This year, CASCAIDr’s theme for our annual Access to Justice fundraising walk is the rights gaps that is getting bigger and bigger in the world of adult social services. Please consider donating here. For those already aware of our work and why it matters – every donation is appreciated.
Today we’re highlighting the Care Services Gap.
Due to reduced resourcing of adult social care, there are well documented gaps in people receiving entitlements, for example 2.6 million people in England over 50 having unmet social care needs.
PA shortage leaves disabled people and their carers struggling – BBC News
Recent examples of CASCAIDr’s work include care packages ending, with no replacement care in place, people waiting for care for long periods and inadequate care packages due to the thinning out or overt rationing of service to go round more clients, as if the Care Act easements were still in place! It’s deeply ironic that it’s unpaid carers – in Carers’ Week – picking up this slack – when the government has just announced a formal Social Care Volunteers scheme – it had already forced one of those into existence, simply by doing nothing!!
People need to know that the duty to meet eligible needs is absolute. If there are no providers available, then explore how Direct Payments can be used, even to employ relatives or friends.
I’m Belinda Schwehr from CASCAIDr – it’s day 3 of our 2023 efforts to raise money for Access to Justice – specifically, for access to community care justice, as that’s our specialist advice field.
This year the theme is Plugging Away at the Rights Gap and today’s focus is on the gap in care services – the apparent non-existence of care agencies who are currently able and willing to deliver staff to people’s homes for the care for which they’ve been found eligible by the local council, which is legally obliged to organise and pay for those services.
It’s been the law for over 25 years that a person has a right to have the contents of their care plans funded and delivered, regardless of the social care team’s own budgetary difficulties. Care packages are not funding-led or allowed to be arbitrarily capped to a maximum rate; care plans are, and always have been, needs-led and what’s in them is an entitlement, not an aspiration.
The law explains how that can actually be the case in the real world, by saying that the council itself must find the money from some other coffer, even if the social care budget has been burned through, because a duty is a duty.
Years ago, when councils provided services rather than just buy them in from charities and businesses, councils would have had no other option than to employ more staff on higher rates, in order to attract them back from hospitality and retail, if that’s where they’d all gone.
Nobody is saying that that is what should happen now – they say that the staff simply don’t exist – but we think that councils are actually refusing to pay out more as part of a power struggle with businesses, and leaving people with assessed eligible needs to wait and wait, whilst leaning on a family carer for longer than would ever have been thought acceptable, before Covid.
A variation on the theme of NO care being put in, is care with reduced services without a care plan revision having been done, in order to make the number of commissioned hours in the local area go round more people, or care with unskilled staff being sucked into doing what people with more formal skills would previously have done. This week’s announcement of a social care volunteer scheme is all well and good for supporting rapid hospital discharge but it’s no substitute for the skilled personal care workforce needed to keep people independent in the community.
All of this is unlawful. The Care Act is about the minimum required to be funded by a council, for a half way decent quality of life, and councils’ leaders know that they are not abiding by the Care Act.
We suggest that people in this situation put it to councils in writing, demanding to know what is the council’s justification for not meeting eligible unmet needs given that it’s a mandatory duty
Or asking what is the justification for and logic behind any waiting list that the council may be running? The duty to meet need must be implemented within a reasonable time, and people’s edging closer and closer to crisis and risk is crucial to the legitimacy of any waiting list for services after a finding of eligibility…
Or you can use the flexibility in the Direct Payments regulations to ask to be allowed to spend a budget in the form of a direct payment on a close relative even if they’re living in the same household. The justification for making an exception to the general rule that that is not what Direct Payments are for, is that the council accepts that it’s necessary. If the current crisis in care service provision isn’t evidence of necessity, we don’t know what is!!
Or try asking the Cabinet member for adult social care in your area why it doesn’t seem to be offering a higher rate for other providers to re-join their framework, or working with a dynamic purchasing system where providers can bid between a pre-set minimum and maximum price.
Or get to know how to challenge the rate per hour that is being paid, by reading up about it on our website.
Every council’s principal social worker, head of adults’ services and each council’s Monitoring Officer needs to know that the local population knows more about clients’ legal rights than the staff do, frankly, if things are ever going to improve. If you get nowhere you can go to the Ombudsman for free and we can help you do that for a low cost charge.
CASCAIDr aims to help people go up that learning curve for themselves, but we need your support and your donations, now please, more than ever before.
Good stuff. I’m eighty-five and struggling as a half shared owner in nondescript resident accommodation run by a housing assoc. I’m not that badly off, although the latest increase in the my rent and service charge came £92 per month but really the system is up the creek. I’ve been to the ombudsman who identified four areas of investigation but turned them all down when never mentioniong what the four areas were. As did the housing assoc. who didn’t trouble to reply. Good luck with your walks and other things and sorry, with three families and five grandchildren my money needs to be spent on them. As a recent inter-parliamentary committee recently reported grand-parents want, and have, certain obligations as they age.