modernised infrastructure
One of the most important and obvious strategies to reduce the costs, complexity and incoherence of current procurement practice around health and social care is to build an effective national online solution.
Beyond Direct Payments
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