Final funds for personalisation

Councils have received the last and largest strand of funding for transforming and personalising adult social care.

The third and final year of the Social Care Reform Grant has seen
£237 million allocated for revenue funding, plus an additional £33.5 million capital funding for associated infrastructure costs, such as IT systems to help with accounting for personal budgets, or development of advice and information hubs.

Transformation and personalisation are based on the principle of involving service users and carers in designing, commissioning and delivering services. Details are set out in Putting People First: a shared vision and commitment to the transformation of Adult Social Care (2007).

Central to personalisation is provision of personal budgets for services users, so they can purchase care and support themselves.

Allocation of the Social Care Reform Grant has been pegged to key milestones to ensure progress of transformation.

Milestone requirements and achievement dates are:
•the move to personal budgets is well understood and local service users are contributing to the development of local practice (December 2009)
•every council has introduced personal budgets which are being used by existing or new service users/carers (April 2010)
•all new service users/carers with assessed need for ongoing support, and service users whose care plans are subject to review, are offered a personal budget (October 2010)
•at least 30% of eligible service users/carers have a personal budget (April 2011).

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