Think of this: a plan to ‘warehouse’ disabled people.

[SerendipityJane]

maybe just send them to Rwanda ? Out of sight, out of mind etc ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/25/warehouse-disabled-people-bristol-city-council

I think the term ‘warehouse’ is unfortunate. In my view, every effort should be made to be provide the care and support that is appropriate to each individual within the confines of the budgets available.

Budgets are a choice though, not something that has been established ut if nowhere and we have no control over.
The way it’s working is that you first decide what your priorities are and then set budgets. Not the utter way around.

Eg this government has decided that inheritance tax is important so it has given it a really nice budget - in billions.
It could have decided instead to spend it in social care. Or doctors. Or education.
It also has decided that spending billions on barges, the Rwanda stuff etc was wise. It could have made a different choice.

Saying ‘we don’t have the money and have no choice’ is completely missing the point.
The money is there if you want. It’s a choice. And for now the choice is to say that social care, the elderly and the disabled are simply not important enough. But IT IS A CHOICE

Government money is funded by tax payers, and it's currently massively underfunded. As tax payers we have to either streamline services or dig quite a lot deeper and increase personal tax.

Or, here's a thought. Maybe the government could stop making the very richest richer and richer? Then there would be money to spend on vulnerable people with out people on average salaries or reasonably high salaries having to pay even more??

"The person with ME that needs silence? Nope. They have to be out in the common room with everyone else."

This terrifies me.

This is an extremely complex topic, similar to those such as which life extending drugs should be funded or not.

It boils down to one thing, our beliefs as a society and how we justify them but it gets translated into MONEY.

Society as a whole can't grasp well enough how things are organised and spent, it's just too complicated for most of us ( myself included) to really get to grips with it so we try to simplify things and end up with not a true picture .I can't say for sure how much money as a society we spend on certain things, so there's no way for me to know what I would agree or not agree on. I imagine that a large part of money is spent on self serving interests of those in charge, but again, I don't know the specifics. I say a "large part" but if there's no limit then god only knows!😆

Speaking as someone with a disabled family member in a home type facility I can see why someone like the man in the article would not want this, but saying all places are like old people's homes where autonomy is reduced to zero is also not entirely correct.

It's obvious that you would ideally want "the best" for everyone, so that everyone could fulfil their potential and live their best life, but life and society doesn't work that way. It especially doesn't work that way when to have one thing we rely on the choices of others to enable this to happen.
When it comes to care work we are essentially relying on a part of society to look after another part, and that costs money, and because we are now talking numbers and not in terms of a perceived basic standard of living, people find it difficult to agree on what's morally right.

If we ask someone if it's acceptable to be able as an individual to choose when to do basic things, we'd all say yes. However often if you see how much it costs to pay to enable this, then people will start saying no.
I personally think that's because we think that we have finite amount of money and if we spend on something we automatically have less on something else. We find it hard to accept that some individuals get 100s of thousands spent on them,to improve their lives, yet others seemingly don't.
It creates division in society and puts people against each other.

I personally don't know what the answer is, but I would say that if you ever feel a part of society is getting more than you, or more than they "should", a quick game of "would you swap lives with them?" can help to put things in perspective.

Me too 😢😢

This is extremely complex, I work in this field and understand how much some of these packages cost when you take in to account housing benefits, packages of care and housing benefits. There must be a point where the cost of some just becomes prohibitive, there must be equality of care.

There isn't an endless pot of money and if person 1's package costs 150k a year and there's not enough money for person 2 to receive care how is that fair?

Some people get the care they deserve from family and paid carers, some people get stuck in toxic family situations or receive substandard care from domestic care agencies. The gent in the article is living a good quality life in the community, but many don't.

So we cut person 1s care package and they end up as an inpatient in a privately owned hospital costing the NHS £15k a week??

Cutting budgets has costs. For people with learning disabilities these costs have included numerous deaths due to poor care & abuse due to poor care as well and increased costs to the NHS. For decades policy has been that disabled people are supported to live an ordinary life. Chucking them in institutions is not really an ordinary life.

Not everyone will end up as an inpatient though

So glad to read this. Can’t help thinking if some of the money sloshing around government could be given to families / service users, then better solutions could be found rather than unimaginative solutions and cruel policies.

A friend has an aquired brain injury, for a time he was living in a care home. While he was in that care home he was left in his room for around 20 hours a day, he had pressure sores that led him to have three different stays in HDU, he lost so much weight that on his last hospital admission there were concerns about refeeding syndrome. He was washed once a week. He wasn’t allowed any visitors before 10am or after 4pm, and he wasn’t allowed more than two visitors at a time.

How is that not a bad thing at all?

Ffs has Hitler been reborn? And how come no one asked anyone disabled what their concerns would be. It’s not very progressive thinking and it’s time to go back to basics and ask where the money really is going. Do the MPs (half a bunch of narcs and the other half psychos ) really need two houses, constant expenses for everything and taxis to all these ridiculous places they go and call it research? I think it’s high time we started looking upwards instead of to the floor. Not easy I know when they’re trying to nail you in the coffin before your anywhere near dead. Yeah think I will watch The great Dictator tonight.

For awhile when I became disabled I was on disability benefits. Being placed in a care home may have meant that I was unable to undertake the retraining I did so that I could re enter the workforce and become a higher rate taxpayer.

