Direct Payments is not a universal panacea

Local authorities and social workers enthusiastically sell the benefits of direct payments. Direct payments (DPs) allow disabled people to buy in their own care and support. This can be accomplished through engaging an agency to carry out the care and support. Or the service user could employ their own personal assistants.

Social workers generally use the following three points to sell DPs to disabled people:

Flexibility: However, flexibility is not a universal panacea. First of all, define flexibility. When you try, you come up against the test of reasonableness. So, flexibility has to be negotiated. This negotiation can mean the DP user having to make big compromises with their PAs.

Choice: Yet, like so many things in life choice usually comes with a price tag attached. Therefore, the parameters of choice are governed by good old-fashioned economics.

Control: Arguably this should be the greatest advantage of DPs. Yet as with other determining factors such as flexibility and choice, control is heavily influenced by exterior forces.

The two factors that can make DPs an advantageous way of buying in care and support are:

1.    Adequate means to support your needs, and

2.    An ability to properly manage PAs.

Until care and support packages can offer adequate budgets and proper training funding to DP users, this means of caring and supporting disabled people will remain as care on the cheap.

There is also a downside for the PAs who deliver the care and support. This group of undervalued workers have usually to:

• Work several jobs to make up a weekly wage,
• Work unsociable hours, often without proper recompense,
• Go without a decent pension scheme,
• Go without an occupational sick pay scene,
• Come out to clients at unsociable hours.