Need Social Care?

Individual Budgets and Financing.

Will there be more money for personalisation?

There will be no new money to give people for their individual support.  The new systems and ways of working will need to be achieved within the money we currently have available and the efficiencies that we are required to make to contribute towards the council’s overall savings targets.

However, the national pilots for Individual Budgets have already reported that better outcomes for people can be achieved within similar levels of funding to those required for the current traditional approach.  Some money is being made available to local authorities by Government to help with making the transition from traditional services to the new personalised ways of working.

What is an Individual Budget?

Individual Budgets were proposed in the 2005 Green Paper called Independence, Well-being and Choice  (928.89 KB).  The aim is to allocate budgets to individual service users who are eligible for social care support and to give the individual more choice about how the money allocated to them is spent.

An Individual Budget will bring together different pots of money (known as funding streams) that a person is eligible for into one single pot so they can use it in ways that best suit their own particular requirements.  This may mean using the Individual Budget to buy their support themselves, have the council arrange their support for them or it could mean a mixture of both.

What’s the difference between an Individual Budget and a Direct Payment?

A Direct Payment is an amount of money given directly to people who are assessed as eligible for social care support, to arrange and purchase their care and support services themselves, instead of having their care manager or social worker do it for them.

An Individual Budget is an allocation of money specifically identified for a person so that they can decide on how they want to use that money for their support.  For example, someone could use part of their Individual Budget as a Direct Payment as well as having social care staff spend another part of their budget on arranging support for them.

Alternatively they may want to put some or their entire budget together with other people’s money and buy their support as a group.  Basically, an Individual Budget gives a person the flexible option of arranging support in ways that are specific and unique to them.

How can an Individual Budget be spent?

There are many different ways in which the Individual Budget can be used to pay for the support that is needed.  A person may decide to recieve funds directly and source their own network of support; someone else may prefer to get a third party to do all of the paperwork and organise the required support; someone else may want to join together with other people in order to combine their funding and organise their joint support.  The support matrix diagram  (744.00 KB) illustrates the various methods of how an Individual Budget can be spent and the pros cand cons of using the different methods.