Joined-up care thinking

20 Jun 11
James Lloyd

The Dilnot Commission on care funding has indicated it won’t recommend the wholesale transfer of Attendance Allowance to the social care system. But there is a need for more joined-up use of the £7bn allowance

Attendance Allowance, the older people’s disability benefit, is one of those bits of public spending that tends to carry on quietly in the background. It costs £7 billion per year in England, reaches over a million people, but rarely pops up in political debate.

Ever since the Wanless Review of social care, there’s been a tussle going on among policymakers as to whether the money spent on Attendance Allowance would be better off transferred to the social care system as part of a reformed state funding package.

Unlike AA, the social care system, delivered via local authorities, targets spending on need proportionate to means and the availability of other support, such as informal care. Compared to the social care system, the argument goes, AA is a pretty blunt instrument - and goes to too many people who don’t really need it.

The previous government took on these arguments and its proposals for a National Care Service assumed that AA spending would be used to fund this vision. However, this idea was never popular with interest groups, and early soundings from the Dilnot Commission on Funding Care and Support have indicated that it won’t be recommending the wholesale transfer of AA to the social care system.

But in the background to all this, something more interesting has taken place. The social care system has over the last five years completely reimagined what social care is for – enabling independence, well-being and choice – and the best way to achieve this: giving individuals control over their own resources, preferably in the form of direct (cash) payments.

If the challenge laid down by the care services minister is met by local authorities, then by 2013, every user of local authority social care will be using a cash-based personal budget. And there will be two separate arms of government making cash transfers to largely the same target group, but with negligible coordination between the two systems.

This opens up a really interesting set of questions that have been ignored for far too long about how the two systems can be better integrated and coordinated. In our new report – Cash Convergence – the Strategic Society Centre has set out ten ideas for doing this. Here are some of the highlights:

Data-sharing: there’s actually a huge amount of overlap among users of the social care and AA systems, so the DWP and local authorities should start sharing data to ensure individuals are getting what they are entitled to.

Sign-posting: there’s lots of scope to improve sign-posting across the two systems. At present, the official booklet from the DWP for potential AA claimants makes no reference whatsoever to being entitled to a needs-assessment from your council.

Positioning AA as a gateway: as a non-means tested benefit, the AA system appears very effective at identifying and reaching older people with a disability. So why not position it as a formal gateway to the social care system and use it to distribute social care resources, and advice and brokerage services?

There’s so much money in play here, relating to some of the most vulnerable people in society. We really should be thinking more creatively about how the two systems can work better together.

James Lloyd is director of the Strategic Society Centre. The Centre's report, Cash Convergence: Enabling choice and independence through disability benefits and social care, is available at www.strategicsociety.org.uk

 


 

Did you enjoy this article?

AddToAny

Top