Production of welfare evidence: PSSRU's budget-devolved case management experiments

<p>First, some historical background. Like many births, these experiments were a happy accident. A forceful and unorthodox<p><p>director of services believed that there were contradictions between the circumstances which would allow welfare to be produced in the most equitable, effective and efficient way, and the arrangements which local authorities made for the provision of care. So did I.

<p><p><p>Luckily, I arrived in Kent at the same time as this new director. I had got to know him because he had attended seminars I<p><p>had taught at the LSE. His idea was to give users vouchers. However, that was overruled, partly because it would have been ultra vires, beyond the legal powers of his local authority. In essence, my response was to propose pooling service budgets, and allocating the money to what we later called case managers. They would be empowered to use it buy in any mix of the services hitherto provided without cost to the case manager, and other resources they could raise, for a caseload satisfying certain requirements. He liked the idea. I made the proposal and stated the argument in a paper written in 1974. However, an official of the central government thought this to be 'undesirable', and tried to declare my model to be ultra vires also. However, we took the advice of a senior specialist advocate - we took 'Counsel's Opinion', as we say in England. The barrister's view was that it was within the law.

<p><p><p>Therefore, it was not until 1976 that the case managers started work. An evaluation researcher to work with me started soon after. So our case management experiment for elderly, the Kent Community Care Project, the KCCP, was initiated at much the same time as the first American case management projects. We in the UK knew nothing about American case management writing. I discovered it early in 1979, and hurriedly arranged a tour of some of the main experiments and the centres from which they had sprung.

<p><p><p>The KCCP experiment was highly successful. The argument and results were fully stated by the end of 1986 (Davies and<p><p>Challis, 1986). Our timing was lucky. Early in 1987, Mrs Thatcher invited Sir Roy Griffiths, managing director of our leading<p><p>supermarket chain, to produce a report proposing how to reform community and long-term care. Sir Roy was an extremely shrewd and intelligent lawyer with vast management experience. He proved to be the hero of British community care. Among other things, he took a keen interest in budget-devolved care management and related ideas.