Personal budgets and direct payments

5 mins read

This advice applies across the UK.

You might have different options for how you choose, manage and pay for the care you and your family need.

In this article

Options for managing support

If the local authority (in England, Scotland and Wales) or health and social care trust (in Northern Ireland) decides that you’re eligible for help, you might have different options for how you choose, manage and pay for the care you and your family need.

Options include:

In Scotland, having the choice of how you manage and pay for care services is known as self-directed support.

What is a personal budget?

In England, if the local authority agrees that you, your child or your family needs support, it will allocate a pot of money to meet these needs. This pot of money is called a personal budget.

The amount of money available to spend is based on how much it will cost in your local area to arrange the care and support your child needs. You can choose how you spend your personal budget from the options above.

What are direct payments?

If your local authority/trust agrees that your child, or you as a carer, needs services or practical support, you can choose to receive the payments to buy and organise these services yourself. This money is then paid to you in the form of direct payments.

Direct Payments can be a good way to be creative and flexible when managing your child’s care. But they can involve more work for you to arrange and manage the care provided.

If you’re employing someone directly, you will need to deal with tax, National Insurance and pension issues for them. You should also arrange insurance and a criminal record check. 

How can I use a direct payment?

Some of the ways direct payments can be used are:

Some reasons for using direct payments

Direct payments should give you more control over how your child’s needs are met. There are several reasons you might choose to receive direct payments instead of having services organised by the local authority/trust:

It is important to be aware that local councils can refuse to give personal budgets or direct payments if they are considered an inefficient or impractical use of resources.

Additional information for England only

In England, your personal budget may come from your local social services team, local education department or in some cases from your NHS clinical commissioning group (CCG).

The personal budget for education is included in an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan and will only include the funds needed to buy more specialist or individual support than the school or college is expected to provide.

Social services are required to offer personal budgets to disabled people aged 18 or over who they assess as needing social care. Although they are not obliged to offer a personal budget to a disabled child under the age of 18, an increasing number of councils do offer them.

Anyone receiving NHS continuing healthcare, including a child, has the right to have a personal health budget. This sets out the funding available to meet the healthcare needs that have been agreed by health professionals in a care and support plan.

A care and support plan helps people to identify their health and wellbeing goals, and then sets out how the funding in their personal budget will be spent to achieve these goals.

Integrating education, social care and health budgets

Social service departments, education authorities and CCGs are being encouraged to work together. The aim is to establish arrangements allowing for single personal budgets that cover someone’s social care, education and healthcare needs. How this personal budget is used is then set out in an EHC plan.

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