'Personal budget' care switch sends council costs soaring

3:03pm Wednesday 13th March 2013 in News Exclusive By Leigh Marles

'Personal budget' care switch sends council costs soaring 'Personal budget' care switch sends council costs soaring

A controversial switch which put vulnerable people in charge of their own "personal budgets" is contributing to a £10m overspend in Wirral Department for Adult Social Services.

A major shake-up by the Government in 2010 in how councils paid for social care was designed in part to cut costs and reduce bureaucracy while "allowing people to have more choice."

But instead, in many cases in Wirral, it has been found to have cost the council more cash.

The problem lies in how personal budgets are calculated.

Experts use a "pounds per point" method to work out how much each person should have in their personal budget to pay for their care packages.

But unfortunately research shows the calculation often bears little resemblance to how much a service-user actually spends.

The evaluation also highlighted "significant variations" between user groups, with older people spending on average only 76% of their budget while adults with learning disabilities are spending 153%.

A report by DASS director Graham Hodkinson to tonight's health and well-being overview committee says: "It is evident adjustments need to be made to improve the effectiveness of the current method of allocating resources while ensuring the right balance between affordability and meeting service-user needs."

He said the current arrangements "are clearly unsatisfactory" because there is a poor correlation between the personal budgets actually awarded and the calculated budgets.

"The value of budgets exceeds available resources and this is a significant factor in the forecast DASS overspend of £10.2m in 2012-13," he said.

The director warns that failure to establish a "sustainable and robust" approach to the allocation of resources would leave the authority open to legal challenge and unable to implement appropriate budgetary control.

Comments(17)

PaulCa says...
3:52pm Wed 13 Mar 13

"Sustainable and Robust".

Everything this department and wider council are NOT... nor will they ever be.....

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PeteSheff says...
4:12pm Wed 13 Mar 13

It could reflect a fairer way of assessing eligibility to services and the large amount of people previously sidelined for services who are now getting them.

Sustainable and Robust.. maybe it should be lawful and fair as a good starting point. Preferably without delaying tactics.

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djrimmer says...
4:53pm Wed 13 Mar 13

In my experience of personal budgets the packages offered did not cover the cost of the existing services supplied by the council so why exactly has the council costs escalated ?

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WirralAl says...
8:49pm Wed 13 Mar 13

Positive thinker wrote:
Paulaca has got a hell of a chip on her shoulder
If you had a brain you might know why.

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Hugo1008 says...
9:41pm Wed 13 Mar 13

How the hell do you use the word positive in your tag line, every time you put finger to the keys it comes out pure drivel and anything but positive.

I also think you spelled the rest of your name wrong.

Try negative w"i"nker, with the "a" in the right place.

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Jimrob says...
10:08pm Wed 13 Mar 13

"is contributing to a £10m overspend in Wirral Department for Adult Social Services"

Yet more Council doublespeak.

Let's canalize the quote from the already discredited (see 4 week Delay Scandal) Mr Hodkinson shall we?

There has been, YET AGAIN!!!! an overspend within the Department for Adult Social Services. They cannot do what they did last year and simply change budget headings and take it from a budget meant for other things.

So...........

Typically for WBC they have decided to blame the Service Users....

"significant variations" between user groups, with older people spending on average only 76% of their budget while adults with learning disabilities are spending 153%."

When I went to school I was taught that there was NO more than 100%. But that's by the by, shouldn't expect these Council workers to know such things as basic Maths. For if they did, they wouldn't overspend my millions every year, would they now?

So back to the analysis of the statement in question.

There has been an overspend of more than £10million in one year at DASS (quite impressive, even for you Mr Hodkinson) But the reasons listed above are only "contributing" to the overspend, so the questions that should now be asked are....

a) What proportion of the £10.2million overspend is down to the "personal budgets"

b) What proportion (to the nearest £million, give or take a senior officer pay-off) is down to pure mis-management, waste and NON Independent Reports?

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PaulCa says...
10:52pm Wed 13 Mar 13

The message they're keen to get across is that an idea, foisted on them by central government.... isn't working.

