ABSTRACT
In the current era in the UK of heavily constrained public spending, and with popular opinion seemingly set against the maintenance of welfare support, many people with learning disabilities (and others) are losing their social care support and a range of benefit payments as eligibility criteria are tightened (Community Care, 2012a). In these difficult times, individuals with learning disabilities are increasingly looking to their families, friends and supporters, and local voluntary organisations, to fill the expanding care gap ( Guardian, 2013; Hall, 2011). Whilst this is undoubtedly causing hardships for many, the austerity-driven reconfiguration of care and support for disabled people is also generating possible opportunities for new and progressive forms and spaces of care. Importantly, however, the chapter emphasises for there to be such positive outcomes from the current crisis, the political and policy/practice context has to be right. The chapter argues that the form of devolved governance from the UK to Scotland (and other countries of the UK) and onto local authorities and communities has been generative of a new model and landscape of ‘care’: care broadly conceptualised, co-produced, holistic, locally-based and centred on an ‘ethics of care’ based on mutuality and trust (Lawson, 2007). This collective and negotiated provision of care is in stark contrast to the personalised and commodified model of social care dominant in England (and in many other neoliberal welfare states), where individuals are given ‘personal budgets’ to purchase care in a social care marketplace (Hall, 2011), budgets which are now being severely cut.
