Can anyone give me some advice (or where to turn to) on my rights under the carers act (2015) in Scotland please?
Social work were helpful at first but over the past 5 years they have grown increasingly hostile to carers direct payments, have implemented cut after cut after cut, where its clear their management see direct payments as prejudicial to their head counts and empires. Where they are so out of touch with the realities of carer’s lives that they are obsessed with “tight financial controls” “non negotiable supply of receipts” and from one of their senior managers “myself and other members of the senior management team feel very strongly that the provision should be standardised so you get the exact same thing week in week out every single week of the year and there should be absolutely no deviation from this permitted whatsoever, this is taxpayer’s / the public’s money and there must be tight controls over its use”
So I could REALLY do with some help on dealing with them as I’m at the stage of wishing I had never approached them in the first place as it gave them the chance to open a file (which they point blank told me they will NEVER close, despite there being no wrong doing and it being opened at my request not theirs, all very Orwellian/East Germany esque)
(one of worst examples of cuts was prohibiting use of direct payments for help with gardening and instead substituting the “restorative justice teams” aka convicted criminals, thugs, hooligans, drug addicts, thieves and worse, so not only would my garden be destroyed by those whose only knowledge of “weed” is something you smoke and couldn’t tell a dandelion from a dahlia but it runs roughshod over my lived experience as a victim of crime and my justified concern that this would open the potential to the house being “cased”.
The veritable screams of outrage from social work was something else “but but they are supervised you know!!“ - like that makes a jot of difference?
Worse still my local council demanded cuts to carers and disability support YET their own figures said projected spend was expected to be stable AND they took money issued by Scotgov for and directly to fund carers and disabled support and local council instead diverted said funds to criminal / restorative justice (Scot gov “didn’t think any local council would do such a thing so it wasn’t ringfenced so we can’t do much about it, but we are paying close attention” - couldn’t make this up could you?) )