For example, the eligible outcome of “accessing and engaging in work”, and the person demonstrates that a particular specialist agency is required to enable a person to achieve this, but the Local Authority says this is “outside of their remit” (without successfully demonstrating that there is any alternative ‘strength’, ‘asset’, resource, or informal carer who is willing and able to actually, in reality, enable the person to achieve this outcome.) Does this hinge on the legal definition of the scope of “care and support”, or on something else?
The “specialist agency” is an agency that provides specially trained Personal Assistants to neurodivergent people to support them in carrying out their employment. The person in question has a job, but cannot continue to do it without support with specific tasks, such as assistance with communication during work meetings, assistance with the ‘executive functions’ of planning, prioritising, managing their anxiety about work, physical assistance with typing and other tasks required of them at work (the person is also physically disabled.)
The LA just says that some of the tasks we have described the person needing support with, in order to “access and engage in work”/maintain their specific job role – that, is, stay in the job without horrifically negative impact on their physical and mental health (i.e. severe mental health breakdowns due to the stress of inadequate support and severe pain/exhaustion from struggling to do tasks they should not be doing by themselves) – are “above and beyond the remit of adult social care”.
The only further detail they give about what they mean by that is that they feel the person’s employer should be responsible for supporting the person with these tasks as ‘reasonable adjustments’, even though we have already listed the extensive things the employer has already done as reasonable adjustments and why the employer cannot take on the role of the person’s specialist support worker as that is not a reasonable adjustment (we are talking a very small charity here with few resources, not a mega corporation).
Answer:
What is it about the agency’s input that is supposedly outside the scope of the Care Act? Given that the scope of the Care Act extends to ‘facilities’ and includes counselling…. Does that help at all?
I don’t think that the scope of the Care Act is the problem, in fact here. I would be the first to say that if an eligible need can be met, then the price is not relevant – that is what the duty to meet need, means. They don’t seem to be saying it’s too expensive however. They may try instead to say that some other job would be easier to support the person’s engagement within, but I don’t think that that is a proper answer – one shouldn’t just have to do any old thing when one’s wellbeing is intentionally so central to the Care Act. But they would not just say ‘any’ old thing would do for a job, I expect. They would say that to do this job is a choice, but not one that they are obliged to enable the continuance of.
Have you thought about coming at it a different way? Why should the person not take their own salary, for the job, and spend that – or some of it, on the support herself – to top it up over and above standard support that is on offer, if the job is so important to the person? Their salary is not counted for the purposes of the charging assessment.
If the person is on disability benefits and is not already maximising her DRE, I think this scenario has far more of a chance of succeeding as a DRE claim, in fact. If ordinary work engagement PA support from the council would perhaps cover £50 a week for a part time role, surely paying the extra cost oneself is both something about which the person must make up their own capacitated mind – as to whether this is what holding down the job is worth to him or her, within their own system of values, and secondly, a really good way of showing that they are prepared to help themselves, and trust the authority to do the right thing with DRE….
The disability benefits and DRE point is a means of putting the cost back on to the employer in another separate way, and thus being no worse off, in the end.