This project is about how the social care system in
Northamptonshire might work very differently. By
reorganising the approach to social care, the team wanted
to find out if local people with learning disabilities could
really take more control over their lives. As a result of the
learning from the project, work is underway to make selfdirected
support the “default” way of working with all
people with a learning disability in Northamptonshire, and
all other adult social care customers.
In the summer of 2006, the team used the tools from In
Control to analyse the needs and service costs of their
customers and found that the existing approach led to a
low correlation between the level of need and the level of
resources allocated to an individual. The project worked to
reshape this process in a simple but radical way. Using a
fair and equitable resource allocations system (RAS), the
approach placed control over an individual budget in the
hands of the person (or their representative) needing
support. The objectives were to develop an RAS to tell
people early and upfront in the process how much money
is available to them and what outcomes the support plan
must achieve, to enable a group of people with a learning
disability to move into their own homes through SDS, to
develop the learning of social care staff and shape their
future role and to work out how the system would fit into
the new customer care pathway being developed in
Northamptonshire.
The team found that people chose to use their individual
budgets in a variety of ways, either to move into their own
homes or to gain the skills and confidence to make the
transition into their own home. In addition to improving
the way that people’s needs are met, the project found the
average cost of the individual budget process represented
a saving of 18.7%
At a stakeholder event in November 2007, customers gave
accounts of how they had used their individual budgets.
Two themes emerged: first, that each person had decided
to do very different things, and second, that what they had
decided to do was their own choice. One couple who had
met and married in 1999, but remained in a residential
home, sharing with a number of other people have moved
into their own home in March 2008, and are in control of
their own lives for the first time.
For more information on this project, please contact:
bfrisby@northamptonshire.gov.uk
