Learning Disability Coalition
Green Paper Consultation
The Government are currently preparing a Green Paper on adult social care. It will define the treatment of people with learning disabilities for a generation. They have set up a website that allows you to respond to let them know what you think.
Visit the consultation website
They have divided the response form into three sections. You can tell them what you think of:
- who should carry what element of responsibility
- what the rules should be about who receives social care
We have identified the following key issues that we believe the Government urgently needs to focus on (do feel free to use these in your response, and to reword them as you like!)
So far, the Government has focused its thinking too narrowly on older people. The big issue for older people is the extent to which individuals should contribute towards the cost of their own care. Many (although certainly not all) older people do possess the means to contribute towards their own care. However, people with a learning disability very rarely have enough money to do this. The Government must ensure that when it creates the new social care system, it is not one which works for older people but not for people with learning disabilities.
Packages of support for people with a learning disability are for life. In contrast, most users of social care services, including older people, only use services for a comparatively short amount of time. Therefore, the Government needs to recognise that packages of care for people with learning disabilities need to cover all aspects of their lives, including employment, further education and the transition from childhood to adulthood. Again, if the Government focuses on older people, it will end up creating a system that is unsuitable for people with learning disabilities.