Individual budgets

This paper considers cash for care as reflected in direct payments and the more recent development of individual budgets in England. While the momentum to roll out individual budgets gathers pace in England, Wales has embarked on a more cautious approach in wishing to evaluate the impact of individual budgets on social services. The paper identifies some of the far reaching implications of cash for care in general and individual budgets in particular, for service users, carers ‐ both paid and informal ‐ and for the social work profession.

This report presents findings from research into the experiences of using personal budgets for older people, people with mental health problems and their carers, with suggestions for good practice and future improvement.

This chapter sets out the policy and research contexts for the study. It first summarises the individual budget pilot projects and locates these within the wider context of policy initiatives aimed at giving disabled and older people greater choice and control over their support arrangements. It then summarises the somewhat separate development of policies and practice aimed at identifying and meeting the needs of informal and family carers.

Personalisation is about letting older and disabled people take risks others take for granted. But this means councils must find new ways of keeping them safe. [Introduction]

This qualitative study aimed to explore an under-researched issue within the emerging body of research about carers and personalisation - the carer-service user relationship. It was carried out across 11 English local authorities between 2011 and 2012 and focused on the impact of a change in the service user's social care arrangements to a personal budget on this relationship.

Carers play an ambiguous role within the personalisation paradigm currently shaping adult social care practice in England. Although carers have rights to assessments and support in their own right, these rights sit uneasily alongside the practices of assessment, support planning and personal budget (PB) allocation for older and disabled people. This paper reports how 14 dyads of older and learning disabled people with cognitive and/or communication impairments and their carers viewed the roles - desired and actual - played by carers in PBs.

This paper reviews the challenges faced by unpaid family carers and the current support and services available to them. It argues that current carer support should be built on and presents the evidence for doing so, including evidence of the opportunities to make substantial savings in residential care costs. The paper suggests a new way in which proposed resource allocation and personal budget systems could be developed in order to sustain caring, avoiding the risk of a new perverse incentive to families to end caring roles.