Now, let's leave it that. Don't ask too many questions about figures, overspends or whose fault it is.

If we now "move forward" with this in mind, it links in well with blaming the current central government coalition for everything that's now going t1ts up on Wirral.

It's absolutely nothing to do with decades of incompetence, greed, abuse, blaming those on the opposite side of the chamber and the bleeding of the public purse for their own benefit.

Let's just stick to that.

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Mary Adair says...
9:18am Thu 14 Mar 13

Positive thinker wrote:
Wirralanul ain't happy
Grow up you pathetic snivelling waste of space. You add the sum total of ZERO to these discussions.

These are important issues, I have an elderly parent with terminal cancer and if you think that that people commenting on the abject failure of Wirral Council to ensure vulnerable people are afforded dignity care and respect is something to sneer at then you really are as moronic and crass as you appear to be.

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RL 1952 says...
4:34pm Thu 14 Mar 13

DASS and its incompetent director at the forefront of yet another unbelieveable failure and the service users are to blame - £10million overspend that is wholly unacceptable and shows an inexcuseable level of incompetence.
The bizarre fact is the CEO appointed 3 super directors to oversee the Councils working but you still have a Director of adult social services spectacularly failing the frail elderly and vulnerable (sadly no change there).
When will positive and dare I say effective steps be taklen to address the wholesale failures within DASS - why are the CEO and super directors and council leaders unwilling to address these unbelieveable failures.

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Whitby says...
12:01pm Fri 15 Mar 13

When are WBC employees going to enter the real world.They are overpaid which would be excusable if they did their jobs properly but report after report indicates total carelessness or downright inability with the reward being promotion or a hefty lump sum to depart.In any other walk of life a £10 million overspend would mean the immediate sack of the person responsible because they should have been aware of the situation long before that figure was reached.There seems to bea merry go round between many councills where "executives" make a mess of their job,get a large payoff and then reappear doing a similar job in another councill.What is wrong about employing local people with normal skills - you do not need "super" directors to supervice an overspend.....what is the point,they are never going to listen.

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Flannigan says...
4:05pm Fri 15 Mar 13

There are complex resaons the Council overspends on social care. For a start Wirral has more elderly and ill people than other areas. The NHS also fails to support seriously ill people with Continuing Care Funding, so more costs fall on the Council. Trying to adjust personal budgets isn't going to help. Sadly what is going to happen is that more people will be denied services and more will go into care homes, which will cost the Council even more. Personal budgets are very difficult for some people to manage thats probably why some elderley people underspend, so taking money off the old to shift money elsewhere isn't going to help as their needs still exist. Whatever DASS does needs to be done with transparency.

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MX says...
5:25pm Fri 15 Mar 13

Transparency is an alien concept.
I understand that the system for personal budgets was described as " inpenetrable", "incomprehensible", "complex" ,"not fit for purpose" and "not equitable".
How on earth did it get approved in the first place?.
But then when a committee member says "lets park that one" when it comes to a difficult question what hope is there?.

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savemoretoncentre says...
10:48pm Wed 20 Mar 13

Just what you want to hear when Wirral Council announced their 'preferred' option to close down Moreton Centre for 133 special needs adults!

So much for Graham Hodkinson telling us about students wanting to be in more control with a personal budget!

More info can be found here
www.facebook.com/sav
emoretoncentre

Online petition https://www.change.o
rg/en-GB/petitions/w
irral-borough-counci
l-stop-the-closure-o
f-moreton-day-centre
-for-adults-with-spe
cial-needs

Please support us

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shelaghT says...
5:44pm Fri 22 Mar 13

Mr Hodgkinson makes it sound like young disabled people are given a pot of money, which they can go out and waste, so overspend, but the elderly are far more conservative therefore spend less.

I can assure everybody this is not the case at all.

Budgets are only allocated to those people with substantial or critical needs, therefore if they do not receive help and support they would die or come to serious harm.

Budgets are supposed to be very carefully worked out, enabling the recipent to receive just the right amount of care for their needs.

A person cannot spend the budget on anything other than has been approved by panel.

