Ten - Right time, right place? The experiences of rough sleepers and practitioners in the receipt and delivery of personalised budgets

Summary

Introduction

This chapter outlines one way in which personalisation has been implemented within the field of homelessness within the United Kingdom (UK). The chapter draws on research findings from a longitudinal study, which evaluated the delivery of an approach to allocate ‘individual budgets’ to people experiencing homelessness. The chapter outlines the effectiveness of the approach both in terms of outcomes for those who participated as recipients and its operationalisation by workers. The chapter makes a number of central points. First, individual budgets, as described here, can be a particularly effective tool in reducing the length of time homelessness is experienced. Second, how such budgets are delivered is as important as the budget themselves. The skill of workers to work in innovative and creative ways is crucial to their success. Finally, there are inspiring findings arising which point to the pragmatic yet frugal approach by rough sleepers towards the use of individual budgets.

The ‘personalisation turn’ in health and social care policy within the UK appears to have had two main drivers. First, it is a coping response by services seeking to adapt to the economic austerity measures introduced by the coalition government. Second, it is an ideological shift in the way policies influencing the commissioning and delivery of health and social care services were formulated. However, a shift to new ways of working and a movement towards more targeted services was no doubt hastened by an economic necessity largely as a result of the ending of the ring fence around the Supporting People Programme and the subsequent overall reduction in funding available for adult social care. As McCabe (2012) highlighted, many services, as early as 2012, were experiencing the same or higher caseload but with fewer staff available to meet the need. This has meant that organisations have had to prove their costeffectiveness to funders, particularly the government, by focusing on ensuring the ‘recovery’ (that is, reintegration into the labour market) of clients (Scullion et al, 2015).

An apparent consequence of this is that those people with the most complex needs were also the ones finding it less easy to access support due to the challenging nature of their cases for already overstretched workers (Cornes et al, 2015). At the same time an ideological shift to the discourse of personalisation has been gaining momentum.