Valuing People NOW!!!!
Another day, another document rolls out from the ‘Tree Destroyer” aka the Department of Health.
Yet another attempt to reinvigorate or change the way in which services are provided and or delivered to people with learning disabilities or so it says. It looks like another gigantic unrealistic ‘wish list’ formulated by people who wave their arms about in an enthusiastic fashion and talk about their ‘mates’ with learning disabilities who in reality are the ‘cannon fodder’ for their little ‘cottage industry’ of “how much money can I make by pretending that people with learning disabilities” aren’t.
It makes me puke.
No new money so they will ‘recycle’ ie ‘reduce’ the current money into new ‘initiatives’ such as “personalisation” and ‘Direct payments’ and as the ‘In control’ crowd said offering ‘new opportunities’ for Social Workers who may become redundant to become ‘brokers’ that is take a cut from a person’s individual budget to help them ‘manage’ their budget.
A budget which will be a reduction from the cost of their previously organised and provided care so the person can ‘manage’ their money to try to find people to work for them virtually ‘free’. Of course these new staff have to be all singing and dancing interactive providers/community facilitators for little more than the minimum wage – so the sorts of people they will be able to attract will either be well meaning misguided individuals, with no ‘back up’ or training but who are ‘nice’; agency staff who cannot get jobs elsewhere who may be nice but have little or no knowledge.................you get my drift. Nothing changes. Valuing People NOW only values the people who manage services and certainly not the poor suckers in receipt of them or the people they can scratch around to provide them.
There is no real plan behind this but just a set of meaningless sound bites and “mood music”.
A series of sociological ‘mists and mirrors’ which really only distracts attention from what is really going on.
This absurd Government’s response to the real issues facing people with learning disabilities is to say to them, “you are just the same as us really, so you do not need to be ‘labelled’ as disabled – we can provide you with Pathways to Work” – which in essence means ‘we will ridiculously despite all contrary evidence of your life, your abilities and your conditions, pretend that you are a really good candidate to find a job so why will you need these disability benefit when what you could have are several ‘Counselling’ sessions and then go onto the job register’.
You could not make it up.
I am all for empowerment but not for the ‘empowerment’ of marginalising people with real disabilities which in the real world may mean they will never be competitive in the job market and so this pretence is a shabby confidence trick being played on people who know no better.
What is horrible is that this lie is being colluded in by so called ‘proper’ people with alleged social care experience who in order to further their own agendas are prepared to see people with learning disabilities going back to the old days of having nowhere to go and no-one to be with. Because sure as eggs are eggs, this will have no substantial effect on people with learning disabilities except to impoverish them further socially, economically and in all other ways. Why don’t they just reopen the Asylums? At least they would have a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs? This is a scandal.
I think you underestimate both how far people with learning disabilities have come since the dark days of the grim institutions, and how far potentially they still could go, and underestimation leads to further segregation and control.
People with learning disabilities have a tremendous amount to contribute, and wish to do so. Valuing People Now says we should be finding ways to enable this to happen. This will require good listening, imagination and commitment to deliver better lives.
People do want paid work. It's accepted that sometimes this requires a lot of support to enable it to happen, and when it does happen it's a big achievement for the person and their allies. You're right that without this support, people would not be able to compete directly on the open jobs market - but we need more imagination so that people find ways to contribute to their communities. A daughter of someone I know had very severe disabilities - basically she did not move from the neck down. It took powerful imagination for her family and supporters to see her inability to move as a 'gift': she could stay still longer than anyone else. This meant she was able to get paid work for a few hours a week at the local college, using her gift of stillness to work as a model at the local college for art students, beauticians and hairdressers. Her mum told me she enjoyed this work a lot more than sitting in a Day Centre watching the staff threading objects onto wool, which was how she was spending her days prior to getting this job. If they'd waited for the 'service system' to sort something out for her, that is what she would have been doing for the rest of her life.
Nobody is pretending people with learning disabilities do not have disabilities and do not need support. What VPN is saying is that we need to be a lot more imaginative in how we support people. Trapping people in boring segregated and unproductive lives is no longer acceptable. We can sit around and moan that nothing is being done, or we can do something ourselves.
Max
your reply makes unsupportable generalised statements that do not apply to the majority of people with learning disabilities I work with.
My remarks are based on an evidence base of providing advocacy support over 20 years to a wide range of people with differing levels of complexity of need.
Undoubtedly things are changing for a small number of people and yes some complex need cases are handled well but for the majority and particularly people with what are perceived as less complex needs, things are not improving and your remarks are not sustainable in relation to the area I work in.
People are being given unrealistic expectations that they can compete for paid work when we have entered a recession which would prove a stumbling block to people without learning disabilities let alone the people I work with.
The fact is they are being asked to pay more for the services they receive or they are having them rationed or taken away; they are increasing being diverted into 'Pathways to Work' programmes which are just another method of reducing the jobless totals.
This is being done cynically and disgustingly by a Government which alongside its greedy cousins across the Atlantic have succeeded in ruining the economy and who in order to try to correct the situation use the most vulnerable to 'target' to achieve their aims.
I work hard everyday to try to correct the imbalance caused by their actions and we do offer interactive reactive services building up people's life skills to try to meet the challenge brought about by the institutional discrimination against people with learning disabilities and frankly have therefore 'earned' the right to comment.
It does not mean I underestimate anyone within my client group and it means that I underestimate either the cynical disregard shown to them by the so called 'proper people' who 'govern' us driven by an obvious contempt and increasingly obvious incompetence.
Chris Close
I would like to know which of my statements were unsupportable. Nor were they generalised, I used a specific example of a person with highly complex needs who was able to both get a more interesting life and contribute to her community thanks to the unwillingness of her supporters to underestimate exactly what she had to offer.
You say that you have 'earned the right' to comment due to your long experience of working in the field, implying that younger people with new ideas, or who have not worked long enough in the field to become acculturised to practises that would seem bizarre and oppressive among those who do not participate in social care, cannot offer anything to this debate.
Speaking as someone who's experience of work with people with learning disabilities almost rivals your own, I'd like to suggest that this can be nothing to do with 'getting people off benefits' or reducing people's support as the amount of hard work it actually takes to enable people with learning disabilities to get into paid work and to lead interesting and productive lives is very high - the point is that this investment of time, energy and imagination is actually worth it - for all concerned.
We should not use doubts about our governments' motives and competence as an excuse for us not to do this work.
Lucy Hurst-Brown, chief executive of the Brandon Trust has just posted on one of our blogs, arguing that we should forget the "tired old arguments" about lack of resources and focus on the positives that VPN has to offer. I just wondered if people agreed with that.
CareSpace support
The arguments about lack of resources may be tired (those that make them are certainly tired of having to), but they remain true. The fact that they have not been addressed and continue to undermine the quantitiy and quality of social care services may be longstanding, but it remains valid.
This is what New Labour is all about - the privatisation of community need - shoving lucrative contracts in the direction of private companies in the vain hope that they will get people with disabilities back to work. For a good fifty years, social workers and related professionals have been working their hardest to rehabilitate disabled people in the community. They have done a splendid job in improving life chances, accessing education and training and sympathetic employers. New Labour has completed airbrushed out this part of our history while drastically cutting resources; yet in the same breath we are told to use our imagination - we have been doing it for years and we have fought hard along with service users and carers for the gains we have made, only to have them completely wiped out by New Labour, which is now rewriting social policy with the Social Thatcherist pen. Welfare provision has been rolled back to the Poor Law, and this New Labour policy is a clear manifestation of it.