This is the year that social care must start to change and it is indeed changing. The sector needs to be more honest with its priorities and that rightly or wrongly, social care is for the most part moving away from supporting individuals directly and towards supporting informal carers to support individual due to basic economic reasons.


The ideology of independent living is not being delivered to the extend people are changing and while many personal budgets are in the name of individuals but I believe are in reality supporting families to exist without interference and therefore potentially reinforcing dependency. People need firstly be honest about this, and secondly decide how the sector should pursue genuine independent living.


I fear the white paper due out in the Spring will not provide many answers and it will certainly will not go far enough to make the changes needed in social care.