Credit where it's not due

A recent social policy award has had Professor Peter Beresford seeing red not only because he feels it’s gone to the wrong person, but also because it rewards regression in the field of independent living

You shouldn’t be shocked when all you know about the routine exclusion and discrimination experienced by disabled people is borne out by another insidious example. Although I like to think I have developed a strong stomach to deal with such situations, I have to admit that a recent award has been just one bridge too far for me.

The Social Policy Association is the respected professional body of people who work in social policy. This year, in its annual awards, it honoured Simon Duffy, formerly CEO of In Control and now heading up The Centre for Welfare Reform, for his “outstanding contribution from a non-academic”.

This was in recognition of his contribution “to the creation of personal budgets” and his “recent work as lead coordinator of the 2011 Campaign for a Fair Society which opposes the coalition Government’s cuts in funding for disabled people”.

Let’s just look at this a little more closely. The idea with which Simon and his colleagues have been most associated, individual budgets, was advanced as an innovation that pooled different funding streams to enable disabled people/service users to receive a cash sum whose amount they would know right from the start through a resource allocation system (RAS). We now know two things. First, it has generally been very difficult to pool different funding streams, thus the shift in terminology to “personal budgets”, which are based narrowly on local authority social care funding. And second, the RAS has become a bureaucratic nightmare, acknowledged as more of a problem than a solution.

More to the point though, it is difficult to see how in any positive way, personal budgets represent a move forward from the direct payments pioneered by the disabled people’s movement a generation ago, and which they replaced. So which disabled pioneers were awarded medals or awards for this truly groundbreaking achievement? What about some of the heroes of the disabled people’s movement, like Jane Campbell, Paul Hunt, Simon Brissenden, Mike Oliver and Nasa Begum? Sadly the answer appears to be none.

The Campaign for a Fair Society describes itself as “a group of people who had worked for many years alongside disabled people and their families”. But aren’t there any campaigns initiated by disabled people that are doing this?

What about the United Kingdom Disabled People’s Council, Disability Rights Watch UK and The Hardest Hit, for example?

The subtext of such awards to non-disabled people seems to be either that the achievements of disabled people are invisible or that they aren’t really seen as matching up to those of non-disabled people.

The non-disabled individuals involved are not important here. But rewarding them for achievements that truly belong to disabled people indicates something much more worrying and significant.

There is, however, an even greater problem. The direct payments developed by disabled people were enormously valued by them and strongly evidenced to improve their lives, opportunities and wellbeing. Yet their implementation by both central and local government was hesitant, slow and patchy. The councils that had responsibility for them frequently over-policed them and either discouraged take-up or approached it mechanically to meet targets.

The personal budgets talked up by non-disabled people and their organisations, on the other hand, received a remarkable response from government. From a few unevidenced pilot projects, we have moved to a situation where every social care service user is meant to have a personal budget by 2013. It is difficult to think of another policy initiative where in a few years there has been such a massive move from a handful of people to millions. Government found half a billion pounds to achieve this “transformation” and it has had cross party support ever since.

Yet there were some subtle changes in the passage from disabled people’s direct payments to the new personal budgets. The old direct payments had a clear liberatory goal. Disabled people would be in charge of their support and this would be linked to the values of the philosophy of independent living, enabling them to live on as equal terms as possible, alongside non-disabled people, with equal access to mainstream society.

Local user controlled organisations would be resourced to offer the infrastructure of support to enable people to set up and run direct payment schemes, with zero or minimal effort or cost, so they could truly be accessible to all.

The new personal budgets were sold on something very different. They would be cheaper – that was the promise made for them – and they were divorced from all the principles that distinguished direct payments. Funding levels would be determined by what (inadequate and diminishing) cash was currently available, divided up on a “points win prizes” basis and top sliced for administration. No wonder service users under the new arrangements would often find that they were now assessed to receive less, and older people and people with complex impairments and from BME communities seem to be particularly disadvantaged in accessing them.

So a democratizing, empowering ideal has been reduced to a voucher scheme, associated with cuts, privatization and the political right. More often too, it is a voucher scheme where most people on personal budgets never even see the colour of the money, since they are on “managed budgets”, which is council code for simply receiving the same old services, with this new label attached to them. It’s generally only in that much smaller number of cases where people access a direct payment that they experience any appreciable improvement.

This is the dismal current scenario for personalization and personal budgets in a time of ever increasing cuts in services and support.

The prospects for many thousands of disabled people and service users are disturbing to say the least. Little reason for honours and awards, we might think, especially when they appear to be grossly misdirected. But then this is hardly the first time that the brave new ideas of disabled people have been subverted and others given credit for them.