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Assessment – s2 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 – resources A local authority had a duty, under s47(1) National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990, to carry out an assessment of the needs of anyone for whom community care appeared to be required. In assessing whether: a) an individual has a need; and b) if so, what arrangements ought to be made to meet that need, a local authority was entitled to balance the needs of the individual against the comparative needs of the disabled in the area in the context of the amount of resources available. A local authority was not, however, entitled to withdraw or reduce the provision of services without first reassessing the individual’s current needs in such context. |
I note the final decision by a majority of 3-2 agreed it was ok to take resources into account when assessing needs, not just in regards to how to meet them thereafter. In my non-lawyer understanding this decision was based on the unpicking and interpretation of the intricately interwoven pre-care act laws, guidance etc. that lead to and underpinned the right to assessment.
With respect, no matter what this decision was based upon, or how those things were interpreted, or by which 3 learned and insightful judges, it nevertheless, in my opinion was when put into practise, a fundamentally flawed decision that additionally did nothing to ‘encourage’ central government to fund local authorities properly and instead merely provided those authorities with a legal excuse to treat people more poorly and in the end, also to make their own jobs harder and crueller to carry out whilst making the people they were assessing go without more and more of what the rest of society expects as a basic level of living.
Indeed, as one of the two minority view judges noted, when one needs shoes, one needs shoes, ones resources do not alter that fact.
I do appreciate some of the positives confirmed in this case, such as the lack of resources not being a reason not to meet needs once agreed in the care plan, (although in light of this ruling, all one has to do to achieve the same end is re-assess with money in mind of course) yet this ruling seems to strip away far more than it upholds and leaves me with an uncertainty as to whether it also means it could be lawful for an authority to re-assess solely (stated or otherwise) to reduce funding when resources were unable to stretch to meet the total needs in it’s area?
I respect in our current system there must be gatekeeping on resources, but this ruling seems akin to adding barbed wire, alarms and armed guards to those gates!