The Poor Law may seem a long way away. It was abolished by the 1948 National Assistance Act amidst the deluge of legislation that set up the welfare state. In the 60 years that have passed there has been a continuing trickle of further legislation, statutory regulation and case law. This has kept lawyers in business but has left disabled and older people and those who seek to assist them uncertain and confused.
It is now necessary and timely that there should be a tidying up of the legal framework for social care, and this is essentially what the Law Commission is seeking to achieve by its recently published review and recommendations.
The review collects, collates and combines the social care legislative developments. This is reasonable but it is not, as some headlines have suggested, radical. It is valuable but hardly visionary. Indeed the Law Review seems to be trapped in the past as it harnesses the history of adult social care into one proposed legal statement.
It still focuses on services, and indeed provides a list of what is included within the definition of social care services. This echoes the 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act. But aspirations have moved on from then.
Disabled people themselves have shaped and promoted an understanding of a social model of disability and have championed an agenda for independent living. This is where we are now and it is the future.
A review that has focused on bringing together disparate legislation and court rulings from the past has trapped itself in the past. It has also failed to address sharp-end issues that still loom large.
For example, there will still be a postcode lottery. What help you will get depends on where you live. Moving across council boundaries is and will be fraught with uncertainty and anxiety. This is at a time when public expenditure cuts mean that councils are upping eligibility criteria and the difficulty you must be in before you have any entitlement to help, and also lowering the amount of help you will get (and with the Dilnot review ahead on the funding of social care you will probably pay more while getting less).
Practice on the ground, with the drive forward on choice and control for disabled and older people, facilitated by direct payments and individual budgets, is only glimpsed in passing within this law review. The old jargon about 'services' misses the new focus on personalised assistance. The law review glances at contemporary developments but is gobbled up by the past. It has usefully simplified the baggage of legislative history but it has not stimulated a view of a better future.
Dr Ray Jones is professor of social work at Kingston University and St George's, University of London, and from 1992-2006 was director of social services in Wiltshire
