Let our people go

Disabled people are being imprisoned in residential homes because of the inflexibility of local authority support packages. So change the law, says Andy Rickell

For nearly 40 years, activists have campaigned against institutionalised segregated provision for disabled people, on the basis that it is inconsistent with our equality.

That campaign continues, in forms such as DAN’s (Disabled People’s Direct Action Network) “Free Our People” campaign.

Suppose, then, that a provider of institutionalised living over several decades recognised that segregated provision was inconsistent with the equality of disabled people to which it is now actively committed, and decided to support disabled people who wanted to move out of a residential home and into their own home. Surely the government would do all it could to support such a move, particularly as it would be consistent with the government’s commitment to independent living as stated in its Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People report? Dream on!

The barrier is called “ordinary residence” and works like this. Each disabled person has a home local authority, where he or she originally came from, and which has the obligation to fund that person’s social “care”. For those disabled people who were funded to enter a residential home, many went into a home outside their local authority area: an “out of county placement”. They may have lived in that home for many years and are now very much part of the community where they now live.

Their obvious next step, on wanting to move out of the home and into a community, is to move into their own home in the same area where they now live.

But if they do that, they would become the funding responsibility of the local authority where they now live and that local authority will refuse to pay, because they are deemed to be “ordinarily resident” in the place where they originally came from.

Meanwhile, the home local authority will only fund them to live outside a residential home if they move back into the community that they originally came from, away from all the social and support networks they have built up.

So they are stuck, and often their best choice is to stay put, imprisoned against their will and the will of the residential home provider to support them out of segregation.

This is the mother of all postcode lotteries and applies to all disabled people who would like to move from their original home authority with their support package. In short, wherever you start is where you are stuck. Your freedom of movement is seriously limited.

Can this be sorted out? Easily! Remove the “ordinary residence” rule, and allow disabled people to live where they want and to take their support packages with them. Then make sure the funding issues for the local authorities are sorted out by adjusting the grants they get from central government.

This is no more difficult than other adjustments made to local authority grants.

I do not intend to handcuff myself to the minister for disabled people, she will be relieved to hear, but this “ordinary residence” rule is still completely objectionable.

I thought the state was supposed to help disabled people, not be their jailer! Local authorities are given freedom in how they deliver their services, but they should use that to improve disabled people’s quality of life, not worsen it!

Free our people, now!