Introduction
When we complete your care and support plan, the things we agree to help you with are worked out as a weekly amount of money. This is called your personal budget. There are several ways you can choose to manage your personal budget. You can:
- Receive it as a payment into a bank account, set up especially for the purpose. This is so you can arrange and pay for your own care and support. This is called a Direct Payment.
- Have a Direct Payment and ask someone you trust to manage it for you. They must be willing to do this.
- Ask our independent advisory service to manage your Direct Payment for you.
- Ask us to manage it for you. This is called a Local Authority Managed budget, there will be less choice with this option.
- Choose a mixture of the points mentioned above.
How your personal budget is calculated
When we talk about what you want to do and how you plan to do it, we will first look at the people close to you, like your family and friends. Then, we will see if there are any community groups that can help you. If there are still things you need help with, we might agree to help pay for them.
We start by setting a budget based on what it usually costs to help people with similar needs. This helps us to work with you on your individual care and support plan.
Using this budget, we will work together to write a detailed plan that shows exactly what you need and how much it will cost. This may be more or less than the initial amount.
We will also talk about your finances to see how much you can contribute to your budget. The final combined figure is your personal budget.
Policy and The Care Act
We do not have a strict policy for what the maximum level of funding will be, but we have a decision-making process that considers all requests for a personal budget. This checks that all possible options have been explored to meet a person’s eligible needs based on their own facts. And that the Council is getting the best value. We follow the guidance below from the Care Act 2014 to do this.
In determining how to meet needs, the local authority may also take into reasonable consideration its own finances and budgetary position and must comply with its related public duties. This includes the importance of ensuring that the funding available to the local authority is sufficient to meet the needs of the entire local population.
However, the local authority should not set arbitrary upper limits on cost it is willing to pay to meet needs through certain routes.
The authority may take decisions on a case-by-case basis which weigh up the total costs of different potential options for meeting needs and include the cost as a relevant factor in deciding between alternative options for meeting needs. This does not mean choosing the cheapest option; but the one which delivers the outcomes desired for the best value.
Unused budget
Most people have occasions when they do not use the full amount of budget. For example, when they are away for a few days or have family staying who can do these tasks instead. We will agree with you on what to do with any unused budget.
If you have been assessed to have short breaks, the costs of these are different to your normal weekly cost and these will be worked out and shown separately.
We will send you your personal budget statement which will show:
- your personal budget
- your contribution towards your personal budget and how we worked this out
- our contribution and how we worked this out
