© British Association of Social Workers
Reconciling Cash and Care: Home Care Charges and Benefit Checks in Social Services
Pete Alcock is Professor of Social Policy at Sheffield Hallam University
Gary Vaux is Head of the Money Advice Unit, Hertfordshire County Council. Both are members of the Editorial Board of Benefits: a Journal of Social Security Research, Policy and Practice.
Correspondence to Pete Alcock, Health and Community Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, Collegiate Cresent, Sheffield S10 2BP
Summary
This article contains the report of a small research project on the development of welfare rights checks for home care clients in social services departments. Welfare rights take-up activity has become an important feature of provision by local authority social services departments, frequently targeted on particular groups of clients known to experience problems in claiming full benefit entitlement. Users of home care services are such a client group. Take-up work with home care clients is also, however, a product of the impact of community care policy changes and of financial pressures on local authority social services. These have resulted in the introduction of charges for home care services by many authorities, and the use of rebates from such charges to protect low income service users. Welfare rights work has thus become an important feature of the reconciliation of these new charging policies with the continued service needs of poor home care clients. The research examined a successful take-up initiative, linked to home care charges, in Sheffield and contrasted this with similar activities in other authorities throughout the UK. The conclusion is reached that levels of non-take-up of social security benefits are particularly low amongst home care clients and that benefit checks can secure significant additional income for them, which may also have the indirect effect of increasing the income to social services departments from the charges for home care services.
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