This topic seems to have widened out a bit to take in issues surrounding the
availability of Direct Payments to people described as having learning
difficulties.
(In passing, it's disappointing that there isn't a greater exchange of ideas and
experience about DPs in this list and in other media. There is a need for a
forum on the subject to facilitate shared learning .. .)
It's true that people with learning difficulties are grossly under-represented
in the take-up of DPs, as are people needing mental health services, people with
acquired brain injury and others. I don't think it is entirely down to a
reluctance of local authorities to make them available (at least not in the
county I work in), although there are a lot of assumptions both within service
agencies and elsewhere about their ' vulnerability' and 'competence';
assumptions which get in the way of promoting DPs as a basis for creative Care
Planning.
In the UK there is a real difficulty with the ambiguities within the Government
guidance on how DPs should be administered. The Govt. clearly intends DPs to be
made available to people in all client groups, and suggests that recipients can
use very extensive help to manage the payments. However, DPs are not an option
unless the Local Authority judges that the person would exercise control over
the use of the money. This leaves the obvious question as to how much control
is enough to satisfy this condition? The law and the guidance are silent on
this point, so the only recourse is to develop practice on the basis of trial
and error - seeing how far you can push the interpretation of 'ability to give
informed consent'.
Consequently, it becomes very important that those of us who want to see DPs
used by people in these under-represented groups should be able to learn from
those schemes that have managed to make some headway with this question. We
need a means of consulting those DP schemes that are apparantly providing DPs
to a significant number of clients with learning difficultles.
Barry Ruffell
DP Liaison Officer
West Sussex Social Services Dept.
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