Having discovered recently that the Care Act and its Guidance have superseded all previous legislation and guidance on Direct Payments (you live and learn), I was interested to see the following article in Community Care online, which deserves a wide audience.

Whilst technically a ‘Q&A’ session, the article by Belinda Schwehr considered the ‘big questions’ about Direct Payments, around entitlement and access:

Please read it in full if you have the time and are at all interested or involved with direct payments.

Here is an extract:

Is a Direct Payment a legal right or a matter of discretion?

“A council can refuse a direct payment if it does not wish to provide one, as long as it has legally defensible reasons – which it has to share, so as to enable a person to address them, if they choose.

The local authority must make direct payments if the conditions set out in the Care Act and its direct payments regulations are met – but since two of the conditions allow for much difference of professional judgement, on the same facts, one would never safely call it ‘a right’.

Apart from the basic question of capacity to request one, and the question of whether the person is formally prohibited from receiving a direct payment, there are two obvious aspects of residual control by the council over the ‘right’ to a direct payment. Both are woolly: one is capability to manage the payment, with whatever help is available, and the second is the question of the appropriateness of paying the money to the user or to their nominee, as a means of meeting the needs.

So it is sensible to accept that the authority has to be satisfied with one’s nominee, at the very least, in a general way, before a person can say that they have a right to a direct payment…”

Photo: Gary Brigden