However, at first, having been assessed a person will be offered an indicative amount, this is where the problem lies, because the indicative amount worked out by the point system mentioned, bares little in relation to the actual cost.

I can give an example, for somebody who cannot do anyhing at all for themselves, who has double incontinence and can be very aggressive and has no communication, therefore requires round the clock care by at least 2 people at all times : Indicative budget £17,000 per year but the actual care costs while being cared for full time by the family (parents) and receiving 40 nights per year in a suitable respite centre, with 11 hrs per week being taken into the community by 2 paid care staff and 4 hrs one evening by a single sitter (who will not change nappies or do any personal care, just babysit) costs £45,000!

That leaves the parents of an adult (or the family who care) caring, unpaid, exhausted and isolated for 139 hours per week! (the eqivalent of 5 full time workers (because the person requires constant 2:1 care!)

It is time the council got it's head around the fact that if every unpaid carer gave up and said "I have had it! No more!" then the council would be faced with bills of £3 - 400,000 per year to care for someone like this.

Also the carers are supposed to receive a budget to help care for themselves. Carers get very little financial help and indeed are kept poor by the governments own policies.

The carers budget has been hard fought for however Wirral will not fulfil it's obligation to carers, and has chosen to hit them the hardest by reducing the carers budget to nothing or giving it in such a way it cannot be used. eg allocating man,who cares full time for his adult, severely disabled daughter, a carers budget in the form of a voucher for a hairdressers appointment, when he would have prefered a deep muscle massage!

I would like to remind Graham Hodgkinson, disabled people are just that :PEOPLE, they are not numbers, or faceless and their carers SAVE this council millions, by giving their time and love for free.

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unbeleivable says...
8:34am Sat 23 Mar 13

This council spends to much on management fees to agencies, they should stop the agency fees and do the jobs themselves inhouse. I have heard that one company charge the council in the region of £140 per service user per week just to set up a care plan and tick cqc boxes.I wouldn't call that value for money.

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statictom says...
11:12am Sun 24 Mar 13

This department is one of the worst in the country - FACT. The CQC report slated them for their incompetence.
They started awarding personal budgets a number of years ago, then it slowed right down. Along came the Care Quality commission and forced them to get on with it and insisted they reach at least 40% on Budgets by April 2012. They had to buy in Social Workers from other parts of the country to meet these targets, at a great expense. Once they reached the figure, they virtually stopped. We now have no more budgets for at least 2 years as there is no money left.
This department wanted to give out a budget of a max £328 a week. They then wanted to charge £70 per day to go to a day centre. 5 Days would cost £350 - so the budget would not meet the needs of someone wanting 5 days at a centre. That`s before any other costs are taken into consideration. They now wonder why they are overspent?.
Could not organise a **** up in a brewery. They wonder why social care is in such a mess. They close a day centre then wonder where they are all going to go.

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shelaghT says...
8:51pm Sun 24 Mar 13

statictom wrote:
This department is one of the worst in the country - FACT. The CQC report slated them for their incompetence.
They started awarding personal budgets a number of years ago, then it slowed right down. Along came the Care Quality commission and forced them to get on with it and insisted they reach at least 40% on Budgets by April 2012. They had to buy in Social Workers from other parts of the country to meet these targets, at a great expense. Once they reached the figure, they virtually stopped. We now have no more budgets for at least 2 years as there is no money left.
This department wanted to give out a budget of a max £328 a week. They then wanted to charge £70 per day to go to a day centre. 5 Days would cost £350 - so the budget would not meet the needs of someone wanting 5 days at a centre. That`s before any other costs are taken into consideration. They now wonder why they are overspent?.
Could not organise a **** up in a brewery. They wonder why social care is in such a mess. They close a day centre then wonder where they are all going to go.
You are so right! It is absolutely ridiculous, because the indicative amount remains the same, and has frightened the parents and carers of those in transition now. I was told that the indicative figure was the amount a person could go up to but did not necessarily have to!

As you can see by the figure I quoted, my son's need required considerably more, but I had to fight the system by myself. It nearly killed me, and now I am having to start over because of the review and some changing circumstances, making his needs even greater than before.

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