Chickens coming home to roost

With “personalisation” coming down the track, Peter White believes there may be a credibility gap between the vision and the reality

Whenever I hear the term “personalisation”, I’m irresistibly reminded of Alan Luckett and his chickens.

Alan was a guy who’d lost his sight in his twenties, but came from a bit of a farming background. He wanted to work, but no way did he want to do any of the stock jobs available then for blind people.

He wanted a chicken farm, and one way and another the local blind society, then still acting as agent for the social services, helped him get it: a mixture of tapping up what income streams there were, plus loans, plus the begging bowl and the Round Table! And, he made a great success of it.

Basically, it was personalisation: circa 1954! So it’s extraordinary that it took until about 2008 to give it a fancy name, and wheel it out as a brand new policy.

Still, no need to carp; surely! We’ve finally got there: government handing down the tablets of stone: let personalisation and individual budgets multiply (except that the money in the budgets won’t multiply, of course).

But the question which has to be asked is: can it work, when you’re essentially grafting it onto a system which for so long has operated on the basis of: “here’s what we provide” and “we know best”? It’s a big leap from that to: “I want to appoint my own care staff; I don’t want to go to the day centre; oh, and by the way, rather than therapeutic Sunday morning swimming, I’d rather have someone to come with me, watch the Saints on a Saturday afternoon, and have a couple of bevvies afterwards because, actually, that will do more for my sense of well-being”.

The problem is: I’ve now been to numerous conferences entitled “personalisation: what is it and how will it work?”; and the gulf between the theory and the practice is alarming! To exercise choice effectively, you have to know what the choices are; and, especially if you’re new to disability, or if you’ve always had your choices defined by other people, you rely on someone to help you discover what those choices are.

Do we have a workforce, and a mindset, that’s going to make that possible? My conferences don’t reassure me that we do: especially, and here’s the elephant now in every room, when the budgets are going to be cut to the bone.