“This is a massive change with huge implications for provider organisations who deliver 60% of Glasgow’s care services.”

Self Directed Support is a deceptively simple concept with huge ramifications for how social care is delivered in the future.

Charlie Barker’s role as Director of Glasgow Social Care Providers Forum has left her ideally placed to see the big picture of how Self Directed Support is developing in the City,

Charlie and her team have spent the last six months staging the Festival of Ideas to help all those involve understand the concept and its implications.

She said: “This is a massive change which has huge implications for the Forum members, the provider organisations who deliver 60% of Glasgow’s care services.

“We are doing everything we can to support them through the change process and to help them understand how radically different the future will be when the majority of service users control their own budgets.

“This is not just about the outcomes for the people the providers are working for, but how their organisations, whatever their size, survive in a changing market place.

“This is a real opportunity for providers to demonstrate how creative and versatile they can be in coping with a system that will move away from the contract culture to providing services for individuals.

“Providers are used to a system when a person comes through the office door and is assessed by social workers, with their outcomes based on fitting that person into existing services.

“But now that person will be fully involved in doing their own assessment and articulating the changes they want to make to have a richer life.

“The balance of power will change because the client will have the buying power and that’s going to be a real challenge for a lot of providers who currently hold that power.

“It will mean a whole new mindset, Providers will have to ask themselves ‘what services am I good at providing that people will want to buy’, and ‘how can I market and brand these services so that people know they are available and want to take advantage of them?’

“So it’s really difficult to exaggerate the scale of the change.”

Charlie believes that the changes will be radical for everyone involved in the sector, with social workers and other practitioners having to develop a new relationship with service users.

She continued: “The system is built round the concept of people with difficulties coming to us, then we, the professionals, come riding in on our white horses, decide what the problem is and make it better.

“Now we will have to accept that the person concerned is the real expert on his or her own life, and will be tell us what they want in the way of care, and how they want to live their lives.

“That approach will delight those who say it is absolutely why they came into social work in the first place, to find out from people what their problems are and address them.

“But there is no doubt it will be hard for a lot of professionals to accept that the balance of power has changed because the client is paying the piper and will call the tune.”

Charlie added: “Self Directed Support is all about all about giving control of their own lives back to people who have felt restricted by the way their care packages are delivered.

“Caring for people is not just about getting them out of bed in the morning and getting them ready for the day ahead.

“It’s about how they spend that day, and whether the care system makes them a prisoner of the care timetable, or frees them to do the things they really want to do.

“It’s about escaping from living your life by hourly rates.”

Charlie believes that many of those who are now living in the community are still ‘spectators’ and not really part of that community.

“To some extent people with, say learning difficulties, often live quite ghetto-ised lives…going to day centres, and interacting with other people with learning difficulties.

“Self Directed Support means helping them realise that they are more than someone with a disability, but that they can make a real contribution to the community in which they live.

“And that they have the same freedoms, choices and responsibilities as anyone else in society.”