by Peter Beresford
Service users must redouble their efforts to back personalisation because policymakers' initial enthusiasm appears to be waning.
Earlier this year, individual budgets were heralded as the reform that would transform social care. Anyone who doubted them was liable to be taken off the team.
They can be helpful, for some groups, in some situations, but they aren't cheaper, as was promised. There can be real problems in joining up funding streams and older people don't seem to like them. Commentators who banged the drum for them are stepping back.
Of course individual budgets aren't the money saving magic bullet that some politicians and policy makers wanted to believe they were. That was never the point. What they can offer, as part of a broader policy of person-centred support, is a real chance for people to have more choice and control over their lives, whatever their age, whatever their impairment.
The worry now has to be that the push for personalisation and properly implemented self-directed support loses momentum and gets lost. Already there are worries that the focus is switching back to safeguarding and problems of risk. Then we may see a rerun of the hesitant and patchy implementation that took place with direct payments, the true inspiration for individual budgets, pioneered by the disabled people's movement.
This wouldn't be the first time that a pioneering development with grassroots support became lost through failures in top-down implementation. We saw it with patch social work and care management.
Some key steps are now needed if person-centred support and individual budgets are to succeed at ground level. Policy makers must engage with, help and support the face-to-face practitioners who have the key role of taking personalisation forward. They must connect better with the wide range of service users who could truly benefit from individual budgets, which have to be put into place with a proper infrastructure of support for service users, including information, advice, advocacy and administrative back-up, plus proper resourcing and capacity-building for staff. Then we may see those real moves to independent living we were promised - for all service users.
Peter Beresford is professor of social policy at Brunel University and chair of Shaping Our Lives, a national service-user controlled group
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