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Disability Alliance Conference 2004 
A half-day conference held on Thursday October 21st 2004 between 2.00pm - 4.30pm
The subject for discussion at this year’s conference was disabled people’s costs of living. The conference saw the launch of a major piece of research which had been undertaken by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at the University of Loughborough.
Lorna Reith Disability Alliance’s Chief Executive opened the event by providing some background as to why the research was needed. The idea for the research came from a series of meetings of the Disability Benefits Consortium which is made up of a large number of disability charities including Disability Alliance, RNIB and Mind.
It was considered to be very necessary to have some figures of the needs of disabled people with which we could engage with government over the adequacy of benefits designed to meet the additional costs of disability.
Dr Noel Smith from CRISP spoke next and as the main author of the report he spoke about the process which had been undertaken to ascertain these extra costs and then outlined the main findings of the report.
The process began with a series of focus groups involving people with a variety of disabilities: visual impairment, hearing impairment and physical impairment. These groups outlined what they considered as necessary items and then compared these with the income which disabled people receive.
This formed the basis upon which the research could go forward and results have concluded that deaf and hearing impaired people have the highest costs as communication is clearly such a major item of expenditure for this group.
The next speaker was Trevor Harding, Chair of the National Association of Financial Assessment Officers, which is a voluntary collaboration of over 150 local councils with social services responsibilities. Its aim is to share information and to give advice on the many issues that are identified relating to charging for both residential and non-residential services. The association can only recommend good practice to members and not require it.
Each council must make its own decisions and develop its own charging policies. However members regularly seek advice from the total membership, where there is any uncertainty, before taking decisions. This helps with the achievement of consistency in the application of guidance and directives.
He pointed out the difficulty of generalisation about the costs of disability as each individual is unique and should be treated as such. That is why the fairer Charging guidance requires an individual assessment of Disability Related Expenditure (DRE). He highlighted that the concept of disability related expenditure within the financial assessment environment it was a new concept to most if not all when the concept of fairer charging was originally discussed.
Trevor said that a dilemma faced Financial Assessment Officers in getting the balance between intrusive questions and fairness. He said that some of his members had sought to address this by allowing a standard amount for Disability related Expenditure and offering an assessment if it is felt that there are costs in excess of this.
He then highlighted a problem where someone has little or no income. In such cases people have less to spend on their disability needs. The Fairer Charging DRE system favours those who are better off because they actually have the money to spend on their disability and can therefore claim allowance for it against charges.
He emphasised the need for assessors to try and maximise clients income as much as possible citing the example of Durham, his own council which increased additional benefit income of over £1m for service users.
He concluded that he would like to work with Disability Alliance and this should begin with the Alliance checking the content and layout of information leaflets and financial assessment forms to ensure that service users can easily understand the process and the wording.
Maria Eagle Minister for disabled people was the final speaker. She began by outlining the many improvements which they had made including the most recent extension of the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act.
She then said that her department welcomed the publication of the new research reportand would study it most carefully. She mentioned the importance of work in terms of lifting disabled people out of poverty and highlighted the role which pathways to work has played and will continue to play in this. She re-affirmed this point later during questions when she was asked to comment on recent press coverage of possible reforms to incapacity benefit which used terms such as skivers and languishing on benefit.
Guest Speakers
