What have Barnsley, Liverpool, Gwynedd and the Orkney Islands all got in common? Well their local authorities are among the best performers in the UK in promoting, claiming and winning Independent Living Fund (ILF) monies for people who have disabilities and / or long term conditions.
The ILF is a national organisation, funded by the Government, which works with local authorities to assess the needs of disabled people. To those people who meet its eligibility criteria, the ILF makes payments directly for use towards the cost of paying for personal care and domestic assistance, enabling individuals to live at home with choice and control over the assistance they receive. Average awards are around £200 per week.
Many Bury Adult Care Services staff have known for some time that we were missing a trick when it came to ILF. The annual number of new claims from Bury has stayed low (just 6 in 2006), and the total number of people in receipt of ILF places in the borough is now just 22, worth about £200K of additional funding for individualised services for this group of people – which might sound pretty good until you hear what others are achieving.
For example, if we managed to raise our performance to the level of Barnsley or the beautiful Orkney’s we would have 5 times as many people receiving ILF - about 110 service users receiving over a £1 million of extra income to pay for services to help them maintain their independence. Even this pales in comparison with what they achieve in some other authorities – if we could hit the heights of places such as West Dunbartonshire or Liverpool we would see about 11 times the current number – over 230 people would receive ILF which would bring in about £2.4 million per year into Bury. When you consider that the total budget of Adult Care Services is about £37 million, you will see that increasing ILF to the levels of these best performing councils would make a massive difference to our ability to plan and provide service
So what’s stopping us hitting these heights? Some recent training conducted by the ILF itself suggested there is in fact nothing to stop us here in Bury if we are determined and canny enough – and that’s why we are taking steps to put us into the top flight.
A Steering Group of frontline staff has been set up to advise senior managers how we can best support them in terms of additional information and expertise to raise the take up of ILF across the Borough. In turn a Project Group of managers led by me will ensure that those suggestions which are practicable are acted upon as soon as possible – and this will include establishing at least 1 specialist ILF post to act as focus for this work.
And remember the benefits of increasing ILF take up are not just limited to those who actually receive it for themselves. It also benefits Bury taxpayers, who see more of their income taxes returned into the Borough to pay for services for disabled people which otherwise would have to be funded by the local authority out of its Adult Social Care Budget. It also means that there is more money left for the Council to fund services for other potential and actual service users.
So in the weeks and months ahead, please consider in what ways you can help promote and support claims for ILF for those people you work with. We would encourage you to identify and speak to those people in your team who attended the ILF training in Sept, and ask them to pass on their more detailed knowledge to you at team meetings or on a one to one basis so that you can make sure you can offer the best possible advice to the vulnerable people of Bury.
Tony Pounder
Assistant Director