Would that really have put the government in a better position, paying out from my mid 30s for the rest of my life for me to be in a care home, and missing out on the tax they now gain from me being a higher rate taxpayer?

Whilst you on the other hand have spoken on previous threads about being on a lower income. Now your idea of a lower income might not actually be low, but if it is then who are you to decide that disabled people cost too much if you are one of those getting back more than you pay in tax?

Yet you think it's okay to casually decide that placing me in a care home "wouldn't have been a bad thing at all"... Despite the fact there is every chance that you actually cost the tax payer more than me...

Perhaps we should just house low income families in large residential homes where the cost of housing, utilities and food etc could be cheaper. I'm sure you wouldn't mind being forced into one, and having very little choice over what you can do, if it saves money. Sounds like it wouldn't be a bad thing at all...

Think many in here need to educate themselves; especially the op, it would appear, who seems to have gone back under their rock. I’ve done it for you, read this: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/uncrpdguide_0.pdf especially article 19, for relevance to this thread.

This government wants to get rid, but they haven’t managed it yet and won’t be allowed to. Hopefully the balance is with the people who believe in things like the UN, dignity, equality, compassion, empathy etc, although I can see a time we really do go down the darker path. Maybe Orwell and Huxley were right. Depressing!

Wish we had a ‘like’ button, btw! So many excellent posts.

Agree. The whole system needs to change.

@dimllaishebiaith It's because I have a large disabled family, it's genetic. I have worked with disabled people for 8 years. I completely understand how much care costs for severely disabled people. It would be nice to have a safe place for them, especially when family cannot always be there. It would also improve quality of life for the family members, who have to care.

Many children end up as automatic carers like I was, and still am today. It's a massive burden on a child. I like how people are talking about disabled people's rights, but no consideration is given to the family based carers.

Nobody has to be a carer. Plenty of people have no family like me. The system is designed to still support people. You are free to walk away any time. Sounds like you need to. Disabled people have no options that’s why they need rights.

Even if I had family there is no way I would want them to be my carer purely because I wouldn’t want them to be as miserable as you. Granted as a child you had no option to refuse.

What's being suggested will force more family members to be carers not less

When there is no option for paid carers in the home then families are left with only two options, care themselves or put a loved one in a facility, when we know that many of those facilities are not providing a decent level of care. Calling them a safe place is laughable

Some people will feel forced into becoming carers to their family members to avoid that option, where as now there is the option of paid care in the home

But none of this actually addresses any of the points I made in the post you are responding to anyway

I think the posters on this thread (and others like them) are completely ignoring the demographic pressures that are coming down the road. Now while this is great for the planet, and I wouldn't want birth rates in increase, by the timing of my birth, I'm likely to be at the sharp end of this myself and their just won't be the young people to provide care. If you want an example, look at South Korea, many other countries are not far behind.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_South_Korea

@Kendodd I work for a local authority I know full well what's coming. This is not the right direction. Direct payments, so disabled people can use money to employ carers that they choose, or buy adaptive technology or pay for help around the home should be the way forward. This is overly restrictive.

Well then make the country a more attractive place to have children

People shouldn't be forced to have children if they don't want to but we are hardly at a place where its encouraging for them to have them if they do want to

Spiralling costs of living competing with spirally costs of childcare. Abortion rates shot up massively after the 2 child benefit cap, drop that and birth rates might bounce back up. Stop rules that are financially hostile to single parents.

But institutionalising disabled people because "it's better for the planet and its cheaper" is a pretty grim viewpoint. And its hardly going to make people more likely to have children when they know the only option if they have a child with disabilities is that the child is going to be taken off them and locked away for the rest of their life at some point

Which is the exact reason why we all need to be proactive.
The number of disabled people is increasing. And we do nothing.

Instead we should be pushing for a better NHS/Heath system, clean air, fighting poverty (because if it’s link with health and disability). We should be supporting schemes helping people eat better (which starts with knowing how to do that, having the kitchen tools to do it and ofc healthy food available - see cost).
And yes the population growing older will be even more pressure on the system. It doesn’t mean we should just throw our arms in the air and give up. And consider that anyone who is disabled should just be farmed in such a facility. But instead we should ensure those people can carry on being active members of the society - like the man in the article - so it relieves the burden put onto younger generations.

I don't think trying to increase birth rates is a good thing though. It's not just human beings on the planet and ultimately, reducing our numbers is for the best, at least that's what I think. I also realise this will create problems for us. In that we just won't have carers available. If I'm lucky enough to live to an old age, I expect I will die at home, alone, when I can no longer look after myself. Frankly, I don't think this is the worse thing in the world for everyone. I also realise that it's not the same for disabled people who might die through lack of carers. I will have lived a long full life (if lucky enough to reach old age) disabled people, might have a long full life lost to them without carers. I don't know the solution, l think perhaps, there just isn't one. It's a challenge people seem to be just ignoring though.

If we ask someone if it's acceptable to be able as an individual to choose when to do basic things, we'd all say yes. However often if you see how much it costs to pay to enable this, then people will start saying no

Only complete and utter 🤬🤬🤬 would think it is OK to take away a disabled person's autonomy because of cost and say "no".

God this thread is depressing. I honestly thought people in general were mostly a little bit more enlightened these days. But it seems not.