Clare Evans obituary

 Sadly Clare Evans died on 10 November 2018.

Read her obituary in the paper: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/03/clare-evans-obituary

How Self Funders have Been Treated So Far!

How self funders have been treated so far!

So all our hopes for the ‘cap’ have gone now that it has been announced that it will not be implemented. I refer to the ‘cap’ which was our hope, as self funders, for an official, legal cap on the amount of funding we had to pay for social care so that we could all plan for the future and make sure we had enough funding for our needs before we could expect the state to take over. Of course we are in a privileged position to have sufficient to be able to pay for our own care and can’t expect the sympathy that people with no funding are entitled to when they cannot get the support they need on a day to day basis. However, it is just another example of how the social care system is not being comprehensively planned with everyone’s needs in mind and many of us don’t have an infinite amount to spend.

First, it was enshrined in the Care Act 2014 legislation that a cap would be introduced in April 2017 with the limit set and it seemed like just another part of the legislation to be implemented in time. However as time went on there were rumblings that the social care agenda was now so overwhelming there would be no social workers with time to do the initial assessments necessary to have a clear understanding of spending on need up to the cap. Without such an exercise there was no benchmark from which to begin measuring the cap and expenditure of each self funder. We were quietly told the ‘cap’s’ implementation would be delayed.

Then, earlier in the year, we had the debacle of the ‘dementia tax’ leading up to the last election. This was so confused in the way it was reported that it was not clear that the ‘cap’ would be abolished along with the Tory’s plans. It became a party political issue but somewhere in the mix was the idea of the original cap and the chance of a limit for individuals who are self funders on social care spending even if there was not the clarity of thought of the earlier legislation.

To add to the irony, self funders of residential care are finding they are subsidising the residential fee rates of those paid for by local councils because of the constraints on local authority expenditure and their failure to raise their rates for care home places in line with costs. What justification is there for this? Self funders are paying higher fees for care home places as local authorities will not increase the payment of fees in line with increased costs to care home owners!

Now the ‘cap’ has been abandoned for good and quietly dropped because of the insufficiency of social workers for that initial assessment. So there has been a false trail for those of us trying to plan long term social care needs costs! And we are left with the worry and uncertainty of knowing if our saved funding will be enough for all our long term care.  Meanwhile, we have all been left with the offer of a social care advisory paper which may or may not mention the ‘cap’. Our only hope is that Andrew Dilnott, who designed the original ‘cap’ policy, is to be one of the advisory committee members. 

Clare Evans MBE, Disability Equality and Social Care Consultant

Joining together to press for larger loos with hoists

In composing the title I realise how boring this blog will be, but sometimes the most boring things affect us most! This issue has been an inconvenience for years and it's good to know that a national campaign is coordinating pressure for this on the internet and gives us a chance to contribute to solutions.
http://www.changing-places.org/ is a website sponsored by Mencap to promote fully accessible loos with lots of space and equipment, like hoists, for those of us not able to transfer without aids. On the website you can look for such loos by geographical area and also have a chance to alert fellow users to ones not already listed. This site is a great help when planning a day out somewhere new in order to find out when you can make a loo break.  There's a regular email newsletter too with opportunities to contribute to the website map.
Mind you, those updating the website can't be held responsible for the whole experience! For instance, we were excited to find there was a Changing Places loo at Cribbs Causeway in Bristol as we had previously struggled with an inadequately sized one there. However the map was unclear about the exact location and we struggled to find the room for a good 20 minutes as it was off the main thoroughfare and staff at Cribbs weren't in the know. Then when we did find it, the room was so full of clutter, I could hardly get my powered wheelchair and small hoist in there! However solutions were found at high speed and all was well!
Of course there are not nearly enough yet of Changing Places toilets to solve our problem and give us an equal chance of a good day out, but the need becomes more urgent as local authorities take the austerity route and close their public toilets across the country- usually the ones built to a high specification and building regulations!
Make the Changing Places website a regular visiting place!

The demise of Tourist Information Centres - online information no substitute for local knowledge

Have you noticed how completely Tourist Information Centres have disappeared from the High Streets of our cities and seaside resorts in recent years?

I understand this is because of local authority cuts since they have previously funded them and also the trend to put more information online.

How has this affected disabled people particularly you may ask? For us the local TICs were the first port of call when we went to visit a new place – the staff could tell you about accessible accommodation, accessible places to visit and often had leaflets produced by local disabled people’s organisations about other local accessible places to visit such as cafes etc. In addition the staff in TICs often took great pride in hunting down information about access for you and of course always knew where the accessible parking and loos were.

