Personal budgets and direct payments

5 mins read

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. Every council sets its own criteria for assessing if someone qualifies for self-directed support. The local authority agrees a “support package”, which includes how much they will contribute towards the help someone needs. Parents can receive self-directed support for a disabled young person up to 18 years old. Young people aged 16 or over can receive payments in their own right.

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. The local authority pays this money 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 you can use direct payments are:

Some reasons for using direct payments

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

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

Integrating education, social care and health budgets (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).

An Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan includes the personal budget for education. It will only include funds to buy more specialist or individual support than the school or college must provide.

Social services must offer personal budgets to disabled people aged 18 or over who they assess as needing social care. Although they do not have 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 health professionals have agreed to 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 achieve these goals.

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.

How to access services

Needs assessments

Carer’s assessments: your needs as a carer

Personal budgets and direct payments