Over the last two months we've had very productive meetings with John Lennon (Chief Officer at Leeds City Council) and Councillor Lucinda Yeadon (Leeds Adult Social Care Chief). Whilst we wanted to get them both in the same room at the same time, we were able to split our questions between them over our October and November meetings.

A number of personal situations were discussed to highlight the problems that we believe that there are within Adult Social Care provision and Direct Payments/Personal Budgets. In spite of the overall budget "maintaining its current levels despite budget cutbacks", the group highlighted that rather than moving from a rigid model of covering basic or critical needs through a Direct Payment to the supposedly more flexible Personal Budgets model, we in fact seem to be moving the other way.

Much as we should be moving away from the medical to the social model of disability, care packages are being cut back to the nth degree to cover critical needs only. This is less prevalent in cases where 24 hour care is required, but in situations where only 10-20 hours care or 3 nights cover per week are needed, the answer is often coming back, "Well, how do you manage the rest of the time?".

We acknowledge that this isn't always true, there are many who have their ideal care packages. However, a successful outcome of your care package is too often dependent on two lotteries; the Council of where you live and the Social Worker in charge of your case. The system is too open to interpretation of the individual (Social Worker), who are drowned in even more paperwork than before as part of the Personal Budgets system (a fact acknowledged by ADASS).

Unless ASC is radically overhauled, our group is struggling to reconcile how we can continue to promote Personal Budgets if there are continued cases (including our own) where many individuals are often left in a worse situation. The system itself is out of date, slow to respond and inflexible to the ever changing and increasingly complex demands of service users. Social Workers are too concerned with covering an individual's "average day", hard enough for anyone to describe even at the best of times. It should be reorientated to focus on covering a person's needs during their worst day, a more cost effective method than relying on any form of (considerably more expensive) emergency care.

We weren't expecting both guests to simply agree, scrap the whole system and start again from scratch, but both John and Lucinda were willing to take examples of our own situations and look into them further. It is only this way that the system can learn and improve overall on a case by case basis. Both would like to keep more in touch with the group and jointly attend meetings throughout the year on a regular basis. This can benefit both ways, they can feedback on service developments and we can hold them to account on any discussion points and whether agreed action has been taken or not.

We hope that this will launch our group into the New Year with a focussed approach to what we do, and hopefully more positive results! In the meantime we hope you have a great Christmas and New Year!

See you in 2012.