ABSTRACT
Personal assistance (PA) refers to the new ways of delivering personal support in daily living, which were devised by disabled people’s movements in Britain, North America and Northern European countries from the 1970s onwards, as an alternative to traditional models of care (Morris, 1993a). Personal assistance was a key element in the empowerment of people with significant impairments, who had previously depended on residential care. Rather than living in institutions, or being supported in the community by paid carers supplied by the state, or being reliant on family and friends, disabled people began to receive payments directly to manage their own staff through arrangements such as the Independent Living Fund. As pioneer Simon Brisenden wrote: ‘The point is that independent people have control over their lives, not that they perform every task themselves’ (1989: 9). Being in control of how help was delivered meant having freedom and self-respect, rather than feeling dependent on the whims of family or workers employed by local authorities or charities. For this reason, Mladenov claims that: ‘Personal assistance is a major condition for the possibility of disability equality just like rational debate is a major condition for the possibility of deliberative democracy’ (2012: 4).
