Please walk with us on 13th June 2023, along with the Lord Chief Justice, and thousands of other lawyers and supporters, to raise funds for CASCAIDr.
You can walk in London, alongside our CEO Belinda Schwehr and the rest of our London team, or you can walk for us, wherever you live. We need to get as many people taking part as possible, so please consider joining us however you can and please spread the word!
The Walk in central London starts from Carey Street (behind the Royal Courts of Justice) with registration at 3pm and kick-off by 4pm. The Walk finishes with a street party on Carey Street with street food vendors, fire jugglers, musicians and a free drink in The Last Judgment, The Old Bank of England or Law Society bars. The street party will close at 10pm.
Not able to make it into central London, or looking for another way to get involved? Take on 10k (or whatever distance you choose), your way, wherever you live! You can walk, run, skate, swim or cycle your way for justice. Or get creative! And by creative we mean that you can do anything that you can get sponsored for – companionship or reading volunteering, making, baking or whatever takes your fancy – and we’d love to hear about any ideas you may have to support us.
Register your interest as a walker in London, or locally, by email to pamelahoyer@cascaidr.org.uk. Pamela will also answer any questions you may have about the CASCAIDr team or the theme for this year.
The LLST organises a bespoke fundraising page and card donation button for all teams, so this makes it as easy as possible for anyone supporting us to raise awareness, whether walking or not, of what CASCAIDr does, and to generate affordable donations. Anyone who can use email for their own network, or social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc,) can really help!
If you are unable to participate, or feel uncomfortable about asking for donations, but you’d still like to help CASCAIDr reach our fundraising goal, then please donate here. Every pound is much appreciated!
Plugging Away at the Rights Gap
Most of us will rely on social care, or provide care, at some point in our lives.
Only 43% of people who request social care from their local authority actually receive it. Only 11% of those who are eligible for legal aid, for seeking a remedy for that situation, find a legal aid lawyer willing to help.
There are at least 1.5 million people living without the care they need.
Rights without accessible remedies are not much use when it comes to holding public bodies to account. Given the cost of legal advice, and the advice desert that exists for legally aided community care legal advice, access to remedies is simply not available to the large number of people needing it.
Most local authorities are not able to meet the growing demand for care, and with a population that’s living longer, this is only set to get worse. People who need to work to cope with the cost of living are instead torn between the needs of their loved ones, and their own wellbeing, financial and psychological. The State’s role in all of this and how to fund it is a political issue in the end, but in the meantime, CASCAIDr exists to narrow this gap.
Using law and legal principle, we’re trying to turn the critical state of social care provision back towards the legal rights underpinning the whole system, plugging away at the gap between the social care that’s needed and the social care that is in fact arranged or funded through local councils.
We do this through our legal framework training events, seeking to arm ordinary people with the information they need to negotiate effectively with their local authorities; our legal advice work, supporting people struggling to understand how best to navigate the web of social care procedure and improving their outcomes; our online advocacy work, where we provide reassuring hand-holding for difficult meetings; our information outreach, providing regular analysis through our fortnightly ‘Round-Up’ of Ombudsman’s decisions and case law developments.
This year our theme is ‘Plugging Away at the Rights Gap’ – 4 days’ attention, through briefings and podcasts, online, to the means provided by the law and legal principle, to chisel away at the prevailing culture that one can only get what the council has got available…since that’s just not the legal truth! The Assessment Gap, The Care Plan Gap, The Care Services Gap and The Carers’ Support Gap.
Nearer the time, across all our social media platforms, we will post information on the routes by which these gaps can all be narrowed, if you only know how.