Critical time for personalisation
As with all her recent predecessors, furthering personalisation and self-directed support across England will be a top priority for new ADASS President Sandie Keene, but she takes over at a seemingly critical time for this agenda. Councils will need to have got 70% of service users in the community on to personal budgets by 31 March; Adass is conducting a survey to verify whether this has been achieved.
At the same time some of personalisation’s most fervent advocates, including self-directed support charity In Control, wrote to care minister Norman Lamb recently to warn the agenda was at “high risk of failure”. Their concerns centred around restrictions placed by some councils on how people could spend their personal budgets and with which providers, social workers’ ability to sign-off personal budgets without having to refer decisions to panels and unsuitable resource allocation systems. They pointed out that research evidence – notably the 2011 National Personal Budgets Survey of 2,000 service users and carers – showed that giving people maximum freedom over how they spent their personal budget delivered the best outcomes.
Keene admits that councils need to move “further and faster” on ensuring personalisation delivers genuine choice and control. She says Adass will facilitate the sharing of good practice between councils through its regional networks and the Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) partnership of organisations dedicated to promoting personalisation. For instance, she wants to see more councils sign up to Making It Real, TLAP’s set of indicators of progress on personalisation that signatories are supposed to measure their performance against, including through assessment by service users and carers.
But she says it is up to individual councils whether to use panels to sign-off personal budgets or preferred provider lists – another target of criticism for In Control and the other signatories of the letter to Lamb.
