Managing Community Care Volume 8 • Issue 3 • June 2000
© Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Ltd
3
Supporting People:
Another Poisoned Chalice?
Terry Bamford
F
ORMERLY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
O
F HOUSING AND SOCIAL SERVICES,
ROYAL BOROUGH OF
KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA
A r
ecently retired Director
of Housing and Social Services
argues that the new supported
housing regime poses many
problems for social services
departments, and may be
more helpful to the Treasury
than to people in need.
ABSTRACT
Community care reform: the first ‘poisoned chalice’
Social services departments may not all be ranked by the SSI/Audit
Commission Joint Review Team as consistently serving the public
well. There is, however, no doubt that social services departments
have served the Treasury well. In 1993, with the introduction of
community care, they succeeded in setting an effective cash limit on a
social security budget which had been growing at 20% per annum.
Hidden beneath the cosmetic veneer of Special Transitional Grant and
the intricate calculations of the so-called ‘Algebra Group’ (upon whose
plans the resource transfer was made) was a shift from a demand-led
budget to one tightly governed by assessment procedures and eligibility
criteria. While social services departments have been subject to critical
scrutiny for their mismanagement of specific cases, they have
achieved this transition with remarkably little criticism. Of course
there has been pressure from ministerial criticism about delayed
hospital discharges, although that complex phenomenon is rarely
attributable wholly to social services. Rationing is necessary because
of the mismatch between the need for services and the resources
available to meet them, but that is part of the daily reality of service
delivery
.
Supporting People: the hidden purpose
Now, ten years on, social services departments are being asked to
perform the same trick. The new regime in relation to Housing Benefit
is designed to r
eplace a demand-led system without any cash limit by
a finite pot distributed by a joint board comprising health, housing,
social services and probation representatives. That pot, like
community car
e funding, will then be subject to a cash limit. While it
topical theme