Many local authorities are now slashing and burning their way through vital community services, leaving highly vulnerable people without essential support. Thanks to Keith Cooper and the Guardian Housing Network for inspiring yet another sleepless polemic, mostly aimed at 'Dave'
It’s not often I start a post with a big, fat, steaming turd of a lie, but let’s do it anyway. I offer my apologies to all turds for the comparison. They really don’t deserve it:
But ‘spending’ and ‘cuts’ were never far from the spiel either, Cameron’s point being that whatever they had to do to reverse the public sector overspend of the previous mob, it’s okay. Vulnerable people wouldn’t suffer. "A Conservative government will always look after you."
Supporting People cuts leave housing sector unable to help most vulnerable
It’s not often I start a post with a big, fat, steaming turd of a lie, but let’s do it anyway. I offer my apologies to all turds for the comparison. They really don’t deserve it:
"And I want to say to British people clearly and frankly this; if you are elderly, if you are frail, if you are poor, if you are needy, a Conservative government will always look after you" David Cameron: 4th May 2010
 |
| Courtesy of The Guardian |
But ‘spending’ and ‘cuts’ were never far from the spiel either, Cameron’s point being that whatever they had to do to reverse the public sector overspend of the previous mob, it’s okay. Vulnerable people wouldn’t suffer. "A Conservative government will always look after you."
The awful truth of what is happening to community care has been slapping me in the face like a wet fish ever since the grinning Dave and Nick garden party at No.10 way back in May last year. I earn a living running courses for social care staff up and down the UK, and I notice things. I notice how much less cheerful are the delegates who come to my courses. Is it my crap jokes? Have people really become homicidal at the mere sight of a Powerpoint slide? Well, probably yes, but this hasn’t been the reason for the pervasive gloom in my training rooms.
The fact is, I’m working with large groups of people who are not only attending the last course they’ll ever get under the previous training budget, but more seriously are facing the prospect of reapplying for their own jobs, or being handed a P45 and a note of thanks 'for all their valuable service'.
These aren’t the bureaucrats and middle-managers with incomprehensible titles and Mickey Mouse job descriptions. These are front-line, face-to-face support workers who do the often gutty work of helping people who really can’t get on in life without the help of that Warden, Carer or Support Worker who helps out with anything from benefit claims to suicide prevention.
But sometimes something is so blindingly, dazzlingly obvious that it never really hits home until you see it in black and white. On paper or on a laptop screen, the effect is the same. And yesterday, thanks to The Guardians Housing Network, I read the confirmation of all that I’ve been hearing these last sixteen months:
 |
| Courtesy of The Guardian: Author Keith Cooper 22.8.11 |
Now I can certainly help you understand why a 17-year old service user stubs out fag butts on his arm or help you devise a risk assessment and management strategy for your supported housing service, but mention ‘ring fencing’ or ‘local housing allowance’ and I’m likely to look at you as if you’re spouting the combined works of Stephen Hawking in Mandarin Chinese. But I do know a little about Supporting People, the programme of funding established specifically to provide community support for vulnerable people.
People whose lives are shattered by mental illness, drugs, alcohol, homelessness or often a bit of each. Ex-offenders, people with learning disabilities or the frail elderly are also the very folk supported by Supporting People, usually with the invaluable provision of four walls and a roof, and a regular visit of one of those front-line, face-to-face support workers.
Supporting People (SP) is a fund distributed to local authorities to spend on housing and support provision for vulnerable people. The providers may be in-house local authority staff, but are more likely to be independent providers or charities who receive a portion of the local SP pot every year to help those who really can’t get by without support. The Guardian report highlights the massive re-allocation by some (not all) local authorities of SP budgets away from their original targets and into … well, I don’t know what, but it certainly isn’t going to be spent on providing sheltered accommodation and a warden for 80-year old Doris, or helping Gary get his life back on track after a 5-year jail term.
