Could disability allowances and attendance allowances really be scrapped and replaced by budgets spent by the local authority?
Yes! Warns Walsall councillor Pete Smith, and it will affect 24,000 people in his town alone. Attendance Allowances and even Disability Allowances face the possibility of being scrapped following the publication of a Government Green Paper. In Walsall approximately 8000 people are in receipt of Attendance Allowances and 16,000 people are in receipt of DLA (sources for figures: local.odpm.gov.uk/ and neighbourhood.statistics (Health & Care: Disability Living Allowance claimants 2002-8). A Government Green Paper entitled Shaping the Future of Care Together has revealed proposals to stop paying “disability benefits, for example, attendance allowance’’ and hand the cash over to local authority social services instead. Many people might take false comfort from the fact that, unlike AA, DLA is not specifically named as being for the axe. But if the government was planning only to abolish AA it is extremely unlikely that they would refer constantly throughout the green paper to ‘disability be
Related Questions
- Could disability allowances and attendance allowances really be scrapped and replaced by budgets spent by the local authority?
- What if a school or local education authority has very few pupils with an ethnic group recorded?
- What are Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance?
