National Centre for Independent Living

The commitment to pilot individual budgets comes from the Government reports Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People (Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit January, 2005), Opportunity Age (Department of Work and Pensions March, 2005), and Independence, Well Being and Choice (Department of Health March, 2005) followed by Our Health, Our Care, Our Say (Department of Health January, 2006).

An individual budget is a sum of money allocated to an individual who is assessed as needing personal assistance services.

The key features of an individual budget are:

• A transparent allocation of resources so that individuals know how much they have to spend on their support;
• The bringing together of a number of support streams which could include local authority provided social care, independent living fund, supporting people, access to work, disabled facilities grant, and integrated community equipment services;
• A streamlined assessment process across all agencies meaning less time having to give information;
• Individuals have the opportunity to use the budget in a way that best suits them;
• Individuals can have the support of brokers, advocates or user-led organisations to support them to develop their support plan and manage it.

At the moment individual budgets are restricted to people living in 13 pilot areas. These are:
West Sussex
Lincolnshire
Essex
Norfolk
Barnsley
Leicester City
Coventry
Bath and North East Somerset
Kensington and Chelsea
Barking and Dagenham
Gateshead
Oldham
Manchester

Each pilot area is trying out individual budgets in a different way. So for example in Oldham individual budgets are available to all adults who receive support from Oldham Social Services; in other areas such as West Sussex individual budgets are only available to older people and younger people with physical and sensory impairments.

The pilot areas are due to continue until the autumn of 2007. There is an extensive evaluation of individual budgets being carried out by the universities of York, Kent, Manchester and the London School of Economics. They are comparing the experiences of people with individual budgets to those without. They are due to report on their findings in the spring of 2008. A decision whether or not to roll out individual budgets across England will then be taken.

However, the Government have made it clear that they are committed to a social care system that is personal to the people who need it and gives people the freedom to choose and to control the type of support they want. At the Individual Budgets and modernising Social Care national conference held on 30th January 2007 Ivan Lewis M.P., Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Care said, "For me what we are embarked on... is a revolution in the way in which we seek to offer services... the challenge now is to move from a series of pilots of experiments to an absolute understanding this will be the mainstream of the social care system in this country starting this year and next year but over the next ten years." (www.individualbudgets.csip.org.uk/dynamic/dohpage17.jsp)

Some local authorities have signed up to the project In Control which like direct payments and individual budgets is a system of self-directed support. More information is available at www.in-control.org.uk

Both individual budgets and direct payments are methods of self-directed support that is it is the individual who decides how their support needs will be met.

A direct payment is a cash payment for social care from the local authority instead of services.

An individual budget can cover more than personal social care, for example access to work, and can be a cash payment, or arranged services, or a combination of both. Therefore all, or part of an individual budget, can be received as a direct payment.

NCIL has received funding from the Department of health to work with the 13 pilot areas on developing networks of user-led support to assist people to in planning how their support needs can be met and how they can get the most from their individual budget.

Our activities include:

• Providing information about individual budgets on our website and telephone
• Providing e-mail advice
• Publishing articles about individual budgets in our newsletter Independently
• Working with the pilot sites to develop the capacity of user-led groups and networks to support people with individual budgets

About individual budgets
www.dh.gov.uk
www.individualbudgets.csip.org.uk