David Cameron and Housing Minister Grant Shapps will undoubtedly argue that their government have barely touched SP funding (true), and it’s those nasty councils who’ve pulled the rug right from under the already unsteady feet of the vulnerable. But this sounds to me like Hitler blaming the Holocaust on a few SS officers who got a bit over enthused with the gas tap.
People whose lives are shattered by mental illness, drugs, alcohol, homelessness or often a bit of each. Ex-offenders, people with learning disabilities or the frail elderly are also the very folk supported by Supporting People, usually with the invaluable provision of four walls and a roof, and a regular visit of one of those front-line, face-to-face support workers.
Supporting People (SP) is a fund distributed to local authorities to spend on housing and support provision for vulnerable people. The providers may be in-house local authority staff, but are more likely to be independent providers or charities who receive a portion of the local SP pot every year to help those who really can’t get by without support. The Guardian report highlights the massive re-allocation by some (not all) local authorities of SP budgets away from their original targets and into … well, I don’t know what, but it certainly isn’t going to be spent on providing sheltered accommodation and a warden for 80-year old Doris, or helping Gary get his life back on track after a 5-year jail term.
David Cameron and Housing Minister Grant Shapps will undoubtedly argue that their government have barely touched SP funding (true), and it’s those nasty councils who’ve pulled the rug right from under the already unsteady feet of the vulnerable. But this sounds to me like Hitler blaming the Holocaust on a few SS officers who got a bit over enthused with the gas tap.
But back to my real world - the training room, where I spend coffee breaks and lunchtimes staring disbelievingly at yet another support worker telling me “Yes, Connor, this is a very useful course, but to be honest I’ll be stacking shelves in Tesco in six months so there won’t be much call for your insights on Dual Diagnosis.”
And I ask, rather fearfully, what will happen to the twenty or so clients on their caseload when they’ve chopped the staff allocation in half? “Don’t know. Haven’t a clue” is invariably the answer, but neither of us needs a crystal ball to imagine the misery, the mayhem, the reversal of fortunes and the undoing of what often amounts to years of hard work by a support worker who, whether at the end of a phone or the end of a sofa, is quite possibly turning lives around and staving off inevitable chaos.
I often use a technique called Mind Mapping to help staff think about the work they’ve done, often for a particularly difficult or vulnerable client. There are inspiring success stories, the odd dismal failure, but more often the seemingly humdrum case of a service user encouraged to reduce their intake of White Lightning from four litres a day to two.
I ask the support worker a simple question: “Where would this tenant be if it weren’t for your support and a roof over their head?” The answer is usually death, prison, homelessness or very long spells detained in a psychiatric unit.
I often use a technique called Mind Mapping to help staff think about the work they’ve done, often for a particularly difficult or vulnerable client. There are inspiring success stories, the odd dismal failure, but more often the seemingly humdrum case of a service user encouraged to reduce their intake of White Lightning from four litres a day to two.
I ask the support worker a simple question: “Where would this tenant be if it weren’t for your support and a roof over their head?” The answer is usually death, prison, homelessness or very long spells detained in a psychiatric unit.
With rapidly diminishing training budgets and fewer and fewer people left to do training with, I don’t expect to be asking these questions for very much longer, or to be talking job security over coffee and biscuits. But if I were, I’d expect the answers to feature less and less inspiration and more and more White Lightning.
Thanks for that, Dave.
I'm afriad what I've witnessed over the last few months is turning me into a Tory - hand the money over to the private sector. I'm a die hard public sector supporter however I've seen protectionist attitudes that merely protects the top ranking managers within local authorities; bullying tactics via value for money teams and an agenda that is far from person centred support. The system is in chaos and we need people that understand support not box tickers that cover their own backs, who consult with service users on a tokenistic basis. We need people who give a shit and I can't say I've come across many of them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for those comments Anon. I particularly like your parting shot - sounds like a good blog title in itself! I totally agree with your observations on the public sector. As a former NHS employee (20+ years) I saw the rampant creation of a management culture which saw the proliferation of highly paid 'non-jobs' and the decimation of front line services. A large part of my reason for going freelance and leaving a job I'd really enjoyed as a Secure Unit Ward Manager was the increasing amount of ridiculous paperwork demanded by people in suits, and the proliferation of pointless meetings which served little purpose other than to fill the diaries of those same suits who needed a raison d'etre to justify a 40 hour week.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the private sector fares little better in terms of 'giving a shit', as we have seen all too clearly with Castlebeck and Southern Cross as the higher profile examples.
