CC Live: The personalisation revolution

Health and social care consultant Melanie Henwood, said it was not a question of whether change was happening; it was. She described the Putting People First concordat as visionary. Personalisation was a major paradigm shift from councils to people and their families and it was not to be underestimated.

The implications were in advocacy and brokerage and it should not be assumed that people set out to defraud the system. Henwood said we had to trust people to manage the money with only light touch monitoring.

One effect of personalisation would be to give professionals the chance to get back to social work. Henwood admitted there may be regulatory implications but she warned against regulating everything that moved.

She questioned what happened to people with low level needs and the importance of those with complex needs being included.

She added that we had to examine what critics were worried about: whether it was a passing fashion and whether it could work for everyone.

Ray Jones, professor of social work at Kingston University, described his rail map for personalisation and likened it to the Middle East's road map for peace. He believed we were heading in the right direction but much of our policy was based on the Poor Law whose workings should have expired 60 years ago. Crossing parish boundaries brought different services, much as the poor laws intended. And we relied heavily on institutional care and the principle that we should have to work first before being eligible for help.

Jones warned that social care should be wary of being hitched to a runaway NHS express.

Martin Routledge, of the Care Services Improvement Partnership, said if Jones's rail map were to become reality, we had to be driven, problem-solving people.

Julia Winter, director of the Liberation Partnership, a social enterprise group run by and for disabled people and who became disabled in 1993, described the early days of her disability as a low time and compared it to a return to infancy.

But a social worker empathised and Winter got her life back, working for a disability group and running a help line. She set up a direct payments user group and returned to full time work as an adviser. She became one of the first people to go on an individual budget and found it brought flexibility to her life and has resulted in a reduction in her hospital admissions.

Direct payments felt like adolescence but individual budgets felt like adulthood, she said.