The impact of the Supporting People review
Bill Clark, Director of Social Work Services, West Dunbartonshire Council
Steve Robertson, Member of the Board, People First Scotland
The session began with a clarion call for support providers and local authorities to begin the campaign to preserve the funding for Supporting People ahead of the comprehensive funding review.
Supporting People providers fear a further round of cuts and closures if the government reduces funding to the programme. Past budget cuts have already forced West Dunbartonshire to make brutal cuts to services and Bill Clark expects the current review to force more difficult decisions and more harsh cuts.
He continued that Supporting People had successfully separated support from housing tenure and had placed people and need at the centre of support. The initial 'gold-rush' to identify support and 'maximise the pot' also had the benefit of making the scale of support required very visible.
Despite successive cuts and onerous audits he still believes that Supporting People has been nothing short of wonderful for West Dunbartonshire. The Council has been able to fund extra social work posts and over 350 new posts with support providers. This has led to twice as many people receiving services in some areas including: elderly people, elderly people that need intensive support, women and children that have suffered domestic violence and people with learning difficulties. The funding has resulted in 400 additional places for homeless people.
Steve Robertson then talked about the importance of Supporting People funding to People First Scotland; an organisation ran for and by people with learning difficulties. He explained that without the funding they would not have been able to house and support the large number of people with learning difficulties throughout the North-East.
He also talked about his role in the task force used to assess the impact of successive funding cuts on the 'Same as You' agenda. The task force found that reduced funding had forced local authorities to more strictly define the services that can be funded by Supporting People. They found that this had resulted in cuts to 'peripheral' services and that new services were unlikely to receive funding.
The session concluded by the speakers demanding that the review should take account of all services that are provided in an area regardless of the provider or the source of funding. They agreed that only this would protect actual services the people in most need and identify the best and most cost effective way of delivering these services.