Introduction

There are important changes taking place in the way adult social care services are planned and purchased. The Government’s drive towards ‘personalised’ support has included the piloting of “Individual Budgets”, which give people who use social care services more choice and control over the support they receive and how it is delivered - by giving more flexibility in deciding how the money available to support them will be spent.

We think this presents tremendous challenges - and some potential opportunities - for voluntary sector providers.

MACC recently circulated a discussion paper about Self-Directed Support and Individual Budgets, highlighting some of the implications for provider organisations - it's available on the "Manchester Updates" page (see the menu to the right).

There is very little information available as yet about how a wide-scale introduction of self-directed support will work in practice, so MACC is seeking to encourage the local voluntary and community sector to get together to look at this in more detail . We want to get voluntary sector groups together to think about what it means for them. This will then lead to a discussion with the Local Authority about how we can work together to make sure that voluntary sector organisations are able to offer the kinds of support service users want. We don’t have all the answers, but it’s important that we start considering the changes ahead.

To help keep you informed we've set up this small section of our site

• Further information - useful links to other sites locally and nationally
  
• Manchester updates - news from MACC about our work on this topic in Manchester
  
• Resources - tools and sources of support for your organisation in preparing for personalisation (currently in development).
  

We'll be updating these pages regularly over the coming months as this agenda develops.