I darent go on as I'll start waxing lyrical about 'the good old days' of health and social services, but perhaps there is a lot to be learnt from a system that existed without the buzz words and yet promoted client-centred care and health/social services integration far better than now, and seemed (to my dim memory at least) to be led by coal face workers supported (not led) by administrators, bean counters, and people with meaningless job titles.
As someone soon to be 'exiting stage left chased by a bear' due to 1) Health puling out of providing learning disability services 2) "My" service closing, supposedly temporarily and 3) there being no place for LD Nurses like me anymore 'cos we're anachronistic and, worst of all, expensive, it's becoming a time of (cynical) reflection on my part.
ReplyDeleteI would and still will, bang the drum for the NHS, but there undeniable faults with it. As you say 'coal face workers' are no longer supported by the departments set up to facilitate their work. We are no longer there to provide care and support as our primary role, we are not there to put people first, we are there to be "corporate", we are there to do the bidding of HR, the Training Dept., Infection Control, Finance Dept., etc.
A quote "the problem with you nurses is that you're not corporate enough, you are too controlled by the 'duty of care' and not enough by the bigger picture."
Having said all that, I would still prefer that any/all 'care services' were NHS or Social Care than private. Profit shouldn't find its way into care provision; "competition" doesn't make things better, it makes firms lower their quotes rather than raise their quality.
"As a former NHS employee (20+ years) I saw the rampant creation of a management culture which saw the proliferation of highly paid 'non-jobs' and the decimation of front line services."
ReplyDeleteThat's the problem and why, I think, you're mildly unfair on the government. Few people will disagree that there are too many people employed doing unnecessary "work" in middle management and administration, so cuts ought to be made to bring the costs of public services down. The problem is targeting the cuts at the non-jobs. I don't believe Cameron wants front-line workers like the ones you train to be cut any more than you do.
Is it right that the non-jobs be preserved (and indeed proliferate) in order to ensure that the real jobs in the front line are saved? Better to find ways to be more aggressive against the non-essential. The difficulty is that the decisions end up being taken by the managers and administrators who ought to be first in the queue at the Job Centre.
A lot of these changes may be going under the radar. I'm a physically disabled client living in Scotland where Supporting People used to pay for the Warden in my sheltered housing scheme. We're simply being de-sheltered, and reclassified as amenity housing with a building manager replacing a warden and all the usual talk of 'personalisation' of care provision (instead of telling the whole group of tenants there's no money for our care, we get to be told individually - yay!) I suspect this is not a one-off and have deep reservations about changing to a 'faux' warden whose responsibility is to the building and not the people.
ReplyDeleteYou know from my perspective at least, the perception that there are lots more admin or managerial staff than are needed is somewhat at odds with the reality. Certainly cuts could be found and I agree, rather from there than from frontline staff, however, the NHS is a huge organisation and needs a hell of a lot non-clinical support and management, rather that than clinical/support staff are taken to far away from their primary roles. The more significant problem, again from my perspective, is that the balance of importance, "power" even has gone from those in direct care to those supposedly supporting that.
ReplyDeleteI liked the concept of SP but for me as a mentally ill person it didn't work. I was offered trips outside the house (no support indoors, meet them at the destination). I had a series of four assessments with different people, the last of whom poked around my flat checking the electricty wiring and plugs (and admitted that she had no relevant training or knowledge) then asked absurd questions like whether I had an equal opps policy. I cannot begin to imagine what makes a bureaucrat in an office somewhere design an assessment process that expects a severely mentally ill person to outline their equal opps policy and insists on sending an unqualified person in to examine their wiring before taking them out of the house.
ReplyDeleteWe need good schemes, but where I live, this was not one of them.