The Department for Work and Pensions is seeking views on how
disabled people can take control of state funds spent on them
through wide-ranging individual budgets.
The DWP is legislating to give disabled people a "right to
control" state support, through the current
Welfare Reform Bill, and today launched a
consultation on how this can be implemented in
practice.
The consultation will inform the design of a small number
of pilots to test the idea, starting next year and running for
two-to three years.
Pooling funds
The policy is designed to extend direct payments and personal
budgets for disabled people beyond social care to other funding
streams and enable users to pool funds into an individual budget so
that they can have as much control over their support as
possible.
Proposed funding streams include:-
Overlap with individual budgets
There is a significant degree of overlap with the Department of
Health's individual budget pilots, which ran in 13 areas from
2005-7, and were designed to test how funding could be pooled
for disabled and older people from a range of funding streams.
Key differences between the two schemes include the fact that
'right to control' will apply to all disabled people, not just
social care service users, and that it will also be backed by
legislation.
The IB pilots found there were legislative and administrative
barriers to pooling funding streams for users.
The consultation closes on 30 September.
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