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Denise Platt, chair of the Commission for Social Care Inspection, said earlier this month that it was very easy to read the adult social

Platt: Need to flesh green paper out

care green paper and agree with it but that it would need to be fleshed out in the consultation phase, writes Amy Taylor.

Mona Sehgal, programme manager for the community wellbeing team at the Local Government Association, agrees that it’s hard to disagree with the document but points out that the Department of Health has said that this is a “green green paper” and therefore open to suggestions from submissions to the consultation.

It could be argued that this is unlike parts of the children’s green paper that ex-children’s minister Margaret Hodge often referred to as marbled rather than green and was criticised by some as being too prescriptive.

Independence, Well-being and Choice aims to put service users in control of their lives and create services that promote independence rather than dependence.

Flexibility

In the document the government says that it expects local health and social care services to work together with other voluntary and statutory agencies to form commissioning partnerships to ensure that the right balance of services is reached to achieve this but how agencies go about it is left up to them. The only government’s only stipulation is that doing nothing is unacceptable.

Sehgal welcomes the flexibility at a local level arguing that each area has different issues and therefore needs to be able to respond in their own way. She says that due to this any attempts to impose structural solutions would have been wrong.

The green paper contains seven clear outcomes: improved health, improved quality of life, making a positive contribution, exercise of choice and control, freedom from discrimination or harassment, economic well-being and personal dignity, that it wants users of adult social care to achieve. Some of these go beyond the traditional outcomes associated with social services and health but Sehgal feels that they are appropriate. “If you think about the broader preventive agenda, economic wellbeing is central to that as is community safety,” she says.

The broader agenda is reflected in the separate government consultation on the directors of adult social services position. This suggests that they should take on a wide role taking responsibility for areas such as housing and lifelong learning. Sehgal sees it as a really “exciting opportunity” for directors. “It would become a really interesting job and really embraces the preventive agenda,” she adds.

The government says that support for the voluntary and community sector is an “essential component” of its vision for adult social care. Sehgal says that the sector’s engagement is particularly important in terms of the green papers aims to give service users more choice and more personalised services through mechanisms such as direct payments and individualised budgets. “Service users are going to want to choose more services tailored to their needs that should lead to an increased demand in specialist services,” she says.

Money, money money

The green paper controversially states that the government expects its proposals to be “cost neutral” for local authorities. It proposes that the policies can be funded by savings made from providing better targeted low-level support before issues reach crisis point. Like the Association of Directors of Social Services, Sehgal argues that this will work in the long-term but that some extra money at the beginning of the process is required.

Byrne promises to fight for funding

She welcomes the care services minister Liam Byrne’s promise, made at Community Care Live earlier this month, to argue for more money in next year’s spending review to deliver the paper’s proposals and says that the LGA’s submission to the consultation will make a case for this.

The association’s submission will also highlight the tension between recognised ways of saving money, such as regional procurement of social care and block commissioning, and more personalised services.

The government says that more needs to be done to create a cultural shift amongst the whole of the social care workforce towards supporting the wishes and human rights of service users. It recognises that there is need to make social care an attractive career but says that workforce recruitment and retention will remain the responsibility of individual employers and Skills for Care, the employer-led sector skills council, and asks for views on how it should help employers to do this.

Sehgal says that the Department of Health have said that the workforce part of the green paper is greener than the rest of it. Although not mentioned in great depth in the proposals, she predicts that volunteers will feature more in adult social care in the future due to the increasing number of older people in society.

With the chancellor Gordon Brown committing £100 million over the next three years to setting up a youth volunteering framework in the budget in March there is evidence that ministers are moving in this direction - even if they formally come out and said it yet.