Disabled People: Independent Living Fund

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Monday 31st March 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Low of Dalston (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, for initiating this debate on replacement arrangements for the Independent Living Fund. Closure of the ILF potentially represents a crisis in funding to support the independent living of a significant group of some of the most severely disabled people in the United Kingdom.

The ILF is a national scheme providing financial support for almost 20,000 disabled people to live independently in the community rather than in residential care. It was originally set up in 1988 as a temporary measure to mitigate the impact of implementing new community care legislation and a review of social security benefits for disabled people which was being undertaken by the Government of that time.

However, the desire of disabled people to live more independently was vastly underestimated. Within its first year, the fund attracted 900 applications a month, later rising to more than 2,000. The fund proved very popular. It worked very well. It met a real need and, as a result, has survived to this day, supporting nearly 20,000 disabled people, many of whom have some of the most severe and complex needs.

In June 2010, the Government closed the fund to new applicants. In December 2012, they proposed to abolish it altogether. In November 2013, the Court of Appeal ruled against the Government’s decision to abolish the fund. However, on 6 March this year, as we have heard, the Minister for Disabled People announced his intention to close the fund anyway, on 30 June 2015.

The Government’s thinking is that the ILF should close and funding will be transferred to local authorities so that current claimants can be supported through the mainstream adult social care system. I recognise that the ILF is something of an anomaly, falling as it does on the DWP budget and sitting outside the mainstream system of social care funding. However, sometimes it is appropriate that the imperatives of bureaucratic tidiness should give way to the pragmatism of what works.

I acknowledge that the Government have said funding from the ILF will be transferred to local authorities and the devolved Administrations. However, this must be judged against the state of social care funding. Cuts to local authority budgets of more than 20% since 2010 have had a devastating impact on social care provision. The amount spent by councils on adult social care has fallen by £2.8 billion, or 20% between 2011 and 2014, and the Audit Commission’s Tough Times 2013 report, published at the end of last year, found that while reductions in adult care accounted for 14% of council cuts between 2010-11 and 2011-12, they will account for 52% in 2013-14.

Consequent pressures on local authority budgets have meant that thresholds for care have risen dramatically, meaning that fewer disabled people qualify for social care. Since 2008, 97,000 fewer disabled people aged 18 to 64 have received social care, and even those still eligible for care experience the rationing of support. In these circumstances, the Government’s assertion that the social care system will simply pick up where the ILF left off is unrealistic in the extreme. This is especially the case when it is realised that the £320 million that the ILF currently costs will not be ring-fenced when it is transferred to local authorities.

As the Government have stated their intention to set the new national eligibility threshold at a level equivalent to “substantial”, the more than 3,000 ILF claimants in group 1, a significant proportion of whom have low or moderate needs, will likely not receive any support to live independently once the fund closes. Without this support, ILF claimants will find it harder to live independently and risk being forced to live in residential care, breaching Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which sets out the equal right of all disabled people to choose to live in the community and government’s duty to take effective and appropriate measures to facilitate this right.

Like everybody else, I want to ask the Minister what replacement arrangements for the fund it is proposed will be put in place. With the closure of the ILF, I want also to ask whether the Government will commit to developing a strategy for local and central government to support disabled people to live as independently as possible. As part of such a strategy, will they make independent living a key outcome for delivering social care for disabled people?

The ILF system, however flawed, exists in recognition of the fact that people with high support needs are at particularly high risk of social exclusion. They face particular barriers to living independently in the community and their needs in this regard are not adequately addressed by mainstream provision. By taking away the support provided by the Independent Living Fund, the Government, whether intentionally or not, are sending a message that independent living for disabled people is not a priority for either local or national government. That is at the heart of the concerns that disabled people who receive support through the ILF are expressing.