The disabled adults themselves get the money, and can decide how to spend it.
I know a person who gets it and he is happy with it, its allowed him to employ a support worker to help him.
If you wait to get a support worker from social services its a very long wait.
I'm sure Lulu is right to see nothing but a combination of privatizing hocus-pocus and poorly concealed budget cuts behind this new "reform."
The Welfare State is being dismantled one step at a time, and this is part of the process of passing moral responsibility for the disabled into the hands of businessmen and their share-holders.
One day we will look round and find the Welfare State and the NHS has vanished altogether, and is nothing but a memory in the minds of people old enough to remember what it once was.
Private health care insurers almost always refuse to pay out for long term mental health care, in which autism would be included. Much of the autism news from North America is essentially financial news, since once moral responsibility is set on one side in favour of monetarism, then autism becomes nothing more than a financial problem, and the burden of individual family units, rather than for society as a whole.
Against this bleak picture, it is unsurprising that quack cures like ABA and Chelation flourish in the United States, since whilst they are very costly indeed, and may push families to the edge of bankruptcy to pay for them, they are still cheap compared with the prospect of lifetime care.
Hmm, well it is only in the UK at the moment, this scheme.
I think it can help in some aspects as previously social services were able to make the decisions on where budget money could be spent, and if someone had a poor social worker, they might get nothing.
This is giving the allowed budget straight to the person who needs it.
I'm sure that for some people in some circumstances there will be some benefits to such a scheme (or they would not be able to sell it as an idea) but overall it is just another variation of the doctrine of "consumer choice" which sounds liberating but has very high social costs on the margins of society - where many on the Spectrum are to be found.
Well, it assumes that the services are there and are financially within the reach of the person with the budget. That might be the case now, but what about in the future? Also, if they are not happy with budgeting for themselves can they revert to the system they were under before?