Students warned against "scare tactics" on personalisation

From Sunil Peck with Labour in Manchester

Disabled people must campaign to ensure that the right to manage their own lives with personal budgets does not fall victim to spending cuts, the disabled students officer from the National Union of Students has warned.

Local authorities have been set a target of having thirty per cent of service users on personal budgets by April 2011.

But speaking at a fringe event at the Labour conference on personalisation, Rupy Kaur, Disabled Students’ Officer at the National Union of Students, raised concerns that the social care system was failing young disabled people.

She said that she had secured 24 hour care support at university but that after moving back home she had been told that she could only receive that level of support in a care home.

She said: “These scare tactics did not work with me and a friend of mine acted as my advocate to help me receive the care I needed at home. We won, but what happens to those young people who do not have such support? Would they live with their parents until the age of 40, have no career or life of their own because the system failed them?”

She added: “It makes me sad that some disabled people give up their hopes and dreams of what could be and what they can achieve. This is why personalisation is important. We need personalisation now. People should be given the control to lead and manage their own lives without bureaucracy getting in the way.”

Dave Webber, director of services for disabled adults at disability organisation Livability, described personalisation as being “absolutely vital to the lives of disabled people”.

He said that disabled people and their organisations needed to ensure that the issue did not slip down the list of priorities as local authorities’ budgets shrank.

Baroness Thornton, shadow minister for health and social care in the Lords, said that there was cross-party support for the personalisation agenda in the upper house and that she was committed to pushing for portable care packages for disabled people.