Personal budget policy for children and young people aged 0 to 25 with special educational needs and their families

Several services which might be suitable for funding through personal budgets are currently being provided under block contracts between the Council as commissioner and a contractor.

We will review the contracts it has in these areas at the earliest possible time at or before the time the contracts are due for renewal, with the aim of adding flexibility so that parts of the funding could be transferred to personal budgets.

This may entail the renegotiation or amendment of current contracts or the letting of new contracts.

Some existing contracts may already have the required flexibilities within them.

We will involve young people and families in the review of these contracts and subsequent variations to contracts or re-commissioning of services.

It is important that the freeing-up of funds to be available for personal budgets must not affect materially and adversely the service being made available to those families who may not have or choose to have personal budgets.

We will provide summaries of the contracts to young people and families who receive services under them.

This will allow the young people and families to understand the extent to which personal budgets are available and the reasons for this.

The regulations make it clear that we must be sure that the amount of a personal budget is sufficient to pay for the agreed services.

Where a service is being provided under a block contract it is possible that the provider would need to charge a higher amount if the same service were bought individually.

Only in exceptional circumstances will we make available a larger sum to a personal budget to purchase the service than it would have cost under the block contract since this would represent poor value for money.

For a transfer to a personal budget to represent good value for money other factors will have to be present. These could include:

• The service is available from a different, possibly local, supplier at a lower cost. In this case we will ask for evidence that the alternative supplier can meet the identified outcomes, offers an equivalent quality of service and that the lower price is likely to be maintained.
• The service can be combined with other purchased services in ways that bring down the total cost.
• Groups of young people or families agree to pool their purchases to achieve economies of scale. In this case we will need to be assured that the pooling arrangements are fair and sustainable.
• Families may decide that they wish to provide certain services to their children themselves, even if they do not receive the full market rate of providing those services. In such circumstances we will accept the wishes of the family and make the personal budget available but may ask for evidence that the service has been provided.

When weighing up value for money we will take into account the total impact on the public purse, not just Council funds, when making the decision.

We encourage children, young people and families to use personal budgets in ways such as those set out in the list above.

Where possible we will give assistance to children, young people and families to develop innovative and personalised methods to deliver good quality provision at costs that offer value for money.