We are told the answer is to go online but it’s not quite as simple as this. Firstly, when you type in obvious headings for Google you can find several variations of a theme because local businesses etc have had the idea of a website to publicise their own particular attractions but not in a universal format. Once you have selected the appropriate site you find it doesn’t work like those sites belonging to TICs previously because there is no one to staff them so accommodation is harder to book and information like accessible leaflets is not available in hard copies.  Also many disabled people may not have access to the internet easily so can’t connect and explore. Sometimes one gets a throwback to TIC access from the occasional site which is a real thrill – last Summer I requested by email some information about access and found an enthusiastic council worker who was keen to help me directly despite not being in a TIC!

For hard copy, we now only have stands of leaflets with everything mixed up to show small commercial attractions with the odd National Trust site mentioned. How can one select from that literature, with varying amounts of access information, where you should go on a short visit to the area? Often it is the unmentioned hidden garden or small car park which shows you the best place to visit. Finally of course, gone are the reasonable locally produced goodies previously sold by TICs for the presents to take home! Now one must search local shops to make a selection.

So life won’t end because of the demise of TICs but just a little bit of the quality of life as a tourist in the UK has decreased for some of us through these changes!

Social care at the election: not just a dementia tax

It’s not often that social care policy grabs the national headlines and even less often when it grows from the details of a political party manifesto.

It’s interesting therefore to see, on an issue directly affecting one’s personal circumstances, how the news coverage feels and reflects the situation one is in, although celebrating its headline status.

First, why was it ever dubbed the ‘dementia tax’ when there are many of us with long term physical conditions affected by the policy?

The cost of paying for intensive care support at home is just as likely to affect working disabled people as their conditions deteriorate.

Another difficulty has been the politicians' justification of the term ‘wealthy’ to describe those people with houses worth more than £100,000 when this does not cover the cost of a house in most parts of the country. I’m not sure if these were politicians with duck houses worth most of that!

Finally it seems to belittle the situation one is in and the planning one has done to cover the social care costs in preparation for retirement. For example I have been planning for this eventuality for 25 years since it became obvious it would be a reality if my long term family carer was no longer able or willing to provide support.

I estimate, as a person with social work qualifications, that it would cost £75,000 a year to meet my 24 hour care costs. How can we prepare for such eventualities without family wealth to draw on?

Since they started in the 90’s I have always saved and not drawn on the annual ISA tax free allowance. In addition a dozen years of a fairly generous money purchase pension topped up with voluntary contributions has become more flexible with recent pension legislation. So I have chosen to keep this as a lump sum and rely instead, for my current living costs, on the state pension and DLA.

Of course what we all, who are in this situation, need is a ‘cap’ on expenditure on care costs so that we don’t fear living beyond our resources. This will also I understand allow social care insurance to have viable options. Sir Andrew Dilnot, whose interparty social care commission previously had the ‘social care cap’ agreed and enshrined in the 2015 Care Act, has offered sound advice in recent days. He encourages us to keep up the pressure on this issue until after the election so that it can be proposed in the newly promised government green paper and become a policy proposal for implementation this time.

Vote disability

It’s not so long ago and certainly within the lifetime of many of us as disabled people that polling booths in the UK were not universally accessible and it wasn’t seen as a problem.

I remember a village near here which used a caravan as a polling booth and no one wondered how we should get into it!

Now society understands the principle of disabled people’s rights and so it is easy to challenge if physical access has been forgotten.

Now it is possible to get easy read manifestos and guidance on voting  to enable people with learning difficulties to participate easily.

There are still disabled people who choose to go to the polling station to continue to make the point about our entitlement to vote with the rest of society. I confess to having moved to a postal vote myself as this has become a more mainstream way of voting and it all works smoothly for me. This time I noticed you could apply for a signature waiver if needed and as I have difficulty signing now I have asked for this option. It was quite straightforward to apply via email, telephone or the council website so hopefully it will be ready for me by the general election.

Some disabled people may want to be more politically active around election time and Disability Rights UK have suggested the following questions are in our interests to ask election candidates:-
1. Are you committed to the rights of disabled people to participate fully in society?

•    In practice, if elected, would you work with disabled people and our organisations on an action plan, with short and longer-term goals, to ensure the UK meets its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? See https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2017/january/disabled-people-tell-un-committee-uk-failing-international-rights-convention for the top issues where the UK must make progress

•    Do you support our rights to independent living, accessible transport, education, employment and public life?

