Losing out in social care's local lottery

While welcoming much in the Government’s social care green paper, Andy Rickell regrets that one big opportunity has been missed

The proposal for a National Care Service in the green paper on the future of social care sounds very promising. If done well, this could implement a goal of the disabled people’s movement about the importance of ensuring that independent living support meets the individual’s needs irrespective of geographical location and situation. However, the green paper is open to comment on what is national about the service and contains the seeds of undermining the idea.

For me, the ultimate weakness of the current social care system, amongst many weaknesses sadly, is the limitation of entitlement depending on funding. If the local authority cannot afford it, you cannot have it.

Now whilst in theory this sounds reasonable – ultimately public funds are limited and that’s fair enough – the problem is the current way social care is mostly funded. Most social care funding is provided by a unitary or county council from its own pot, and the decision about how big that pot is is essentially the councillors’ decision. Speaking as a former councillor in Gloucestershire, I had to decide how big that pot was each year, alongside competing priorities on education, roads, waste and recycling and a host of other council responsibilities. When the roads of Gloucestershire suffered during the floods, the money needed threatened the funding of individuals’ support packages – that’s how it works.

This is clearly wrong. Decisions about potholes in roads affect local people, and are best made in the area they occur. The needs of individuals’ support packages are much less connected to local issues, and the consequences of decisions about funding are borne disproportionately by a relatively powerless group if considered locally. The commitment to fund should therefore be a national decision, applied fairly to all individuals across the country, based on a common national supported self-assessment framework.

The actual mechanics of the process however can best be done locally by the local authority.

The barriers individuals face will have a local element, and those closely involved in supporting the assessment process need to be close to the individual concerned so that the process is well-informed and that good and fair decisions based on the national framework result. But the application for funds should be to a central national fund – the local authority merely drawing them down on behalf of the individual.

The current system of funding is really unfair – dependent on the unaccountable vagaries (at least that’s how it seems to the disabled and older people in need of support) of local authority support grant formulas and the perceptions of local politicians about local political priorities. Indeed, the only fairness in Fair Access to Care

Services is that all individuals in a local authority area with a poor social care fund suffer equally from not living in a better funded area!

We need a National Care Service that leads with a funding mechanism that can deliver a fair system. This would be a necessary foundation if we are to achieve at least a national minimum right to independent living support.