The government is inviting views from disabled people and carers as the bill reaches committee stage. Although the oral evidence session was cancelled, Parliament has agreed to open up its web forum to disabled people as well as carers to feed in our views to the Joint Committee, chaired by Paul Burstow MP, as it conducts pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Care and Support Bill.
To have your say follow this link: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/joint-select/draft-care-and-support-bill/web-forum/
Then click on the different sections to give your views:
Responsibilities of Local Authorities
Assessing Needs
Safeguarding Adults at Risk of Abuse or Neglect
The forum is moderated and they want to hear the views and experiences of individuals rather than template responses.
Points you might want to make include the lack of mention of the Independent Living Fund in the bill and how local authorities are not able to meet the outcomes of the ILF. The bill makes proposals for safeguarding interventions and boards but concrete measures to prevent abuse would be to stop disabled people being sent into residential care, against their wishes, where they are at risk of abuse (as we have seen from cases like Winterbourne View) through the closure of the ILF.
The bill misses the opportunity to set a national eligibilty. Such a threshold should be set at low or moderate in line with the preventative aims the bill talks about.
You can download Inclusion London’s response to the draft bill here: https://www.inclusionlondon.co.uk/inclusion-london-comments-on-draft-care-and-support-bill
I have sought to clarify through the courts for a number of years, the failure by both funding agencies to inform carers operating non-profit businesses, that they were obligated to pay thousands of pounds in redundancy costs to their employees.
When I and others showed the harm they were causing, they brought in Run Off payments to pay redundancy costs. Funding is ring-fenced until March 2015, and in the run up to the next election its role is transferred over to Local Authorities.
19,500 vulnerable persons, of which a substantial part has mental issues, care is transferred over to the care of councils. Regardless of whether care costs are cut or not, at some point the issues over the payment of redundancy costs to these personal assistants (estimated around 100,000) requires to be resolved.
Upon the closure of ILF these run off payments end. It is obvious that if the system saddles these costs on persons mental health issues, there are going to have tragic consequences. and then persons start asking questions over the conduct and history of the ILF’s treatment of carers and PA’s.
Even when evidence was shown to the courts and it was pointed out that they had a statutory obligation in children’s cases (2004 Children’s Act) to share information on the fate of carers, the human and legal rights of carers were diminished in the legal system.
So does the council’s cover these costs and reduce the level of care they provide? Or do they state that PA’s lost their entitlement when ILF closed and accept the resulting implications for these vulnerable persons?
M. Francis