"You Need to Treat People as People": Craftivism and Chat Group respond to LGA green paper on adult social care and wellbeing

 

In September, the Merton CIL Craftivism and Chat group got together to respond to the Local Government Association (LGA) green paper on adult social care and wellbeing. The group's response was one of 500 responses sent to the LGA. The LGA says

"what shines through most in the full range of responses is the level of passion for supporting and improving people’s wellbeing and the role social care and other linked services can, and should, play in enabling people to live the lives they want to lead."

We're pleased that feedback from Merton CIL's consultation response is quoted in the final LGA green paper, and some of the key findings reflected our own experiences locally. The LGA green paper says: 

"People’s needs are not being met, services are being withdrawn, quality is deteriorating, improvement is stalling and in some cases is in reverse, the ability to prevent the need for social care in the first place is rapidly being lost, providers are unable to stay afloat and unpaid carers and the care workforce are being put under impossible and unbearable pressure.

At the most important level, the implications are being felt most acutely by people. People who are “sad”, “lonely” and living “undignified” lives. People whose lives have now, in the view of one respondent to our consultation, “been put at risk”."

This reflects what we found in our recent report into social care locally in Merton and we were particularly interested in recommendation one from the LGA which was:

"The Government should convene a core working group from across the sector, with people with lived experience at its heart, to develop a national campaign that seeks to raise awareness of what adult social care and support is, why it matters in its own right and what it could and should be with the right funding and investment. This should be genuinely co-produced, with Government acting as a convenor."

This was interesting because many of the recommendations from our report where to focus on co-production locally, and in fact, this is one of the key things which came out of the discussion panel at Merton CIL's Future of Social Care event.

 

You can read the full green paper here: https://futureofadultsocialcare.co.uk/the-green-paper/  

You can read our social care report here: https://www.mertoncil.org.uk/news/choice-control-and-independen/ 

You can read more about our response to the LGA green paper here: https://www.mertoncil.org.uk/news/press-release-the-lives-we-wa/