It’s not just the embarrassing and the difficult that will be buried underneath the Wills ‘n’ Kate coverage tomorrow – some
good news will be too. Among it is the coalition’s plan to expand the provision of personal budgets.
According to the Lib Dem health minister Paul Burstow, speaking today, some one million elderly people will be given control of their own personal care budgets, up from 250,000 now.
As I’ve suggested before, this is a worthwhile idea. Personal budgets promise to be one of the most concrete elements of what the Tories used to call their Post-Bureaucratic Age agenda, but has now been stuck with the Big Society label. The idea is that – instead funding a one-size-doesn’t-fit-all* care system administered by local authorities – a budget should be given directly to care patients, so they can spend it on a range of services from charities and private health companies.
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