Stamford Initiative

The Stamford Forum Initiative on Funding for People with Learning Disabilities

“A Manifesto for Change”

“We have to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity to develop creative solutions- things cannot stay the same any longer. We cannot have’ long term peace of mind’”

The Stamford Forum alongside five local authorities has been working since December 2007 to:

Try to discover the short, medium and long term trends that are affecting services for people with learning disabilities and how these are being addressed by local authorities and their partners.
Look at the implications of these trends on current policies and practices.
Try to explore the best way to manage the provider market.
Look at the governance arrangements and organisational/cultural change issues that will need to be tackled in any new framework that might be adopted.
To try to formulate approaches and recommendations that might possibly be adopted on a nation wide basis.

Forum members have set out below what we believe is a radical manifesto for change in services for people with learning disabilities. This has grown out of concerns of SF members and others, that major and very complex challenges to existing and future services are emerging. It is also written in explicit response to the publication of the Government’s Valuing People Now update in December 2007

Summary of Recommendations:

§ Recommendation 1: The current national vision is not good enough. A debate needs to take place about the scope and range of our alternative vision together with and on behalf of all people with learning disability.

§ Recommendation 2: Government should ensure compliance with outcome targets on employment, housing and health for people with learning disabilities; to be met by local authorities and their partners on a compulsory basis through the LAA/PSA mechanism.

§ Recommendation 3: There should be new funding partnerships between children’s’ and adults’ service focusing on transitions and budget transfers.

§ Recommendation 4: Issues for young people with learning disabilities should form part of all local authorities’ 14-19 strategies.

§ Recommendation 5: All authorities should be required to maintain a robust (up to date) information base. This would embrace an inter-agency database that would give clear information about the needs of, and services provided to, people with a learning disability (including those who do not meet eligibility criteria and self-funders), to respond to the strategic direction on personalisation and well-being.

§ This would enable partner organisations to plan for new models of service provision.

§ Recommendation 6: Partnership Boards should have goals and targets covering participation in communities.

§ Recommendation 7: People with learning disabilities should become more engaged with local democracy/politics. Any barriers preventing people with learning disabilities becoming involved in local democracy/politics should be removed

§ Recommendation 8: Learning Disability Partnership Boards must be held more firmly to account for their work both strategically and locally based.

§ Recommendation 9: Assessment of Local Strategic Partnerships should include measurement against LDPB’s progress and effectiveness.

§ Recommendation 10: Different approaches to brokerage accreditation should be explored.

§ Recommendation 11: (re)Training social workers to carry out their new functions will be as important as establishing balanced forms of local brokerage. We want to see each local authority develop its own effective training and development programme.

§ Recommendation 12: There should be national guidance on brokerage costs.

§ Recommendation 13: There needs to be explicit clarification about the relationships between regulated and non regulated services.

§ Recommendation 14: A debate needs to take place about (the existing and) potential new powers that local authorities could have to de-accredit potential providers whether these are brokers or service delivery agencies

§ Recommendation 15: All Adult Social Care Departments should be required to set out their plans on how extending the personalisation agenda is going to be achieved. These should form part of their external inspection regimes.

§ Recommendation 16: LD partnerships should focus on the key issues of improved opportunities of things to do during the day, improved housing opportunities and increased (and real) training opportunities. They should develop an outward not an inward focus. The targets for these should be real and challenging and form part of the PSA/LAA.

§ Recommendation 17: We consider there is an urgent need to address the inherent difficulties of applying continuing care funding under the current regulations to learning disability. (An alternative would be ring fencing of these resources and transfer into local authorities through Section 75 pooled arrangements).

§ Recommendation 18: The FACs process needs to be reviewed quickly to respond to the strategic direction on personalisation and well-being

§ Recommendation 19: All local authorities should be required to draw up a provider market development strategy. This would form part of their annual assessment with Government.

§ Recommendation 20: The Valuing People Support Team should seek to influence Treasury and the Department of Health to ensure that the campus closure programme does not promote situations that will conflict with or adversely affect the development of new provider market arrangements.

Further developments

Ritchard Brazil & Phil Woods have launched a new initiative “ Combining Personalisation with Community Empowerment” on the 23rd June at The Royal Society of Medicine following up on their “ A New Social Contract…” paper.

Read the full document