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Eleanor Roosevelt, 1958

'Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person... Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.' Eleanor Roosevelt, 1958

The Small Places has moved...

The Small Places has moved to a new home here, including all the old posts. Any posts after 6th March 2014 will appear on the new website, but old posts are preserved here so that URLs linking here continue to work. Please check out the new site.

Thursday 17 January 2013

ESA SOS!

The government are pushing through more changes to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), this time through regulations.  I hope Sue Marsh doesn't mind, but I'm going to copy and paste her excellent explanation of the problems with these changes:
Although these changes have been advertised as small ‘amendments’, they will in fact have a huge impact on the way people’s illnesses and disabilities are assessed. Many vulnerable people’s needs will suddenly be able to be overlooked or ignored, meaning they could end up losing the support they desperately need to manage their conditions.

PROBLEM 1: FALSE ASSUMPTIONS

Wednesday 9 January 2013

Care refusal - a public law puzzle

Imagine a situation arises that a person, let’s call him Albert, has growing care needs, and the local authority (having assessed those needs) feels that the only way that all his eligible community care needs can be met is through a placement in a residential care home. There are variations on this situation. It might in theory be possible to support Albert through increasing his home care visits, through overnight support, but this would exceed the resources the local authority is willing to spend on Albert’s care, given that they can (in the authority’s view) be met by the (cheaper) care home placement. There are other variants – a person might be currently in the care home and wanting to return home. A young adult moving out of the family home might want to move into supported living (with their own tenancy) rather than a care home. All have in common two theoretical alternatives: a care home placement which meets all of a person's assessed eligible needs, and living in their own home with some unmet eligible needs.  Now supposing Albert does not want to live in a care home, he wants to live in his own home. What happens next?