Low on the agenda

The Low Review proposes that people in residential care should retain all their DLA. Why then, asks Peter White, does the Government want to take it all away?

The Government isn’t just thinking about disabled people in residential care losing the mobility component of their Disability Living Allowance (DLA), it’s making it a sticking-point of the Welfare Reform Bill. Why?

After all, it was the Tories who brought in this most enlightened of benefits in the early 1990s, to enhance the independence and dignity of disabled people by putting a cash value on the aspects of daily life that we required assistance with. It was never called an “added costs” allowance (that would really have opened up a can of worms) but it clearly believed that there were aspects of life that people needed help with, and that a financial allow­ance, free from bureaucracy and the interference of professionals, was the best way to deal with this.

These days they call it “personalisation”, ironically, and the Government claims to be one of its greatest supporters. That is, presumably, until it costs money.

Lord Low’s independent report is only the latest evidence of how the aim of this allowance is misunderstood, not to mention the failure to grasp what would make life in residential care better. It seems to show that the drafters of this policy, who talk about their measures doing no harm to disabled people with genuine needs and even protecting their dignity and independence, none the less believe that in residential care, your wants, needs, wishes should all be taken care of, from cradle to grave, by your “protectors”.

To put it more crudely, should you wish to go anywhere, all you have to do is form an orderly queue of people wanting to go to the same place, and then wait patiently for the arrival of the sunshine bus to take you there. Wrong!

The whole point of keeping your independence in a residential setting is that you retain the ability to do things when you want to do them, and not necessarily conform to the routines of the home, or the wishes of your fellow residents, or, indeed, of the staff.

It is about the ability to attend your course, visit your friends, go to the pub, attend the match, or maybe just go off on your own in order to be away from the inevitable claustrophobia of being in even the best of residential care.

Good residential care should seek to preserve the fundamental ability to live your own life. It can’t do that if your ability to move off premises requires a vote of consent or budgetary approval. The best of Conservatism, I thought, is about the freedom of the individual, and the right to self-determination. It would be nice if Lord Low’s report reminded those who came up with this policy of those first principles.