It’s the news thousands have been anticipating with less than excitement: that within five years, the fund which has kept them out of residential care will be no more.
Sunil Peck reports
The Government has finally confirmed that it’s to scrap the Independent Living Fund (ILF). Users have described the news as a disaster and say that it has the potential to set the lives of disabled people back decades.
The fund was set up in 1988 and now provides money paid by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to more than 20,000 disabled people with high support needs to live independently at home, thereby keeping them out of residential care.
But the Minister for Disabled People Maria Miller announced in December last year that the fund would close by 2015 because it’s “financially unsustainable”.
But she has so far failed to explain what will replace the fund or how existing users and those disabled people who were prevented from benefitting when the fund was closed to new applications in 2010, would be in a position to continue to exercise any choice or control over their lives after 2015.
Is it really conceivable, for instance, that cash-strapped local authorities, whose budgets are already being hit by other Government spending cuts, will be in a position to meet the higher costs of care and support packages?
The ILF makes up around fifty per cent of Martyn Sibley’s care package. For eight years it has enabled him to employ personal assistants so he can do things like turn over in the night, dress, cook, clean his flat and socialise with his friends.
Not surprisingly, he’s “scared” that the abolition of the ILF will take away his independence and his career.
As he told Disability Now: “The crux of the matter is if I can’t find anyone to do my care for the amount of money in the coffers. I’d have to give up my job and move back home and rely on friends and family instead.”
As another user of the fund, Sian Vasey, puts it: “If you need help with getting up, going to bed and preparing and eating food, you have to be able to pay people. Very few disabled people have people who can do that work for nothing; it’s ongoing and regular labour that’s needed.”
Sian is also Director of the Ealing Centre for Independent Living (ECIL), and says that her local council in west London will see a 28 per cent reduction in funding from the Government. But it’s making cuts worth 35 per cent to social services which, as she points out, suggests that the services which disabled people rely on are being targeted by the council to make further local savings.
“It’s a complete and absolute disaster. If it isn’t replaced like for like it’ll take the lives of disabled people back to the days when nobody had any support and you ended up in a Leonard Cheshire home.”
Maria Miller says that safeguarding the position of existing recipients of the ILF is a priority.
Following the publication of a report into the funding of the social care system later this year, the Government will carry out a formal consultation, which will inform decisions on determining how best to continue to support existing users of the ILF into a social care system based on the principles of personalised budgets.
