The personal budgets being introduced for social care are being used to implement the government’s spending cuts, charities warned yesterday.
On November 16, Care Services Minister Paul Burstow unveiled the government’s ‘Vision for Social Care’, pledging that one million older and disabled people who were eligible for social services support should be assessed for personal budgets by 2013.
Charities have warned this could leave vulnerable older and disabled people with inadequate care and support.
Blind wheelchair user Graeme Ellis, who has been on a personal budget for more than a year, was originally assessed as needing £21,000, but after being reassessed, he got an e-mail from his social worker telling him his council would have to cut their contribution by £10,000.
He said: ‘I’m frightened about the effect that being housebound will have on my wellbeing because being able to get out of the house and do things is one of the things that enables me to carry on.’
RNIB campaigns officer Geoff Fimister told the BBC yesterday it was important ‘they were not used as a vehicle for simply reducing the amount spent on social care provision’.
He added: ‘RNIB is extremely concerned that, when misused as an opportunity to implement cuts, the introduction of personal budgets could have a negative impact on care services and fail some of the most vulnerable members of our society.’
Mental health charity Mencap’s Head of Policy and Campaigns, David Congdon, told News Line: ‘Moving people onto personal budgets must not be used as a way to cut frontline services for the most vulnerable.
‘The difficulty is that because individuals get a budget, and most people who are looking at social care won’t know what other individual people are getting, it does provide too easy an opportunity for local authorities to reduce their spending by giving people an inadequate budget.
‘One very typical way of doing that is not giving them enough money to pay the personal assistant they want the proper hourly rate, and that can be a way of implementing cuts by stealth that actually detracts from the good principle of personalisation.’
Donna O’Brien, director of policy at Parkinson’s UK, warned that ‘personal budgets are being cut back by local authorities, and are not adequate to meet people’s needs.
‘They are being introduced at a time of general social cuts, and general underfunding of social care underpinned by a postcode lottery.’
Stephen Lowe, Age UK Policy Adviser on Social Care told News Line: ‘Whilst some older people will want direct payments many will not, regardless of how much support is offered, so they should not be pressured into having one.’