Hampshire Co-production Independent Living Fund (ILF) Working Group

Members of PEP (Personalisation Expert Panel) were very concerned when the Government announced in 2010 that the ILF (Independent Living Fund) would be terminated in 2015. The ILF was transformative and very successful in supporting thousands of disabled people to live independently throughout the UK when it was set up in 1988. Hampshire had well over 1000 ILF users on its books which is why we were so concerned about their future.

PEP discussed this with a former Assistant Director of Hampshire County Council in 2012 to see what we could do, to either stop this and if not to monitor ILF users in Hampshire when this happened. A Coproduction Working group was set up between a former Senior Officer of AHC and some members of PEP along with the Assistant Director. It was agreed that in the lead up to its closure we would prepare ourselves by working along with a national ILF Local Authority Group and to monitor the situation carefully in our communities. Regular joint meetings were held to review progress as to how the situation was developing. We also had meetings together with the national ILF committee to monitor developments. The Assistant Director was kept up-to-date with the developments.

When it was finally closed, we agreed that we needed to monitor the different areas in Hampshire to ensure that no ILF user would lose their funding. We visited many area offices throughout Hampshire to discuss the ILF situation with the different social workers as to how this new ILF development was going and to gain support for ILF users. Our main concern was that no user would lose their funding and support when the ILF moved into local authority responsibility. The Government stated that the ILF money would be transferred to the local authorities, but we wanted to make sure that this money was allocated to the individuals so it would cover the ILF users as it was not being ring fenced.

According to our monitoring we could not identify any ILF user who did lose out, but it is difficult to know how accurate this was. It was certainly not brought to our attention that any ILF and Direct Payments users missed out on their payments.

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