Adult social care must abandon targets and deliver the spirit of personalisation

As the financial year draws to a close, Adult Social Care Departments are pulling together their activity data: counting assessments and reviews completed, packages of support put in place, and waiting times for these interventions.

Even though the Coalition has removed the requirement to report against some targets, those targets have not disappeared — they were built into plans at the start of the financial year. Officers and councillors still want to know whether they have been achieved.

One target requires that 30% of all people receiving packages of support (excluding those in care homes) receive that package as a Personal Budget. Personal Budgets are broadly considered a good development. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour all agree they represent the future of Adult Social Care, with an ambition for 100% uptake in time. So local authorities that have failed to reach 30% by 31 March have failed — right?

The methodologies for calculating performance are notoriously open to manipulation. Behind the scenes, officers swap notes about what they are counting, what they are excluding and what loopholes they have found. This behaviour was more understandable when targets were linked to financial rewards. With those rewards removed, the case for manipulation is much weaker.

A number of local authorities are nonetheless looking at how they can boost their final count of Personal Budgets in ways that fall short of the spirit of Personalisation — in some cases dubiously close to crossing auditable and ethical lines.

The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) anticipated this risk over a year ago, warning councils explicitly: 'Councils are therefore exhorted to avoid schemes to bolster personal budget numbers at the expense of the wider Putting People First agenda. This includes simply converting existing users' services to a monetary figure and sending correspondence to say that this amount is now their personal budget. Without changing processes and culture, establishing support services, developing markets and altering commissioning arrangements, it is highly unlikely that real choice and control and better outcomes will result.'

It is the Directors of Adult Social Care and their councillors who are accountable for making personalisation happen. If a department has genuinely achieved 30%, well done. If it has not reached 30% but is working to effect real change that transforms lives — while standing firm against schemes that dilute the principle — that commitment is equally worth recognising and defending.