Your Choice Barnet - The silent losers

By Linda Edwards,

The Barnet Eye published a blog on Monday, concerning Your Choice Barnet. This says everything except about  people with learning disabilities who are forced to  trudge the streets in all weathers, walk aimlessly up and down the isles of Supermarkets,  and made to travel to different town shopping centres   all under the guise of "being in the community". These are the silent 'losers' who cannot speak up for themselves and won't be heard, unless we shout out for them.

This exchange appeared on a forum. Says it all really

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Hi there

Can anyone help ? If an adult has been assessed as having critical support needs, what needs to happen for a Local Authority to change that?

I am hearing reports of a LA which is re assessing people from critical to severe, because they say the family are providing support, so the individual's needs are not critical.

Is there some new ruling that has just come out, because the families concerned are providing the same amount of support they always were?
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Response
From: Anon Carer

I don't have a straight answer to your question but this is so outragous!

The categorisation of needs - i.e. critical, severe, etc - is completely and absolutely about the service-user/person-with-needs REGARDLESS of who then meets those needs whether that is family, friend, neighbour or a paid service provider. I don't know whether it is legally binding but this definition is definitely in the Community Care Adult Service's declared policy guidelines.

Seems your LA are attempting to downgrade needs and thereby support they are obliged to provide or facilitate.

I have known our LA to argue that someone was mis-categorised before and the person in need of support is actually more capable of being independent than previously assessed but I have never heard of any case where the needs remain the same but family support means someone is in effect less disabled.
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This is what happens when budgets are cut. This is how such organisations implement budget cuts by stealth.