Disabled People: Independent Living Fund

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Monday 31st March 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wilkins (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have been given the clearest of warnings that their plans to close the Independent Living Fund and transfer its responsibilities to local authorities could relegate thousands of disabled people to residential care—either that or they would be living such reduced lives that they would be deprived of their current ability to live independently, have a family life, be educated, be employed, do voluntary work and contribute to their communities. Is the coalition Government honestly willing to accept this? Do they understand the wholly justified fear that this decision has generated?

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, on securing this debate, and I look forward to the Minister’s response to her positive suggestions on ways in which this miserable situation can be alleviated. It is just not possible for the Government to deny that we have a crisis in social care. Only this past week, the Nuffield Trust reported that a quarter of a million older people have lost their basic social care over the past four years due to cuts in council budgets. The report’s authors warned that the NHS and Government are now “flying blind” in planning services for vulnerable people because there is no way of assessing the true impact that social care cuts are having on their lives.

Over the past three years, £2.68 billion has been cut from adult social care budgets despite the increasing numbers of working-age disabled people needing care. Research contained in the report The Other Care Crisis last year found that this is having a significant impact on the ability of disabled people to live independently; 40% of respondents said that the social care services do not meet their basic needs, such as washing, dressing or getting out of the house. How can the Government support a policy which now probably condemns another 20,000 to join that fate?

This is the situation we face, yet somehow the Minister for Disabled People, in his Statement on 6 March, could say:

“The key features that have contributed to the Independent Living Fund’s success, in particular, the choice and control it has given disabled people over how their care and support is managed, are now provided, or are very soon to be provided, within the mainstream system”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/3/14; col. 143WS.]

I take it that the Minister was basing his argument on the Care Bill, with its very welcome introduction of the well-being principle in Clause 1. But this principle does not include key concepts of independent living, such as choice, inclusion and equal participation.

How soon will it be that a local authority argues that a former ILF user’s well-being is being met in residential care, despite it being totally against the individual’s wishes or choice? All attempts by the Labour Opposition in the Commons to include independent living in the well-being principle were voted down by the Government. Moreover, as we constantly argued during its passage, the Care Bill has little chance of achieving its aims without sufficient finance. First it has to overcome the current £1.2 billion shortfall in funding social care for disabled people under 65, let alone care for older people. I feel sure that the Minister will cite the £3.8 billion joint health and social care funding—the so-called “better care funding”—as the solution. Welcome as this is, it is not new funding. NHS England and the Local Government Association have pointed out:

“The £3.8bn pool brings together NHS and Local Government resources that are already committed to existing core activity”.

The fundamental question that lies behind this debate is whether social care is capable of delivering a right to independent living. Disabled people have been striving to establish this for the past 30 years. Far from abolishing the ILF, we need a system which builds on the way it has enabled thousands to live ordinary lives. We need a system based on universal principles, which funds the additional costs that disabled people have—of all ages and across the whole range of impairments and long-term health conditions. It needs to be a nationally consistent system, with no element of postcode lottery.

The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, has proposed to the Government a way to alleviate the misery of the policy they are adopting. I hope that the Minister will grasp it and at the very, very least persuade his fellow Ministers to ring-fence the ILF funds when they are transferred.