How are we getting on with the new way to do support planning?

Support planning - the process where a person thinks through how they would like to spend the money available to them for their support so it can change their life - should be as simple as booking a holiday.

For example, you generally know how much money you have got to spend and whether you want sun, excitement and adventure or culture, relaxation and lazing by the pool. You get the information to book your holiday in lots of different ways - online using Trip Advisor, articles in specialist magazines, asking friends or talking to a travel agent. You also know there are different ways to use your money - give it to someone else to book an all-inclusive deal on your behalf or book the car hire, accommodation and flights separately.

You get the idea. Support planning for people who use services needs to feel that simple too, especially given the government expectations that it must happen at scale so everyone can use a personal budget.

We've been working with Trafford Council and a few other authorities to see just how simple we can make the support planning process. We have been doing this using the Empower and Enable approach which I blogged about back in June. This week we worked with Lancashire County Council to explore what this could mean for them. This is how Irene, a parent carer, describes what 'Empower and Enable' means to her.

At the moment, we know from our work, that even in the most innovative local authorities in England, only one-to-two per cent of people are actually developing their own support plan. The rest are caught up in the complicated paper work and review panels processes. Even though some people get linked up with a peer supporter or care manager to help them develop a support plan, there's often a very long waiting list and people get caught up in a backlog in the system.

This year, we have been saying that support planning is so simple that a person can do it themselves and this is the basis for new national advice on support planning published by Think Local Act Personal, the sector-wide partnership to transform adult social care to transform adult social care.

Joanne Willmott, the personalisation programme manager for Trafford Council, was a guest speaker at our national Support Planning Day in October. She talked through their approach to support planning, and the impact that "Empower and Enable" has had on her council's journey towards personal budgets for all.

For Joanne and her team, they realised they had to change the culture, systems and process that they had originally set up during the first phase of personalisation implementation. They had previously been using a mixed model of brokerage and support planning and used their social care reform grant to fund in house brokers directly employed by council, as well as brokerage services in the community and voluntary sectors.

This worked well initially - it managed people's concerns about a new way of working and supported market stimulation and development. It also improved relationships with providers and in house teams through having to work together on a range of pilots and projects that pushed through barriers and resistance to new ways of working.

But Trafford then realised there was a real need to shift to a model of support planning to one where personal budgets could be mainstreamed and delivered at scale. They recognised that support planning had the potential to become a new bureaucratic burden for customers, especially as use of professional broker had become a compulsory stage in the customer journey.

That's when they started working with us and Breakthrough UK to try the Empower and Enable approach.

The main element behind this approach is a presumption of capacity. This is pretty straightforward and what personalisation is all about: people are experts in their own lives. They may need the tools to translate that into a way that local authority systems demand, but never lose sight of the idea that an individual has knowledge and expertise.

Trafford hopes that this do-it-yourself approach will result in support planning (and therefore personal budgets) becoming a mainstream option rather than something for just the lucky few. They can show hard-headed commissioners that this way of working helps creates capacity in councils systems', freeing up professionals to help the people who really need it. All this without having to spend any more money.

Trafford still accepts they need a wide range of resources to make support planning happen, like peer support, open surgeries and specialist brokerage, and they're keen to stress they don't just give people money to get on with it. But they are changing their operating model and processes to support new customer journey. This is an ongoing process for them and they recognise they don't have all the answers - yet! But when they do, we'll make sure we let you know about it!

You can read more about the Empower and Enable approach to support planning click here.