Wigan Council “Do not operate individual budgets”. Formal complaint to Enable Scotland Council as their presentation is further exposed as highly misleading hyperbole.

DGPPG circulated the following relevant but hitherto unpublished information from Wigan Council on 27-Dec to involved Dumfries & Galloway Councillors and Officers, MSPs, MPs, media and carers.  As a complaint it requests and requires action by and answers from Enable Scotland and further comments on the Council position.  This information sets the Enable Scotland ‘Keynote presentation’ on 30-Nov at Easterbrook Hall into a truthful context and further exposes the highly misleading hyperbole surrounding both Enable Scotland and the Dumfries and Galloway Council presentation of the supposedly new idea of  ‘Personalisation’, which is now being used to justify closing the six Dumfries and Galloway Council ARCs   

The 15-Dec FoI request to Wigan Council was mentioned at the meeting of more than 25 carers with Mr John Alexander & Ms Heather Collington on Weds 16-Dec in Castle Douglas.  For the 24-Dec Galloway News verbatim press report of that meeting please use the following link:  

Council’s social work chief fails to rule out ARC closure

FORMAL COMPLAINT requiring action by:  Enable Scotland incl both Norman Dunning & Alex Russell of Castle Douglas.   In view of the Wigan Council response, please will you explain on the record how and why both Enable Scotland and your keynote speaker Ms Tomlinson at the 30-Nov conference explicitly stated that Wigan Council operated ‘individual budgets’ and that her son Joe Tomlinson was the first in the UK to get one.  This was claimed in the Enable promotional literature and the presentations, when those attending were unreasonably prevented from asking any questions from the floor in open session.  May we suggest that in any future presentations and literature the whole truth is fully and properly disclosed in context without exaggeration and hyperbole designed to market Enable Scotland, not actually benefit and help the learning disabled.   Please treat this as a further formal complaint to the Enable Scotland Council.

Background:  On 24-Dec  Mr Tim  Turner, Data Protection/FOI Officer Business Support Services for Wigan Council, wrote in reply to a FoI request 15-Dec:     I am emailing to respond to your FOI request.   We do not operate individual budgets.   Ms Tomlinson was involved in an early pilot scheme involving 13 families. The amount of funds allocated in the pilot scheme were determined using eligibility criteria under Fair Access to Care (with Wigan meeting Critical and Substantial needs only). Once the level of funding had been determined the cash was allocated to the individual via the Direct Payments scheme using Direct Payments policies and procedures

We do not therefore hold the information you are requesting as the only information we have is about this single pilot – any information we hold would be about a very limited number of individuals participating in a specific pilot. The Council is moving toward personal budgets, but they are not in operation in Wigan at the moment.” 

On 30-Nov there was no mention whatsoever that this was  a very limited “pilot”, now seemingly 6 years ago according to Ms Caroline Tomlinson, who proudly indicated during the lunch break that the largest Wigan Council ‘care package’ was more than £200,000pa in total value, with the clear implication this was for her son.  But even then she did not explain this was a “very limited … specific pilot scheme” for only 13 participating individuals, and the “cash was allocated” conventionally under well established ‘Direct Payments’ policies and procedures.  Being 6 years old this is hardly “new”, being a further example of the confusion caused by using ‘Personalisation’ as though it is a some wonderfully innovative and novel concept.  As far as many can determine it really is a case of ‘old wine in new bottles’, with this jargon term ‘personalisation’ being used to confuse, hide and obscure the real Council intentions of cost cutting, like the six ARC closures

To remind those who did not attend on 30-Nov, the Enable Scotland “Event Programme” schedule, hyped up as “A Brave New World for Social Care” read as follows:  

10:40 – 11:10am  Caroline Tomlinson is the mother of the first person to get an individual budget in the UK.  She will talk about how having choice and control made a difference to her son’s life.  She will talk about how he is doing six years on and share her experiences as a mother.

Her evangelical presentation went on for more than twice the scheduled time, being followed well after 12:00 by Judith Proctor, the second ‘Keynote Speaker’ scheduled as:

11:10 – 11:30am  Judith Proctor, Head of Strategic Planning, Commissioning and Performance at Dumfries and Galloway Council will talk about personalisation in a local context and explain the implications of Dumfries and Galloway being a test site for personalisation.  She will also talk about the Council’s future plans. 

Unfortunately and very surprisingly the one subject Ms Proctor wholly omitted to mention in any way, despite being the joint author of the 12-Oct Dumfries and Galloway Council and NHS Dumfries and Galloway Joint Futures ARC closure plan, was her planned intention to close the six Dumfries and Galloway ARCs, in the name of ‘personalisation’.  As reported above, this is now confirmed by her other co-author, Mr Alexander.  This deliberate failure to mention the ARC closures was despite the programme and promotional billing explicitly stating she would “talk about the Council’s future plans”, as Mr Alexander finally did on 16-Dec, but only to a limited number of carers who could attend in time with only 2 day’s notice.  We all look forward to the much bigger follow up meeting at the end of January, which is now being arranged.  This meeting is essential.  

The lack of information is why many carers present at Easterbrook Hall 30-Nov wanted to ask Ms Proctor and Enable questions from the floor, but Ms Proctor declined to do so and any such questions were then expressly barred and prohibited by Mr Dunning, Chief Executive of Enable Scotland.  This is despite the Enable Event being heavily promoted by Dumfries and Galloway Council via the ARCs as an opportunity for all service users and carers to be informed and educated about the “Brave New World of Social Care” and the changes and cutbacks of personalisati

This perhaps further explains why a carer was directly reported in the Galloway News as accusing Mr Alexander at the 16-Dec Castle Douglas meeting of being “evasive”.  (read the article using the above link) 

We look forward to a formal response from the Enable Scotland Council and shall be submitting a formal complaint about all of this to the Chief Executive of Dumfries and Galloway Council, under the new and revised independent procedure operating in 2010, as requested by the Care Commission.  In due course all will be published as a matter of public record on the DGPPG www site.  We hope this will soon include the outstanding and overdue requested D&G FoI responses for information about the 12-Oct plan and all the 2009 D&G Council activities under the heading of, “personalisation”.