Archive

  Cash and Care
  Edited by Caroline Glendinning and Peter A. Kemp,
  The Policy Press
  ISBN: 10186134 8568,
  £22.99

  STAR RATING: 4/5

The editors have assembled a fascinating array of contributors and topics that reflect this contemporary issue, writes Gary Vaux. It is comprehensive and far-reaching, looking at developments in the UK and overseas.

The boundaries between cash payments (income support in its broadest sense) and state-resourced care are becoming blurred. In some ways, the blurring is obvious - for example, the introduction of direct payments and personal budgets. But other blurring is less straightforward. The widening of the scope of the carer's allowance in recent years, for example, can be presented as another method of cash replacing care.

This book looks at those less-obvious examples and tries to place them in a clear theoretical context. This involves a greater role for service users as "active citizens", making choices about the type and extent of services they need and want.

But it also addresses the problems that come from this shift, such as what is referred to as pseudo-democracy, and, of course, how services are provided to consumers without money.

Gary Vaux is head of money advice, Hertfordshire Council and Community Care's welfare rights expert