With some of our partner organisations, we wrote an open letter last week to Care Minister Norman Lamb MP, urging him to act on the recent Cabinet Office review of choice in public services, which recommended that people should be free to spend personal budgets as they see fit so long as they meet broad outcomes, with the removal of ‘preferred provider lists’ and other traditional commissioning approaches which hamper start-ups, micro-enterprises and other innovators from competing with bigger, more established providers. There’s no point in having control of the money if there’s nothing new or different to buy with it. As reported in Community Care, we warned that without these ‘supply side’ reforms, the risk of personalisation failing in its own terms is high.
A great illustration of the problem is in this Guardian article about how council procurement processes left one social entrepreneur literally starving (at least around lunchtime!) due to their inabiility to renew a contract in a timely fashion. When the basics are so wrong, having an impressive virtual online marketplace for providers and a marketing programme to encourage people to take personal budgets will fall flat.
Our report on Ten ways to stop bashing -and start boosting – micro-enterprise shows how councils can learn from the best work of their peers and get this right, so that we can ‘Make Personalisation Real’, not just another box-ticking exercise.
Escaping the invisible asylum 