Selling out on independence

Sources of impartial advice, or one-stop shops for your support needs? Frances Leckie, editor of www.independentliving.co.uk thinks that the move by some independent living centres from advice and assessment into selling is misjudged

Independent Living Centres (ILCs) – familiar to us all, as helpful places where you can view a range of daily living and mobility aids, and find out what really suits your needs, without any commercial angle. The one environment where not only is there no pressure to buy, but actually no way of buying.

Except that isn’t true any more. Without much debate, it seems that a number of ILCs have turned themselves into shops. I find this difficult to understand, particularly as the entire raison d’être for an independent advice centre is to provide independent advice. As soon as the people giving the advice are also selling products, it is no longer independent.

Individuals visiting an ILC are often doing so because they don’t know the options available. However well-intentioned the staff at a centre where products are sold, they cannot possibly be giving impartial advice: they may well say that there is no pressure on people to buy, and that if the visitor is not happy with what they have for sale, they refer them to other stockists, but that is not the point. Inevitably, the customer will be swayed by the selection that has already been made by the expert they are consulting. It may not even occur to them to ask about other possibilities.

It would be fair to say that most ILC staff are opposed to the idea of having to sell, believing that it would undermine their role as a source of independent advice. But I have also come across keen advocates of the principle, whose position is that ILCs are staffed by professionals who would never dream of selling something that was inappropriate for the user, and therefore it is better for them to make a sale, rather than leaving it to a mobility retailer who may be more focused on profit than probity.

I think they are making my point for me. As a commercial organisation, you are obliged to consider things like profitability. And the manager of an ILC with targets to meet is bound to find themselves selecting products that they know will generate profitable sales, rather than displaying a range that could address more needs, but might include some expensive pieces of equipment for which there is little demand.

I am not suggesting that ILCs will turn into retail sharks: there are very many businesses already involved in this market who are entirely ethical, and would never dream of selling to a customer who hadn’t been properly assessed, and whose needs they could not meet.

What we all need is for ILCs to do their job, not to try and take over another role which is already being well fulfilled by existing professional suppliers.