With the publishing of the green paper on long-term care for adults, the national service framework (NSF) for people with long-term - mainly neurological - conditions, and the proposed roll-out of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 to include public bodies, the government seems to be moving further forward in its consideration of disabled people.

Just as laudable, to my mind, is the way that this has been done. Not only have the major independent bodies been consulted, but also individuals have been invited to contribute to the process. My only objection is that the period for consultation has been so short that many of the people who will be affected didn’t get to know about the process until it was too late. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to find that both civil servants and politicians can acknowledge that they don’t always know best.

The raft of recent policy proposals, and the proposed establishment of an Office for Disability to co-ordinate activities across state departments, was leading me to think all there was left was to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I could go and do something different for a while – perhaps even get a "proper" job. That was until Stephen Ladyman declared the forthcoming crisis in care provision.

Ladyman suggests that care for disabled adults and older people is going to cost the state too much, and that much more of the care needs to be done by informal carers, drawn from the local community.

Coincidentally, it has also been suggested that opportunities for younger people to volunteer remain unexplored.

Although I believe volunteering has many potential benefits, I think a care system based on voluntary community support is risky indeed. To work at all, it would involve a massive change in societies’ attitudes and values, towards an idea of community that in many parts of the country simply doesn’t exist.

And I suddenly remembered that, for all the talk of ending social exclusion, the one topic that has been delicately ignored is the greatest form of exclusion – poverty.