•    Will you work to ensure our rights are protected and developed post Brexit?

 2. Will you change the way the benefits system works for disabled people?

•    Are you committed to replacing the Work Capability Assessment and sanctions regime for disabled people claiming benefits?

•    Are you committed to no further benefit cuts affecting disabled people in the next Parliament?

 3. Are you committed to a health and social care system that enables disabled people to lead full, independent lives?

•    Will you work to stop the rise in compulsory detention and forced treatment of people with mental health issues or learning disabilities?

•    Will you work to phase out restraint and seclusion?

•    Will you work for a social care funding solution that offers all disabled people more choice and control in our lives?

•    What are you going to do about the amount we have to pay in social care charges?

And of course extra support must go to those disabled people who choose to stand as candidates despite the extra barriers of all kinds they face in contributing in this way.

It’s not easy to see a positive way ahead at present but it’s still important to use your vote!
Clare Evans MBE



This is the first of regular short blogs (450 words ish) on topical issues relevant to us as disabled people.

25 years of user involvement- how much has it changed things?

In November 2016, Wiltshire and Swindon Users Network reached its 25th anniversary. 


It was the first user involvement group locally, and became the leading democratically elected generic users’ network at the time, formed in response to the 1991 NHS and Community Care Act.  This Act recognised, for the first time enshrined in legislation, the value of involving users and carers in the planning of Community Care. It grew to be a network of several hundred disabled people of differing perspectives, conditions and experiences, willing to give their views to improve services.  This continues to exist countywide today.

Of course, there had been organisations of disabled people emerging in other places from the new social movement for some years but such specific ‘user involvement’ networks were particularly targeted at long term users of health and social care. As such it attracted much interest from policy makers and researchers- the requests for conference speaking and exemplar book chapters seemed endless and we hosted seminars called the ‘Wiltshire Experience’ for fellow groups of users across the country inviting a single professional locally to add their experience! Has the model had a lasting effect on the landscape of community care?


From the start it was about developing the ‘art of the possible’ techniques without compromising our position, to bring about change to better meet users’ needs. We developed three catch phrases to describe the techniques we found to be most effective.
‘From Bobble Hats to Red Jackets’ described the journey we, as service users, needed to go on to recognise ourselves changing from ignorant outsiders (in tatty bobble hats) to empowered participants with valuable expertise and the red jacketed uniform of professionals. The red jackets my colleague and I wore for the official launch of Community Care in April 1993 gave voice to this feeling of personal empowerment and acceptance by professionals. The change in their attitude as they learned to treat us as equal voices was noticeable.


‘Riddling the system’ was a powerful way of describing our technique of negotiating to have service users’ voices heard at all levels of planning service delivery and strategy. Tentative, usually new to the network, user voices concerned with an initiative would meet safely together in a group of their own with a facilitator and all costs paid to explore their needs. Their collated comments would be taken to a more strategic planning level by user representatives and we also expected to work with elected members to explain the issues for users. In this way everyone was informed of the issues for users and users felt their views had been taken forward in a democratic way to bring the change they needed. I once calculated the Network was involved in giving their views in social care in 64 different ways! This phrase became so well known that one of our principal allies, the Director of Social Service, Dr Ray Jones, reported that he felt ‘well and truly riddled’!


Finally it became obvious that ‘working with allies’ in the system was the most effective way of bringing about change. ‘Allies’ were individuals at all levels of the system who understood the need for users’ views to be heard if services were to become user-led. Their understanding and willingness to go the ‘extra mile’ to ensure users’ views were brought to decision makers’ attention was crucial to our voices being taken seriously.

So, did anything change? It was of course much more difficult than we had imagined- we were after all trying to change a culture of “professional knows best”. Short term however, there were successes, which affected some people’s experience of services. For example, professionals spoke of having “light bulb” moments; we co-produced “Wilf”, the 3rd party cash payment scheme set up in 1993 before direct payments became legal; and voicing older people’s need for a nail cutting service for months eventually led to the setting up of a scheme which overcame health and safety objections.

Is it indulgent to think that service users’ voices are now seen as part of the community care landscape? – The effects of austerity and attitudes to marginalised citizens mean we must always be on our guard.

Clare Evans MBE was the first Director of Wiltshire and Swindon Users network 1991- 1997

SCIE - Co-production – the Wiltshire perspective