Welfare Reform Bill
12:00 pm
Jonathan Shaw: The legislation exists for local authorities to provide individual budgets to social care. If you say that we should put that in legislation and make them do it, I would say that that flies in the face of working in partnership and the devolution agenda. That legislation already exists. To repeat my previous point, this is not only about social care. At the moment the legislation allows social care as the gateway to individualised budgets. I have referred to disabled facilities grants and education grants, and we are also looking at making supported employment available. We need to understand how that will work. Of course, there are implications for services of devolving to the individual the allowance of money for their supported employment and there may be implications for the ability of wider parts of the service to continue.
We are clear that the need to pilot is not born out of a desire to hold up people’s ability to have individual budgets to live their life; rather, having read the transcript endorsed by RADAR and other leading organisations that I have spoken to, it is more about finding out what works and involving disabled people themselves.