This is my question please:
I have carers who help me each day for which I have a care package under adult social care.
I have had this package for roughly ten years and have never had to contribute financially.
I have had my yearly financial assessment done and have received a letter stating I need to pay £400 a month towards my care from now on. My circumstances have not changed and I have been told it’s due to the limit they have on disability related expenses under their new guidelines. I’m absolutely worried sick as I have no way I can afford this and I have 4 children I’m a single mum and many debts and I’m now thinking I’m going to have to stop my care which is something I really need.
I’m not sure who I can turn to for advice, please can you help at all or point me in the direction of a place that can help me many thanks
UNLESS the council is saying that there is no greater sum of DRE that can be treated as a disregard (because the total of your PIP or DLA is the logical limit of any DRE disregard) – there is no other lawful limit that can properly be applied to disability related expenditure because as a matter of the regulations, since the regulations say that it MUST be deducted from a person’s means.
If a council has applied a totally arbitrary limit to it or to how much leisure you can have before it counts as DRE you should write to the council’s statutory Monitoring Officer and point out that whilst there is a discretion as to what is or is not related to disability and what is or what is not reasonably required by dint of the person’s disability, outside of their care plan, the decision as to how to meet eligible need under the Care Act is different in legal terms from the discretion as to whether a person has reasonably chosen to spend their own money on meeting their own needs. The Windsor & Maidenhead case says that, and therefore would the Monitoring Officer immediately knock heads together and let you know that the charging team has accepted that it has absolutely no right to change the policy to the extent you are being told is happening. You should say that this is NOT A COMPLAINT but a Monitoring Officer referral under s5 of the 1989 Act which gives the MO a very important governance responsibility when told of likely contraventions of enactments or rules of law.
See here if you want to read about this case I have mentioned. https://cascaidr.org.uk/2023/06/21/rw-v-royal-borough-of-windsor-and-maidenhead-2023-ewhc-1449-admin/
You could go to Kesar and Co, or Gold Jennings a firm which is actually still functioning in this field of expertise and ask if they’d be interested in taking the matter on if the above gets you nowhere.
The point I am making is that one only gets to disregard DRE AT ALL from one’s means, for the purposes of one’s charges, IF one is receiving disability benefits, ie PIP or DLA. There is a maximum amount that one can get on either of those, per week. So, logically, if your expenditure on disability related things were to be more than those benefits, there would be no disability benefit to spend ON those things. So they would be coming out of ordinary household income.
Then, one would be into a wider unaffordability challenge to the council in which you are allowed to assert that even though ALL of the PIP or DLA has been disregarded, because of DRE, you still have to spend the money, and thus should not be forced to pay the charges that they are entitled to believe that you are able to pay.
This amounts to saying that the Minimum Income Guarantee that everyone is allowed off of their means assessment does not cover your actual daily living costs, but if you are in that zone, and need to say THAT, then any council will say that you need to tell them what every penny IS spent on, so that they can see what the real trouble is.
If it’s debt, they don’t have to allow for that, and that is why some people end up deciding that it’s better to owe the council money than it is to owe external creditors.
The reason for all this is that disabled people have to live within their means too, and debt on household costs is not regarded as a justification for reducing charges, not without more.
If the debt was ON something disability related, you might have a strong point to make on that. Most people don’t want to open up their household accounts to council scrutiny, to be fair.
That’s why I am recommending you put something in that says that it’s illegal to limit the concept of DRE in advance, given the regulations and also you could say how have they consulted on that, and did they take the PSED into account (public sector equality duty).