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| TX: 22.10.08 - Social Care Conference PRESENTERS: JULIAN WORRICKER AND PETER WHITE |
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| Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WORRICKER One inescapable conclusion from the You and Yours month of programmes about social care, the help that vulnerable people need to go on living independently, was that no one thought the current system was fair. So at the end of January the government asked the social care watchdog - the Commission for Social Care Inspectorate - to take a thorough look at the eligibility criteria for services and recommend changes. Well they've reported this morning at the AGM at the Directors of Adult and Children's Social Services in Liverpool and I'm assured that Peter White is there for us. Peter, what have they said? WHITE Always happy to stand in for Martha Julian. Yeah well the first thing they've said is that the way it's decided who gets care services - things like help in the home with washing, cleaning, perhaps getting up in the morning and a whole range of other services - is so flawed and so criticised that we can't wait for the big national changes which are expected to be recommended in the government's forthcoming green paper because they may take five years to kick in, which is time we haven't got. WORRICKER So what's the background to this? WHITE Well the problem is that this is a cake which is staying around the same size, maybe getting very slightly bigger but which more people want to eat, many more people. It's quite clear, as we said all through our series of programmes in January, that as the population gets older more people need more care for longer there just wouldn't be enough to go round unless we worked out how to pay for it. But in the meantime many local authorities, strapped for cash, are solving the problem either by charging more and more for services or just removing people's care - people like Nick Wylie. Now Nick is blind, he'd been receiving assistance in his home, things like having meals cooked for him, mail read to him and then earlier - this happened. WYLIE Up until January 2007 I received enough money to buy in 14 hours per week. I then received notification from the department, they said they had reassessed me and they said that two hours was appropriate. And I said well I was blind last month and blind this month. I disagreed very strongly with that and it wrangled backwards and forwards throughout the year until October when they just pulled the plug completely. Because of my stroke I'm much less mobile than I was, so I can't get out so much. One of my people I've had to let go completely, so I'm getting less social contact with other people. And every day is a struggle. WORRICKER So Peter what's the commission doing to deal with the problem? WHITE Well they admit that until they know whether there's actually going to be anymore money forthcoming in the government's green paper, now expected sometime next spring, this is all a bit aspirational. But they're proposing a system which would establish what needs are reasonable to be - to expect to be met wherever you are in the country. I asked the commission's chair Dame Denise Platt what conclusions they'd come to about the state of services. PLATT What we have found is that the public is very dissatisfied with the system as it currently exists. People don't understand it, they're very bewildered, they're defeated. And the social care system is very narrow, it's just interpreted in terms of people's physical needs rather than their well being, their social situation, their family and their circumstances. Basically the system is really incomprehensible at the moment, not only to the public but also to some of the professionals working in the system. And what we have recommended is that there is more universal availability for people in the community who are seeking care, for advice and assistance about what is available for them, that there's a better assessment of their needs, based on what they think and what they want in their own circumstances. WHITE So what difference would that make to somebody like Nick Wylie who suddenly had his services, which he'd had for many years, taken away from him? PLATT One of the things that we've recommended is that there should be a national formula for looking at people's needs and requirements and coming to a conclusion about an individual's budget and how that amount should be determined. We want that assessment to be portable and so it can't go up or down depending on how the resources are available, the assessment is the assessment that the person would have and that is their assessment and that remains with them. Now local authorities might apply different amounts of money to that assessment but what we heard in Nick's experience was that people redefined his needs. And what we are proposing is a system where people wouldn't redefine people's needs, they might say we haven't got enough money but they wouldn't try and tell him that he hadn't got the needs for a service. WORRICKER Dame Denise Platt. So Peter what kind of reactions have you found at the conference? WHITE Largely favourable but only as far as it goes because I mean you wouldn't be able to find a director of social services who didn't say that he needed more money, that goes without saying and they all want to know, as soon as possible, where that money is likely to come from, you know whether it's tax, or insurance or some other solution. John Dixon is president of the association which represents the leaders of social services around the country. DIXON We would within ADAS are definitely moving towards supporting a national resource allocation system, pounds can be added locally. The point being then that it's transparent, that if in one part of the country the council decides that they're going to put more pounds to the points that can then be debated, it can be the subject of discussions at elections and so forth, so that there is a much greater degree of transparency of the system than we have now. WORRICKER Is anybody unhappy with the report? WHITE I wouldn't say unhappy but it is quite clear, from what John Dixon says there for example, that one area of unresolved debate, let's put it that way, is the extent to which eligibility criteria is national as opposed to local. Now David Rogers, from the Local Government Association, which represents the local authorities, he's in no doubt what his organisation favours. ROGERS In my view a local system that ensures that it reflects the needs of local people in the particular area, is preferable to a national system. And the reason I say that is because clearly needs are very different in Cornwall or Cumbria or London or Lancashire. WHITE And yet one of the main objections about the system as it exists at the moment is there seemed enormous inequities from one local authority to another. ROGERS Well I think that's sometimes exaggerated but I wouldn't say there are no differences and I think that's really a reflection of different local pressures and the fact that the funding as a whole is inadequate and the CSCI report recognises that the cake is not large enough and that's something I very much welcome. WORRICKER So what happens now? WHITE We all wait to some extent for this green paper Julian. This really is the elephant in the room, I'm afraid, because to be honest nobody can do anything much without that and the one word I keep hearing up here in Liverpool - in the bars and walking around the corridors - is urgent, the needs are going up, not least because of the economic situation of course and that cake, which we keep hearing about, is having to be chopped up into smaller and smaller slices. The Department of Health has welcomed the report this morning, they say they wouldn't propose to make any short term change to the democratic process within local government while the long term debate over social care continues and they accept that the guidance needs to be reworked. WORRICKER Peter, thank you very much for that. And for more on the government's response Peter's going to be talking to the new care services minister Phil Hope in tomorrow's programme. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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