Planning your Support

The idea behind an Individual Budget is to put you in control of the support you receive, and gives you choices about when you receive support, and who provides support for you.

You can spend your Individual Budget in almost any way you choose, as long as it helps to meet the goals you have set out in your support plan. An individual budget means that you can get personalised services tailored to your specific needs.

How is my Individual Budget calculated?

When we have completed your assessment, we look at how much help you need and we work out how much we think that support should cost, which gives you a total budget for the cost of your support package. We may be able to make a contribution to the cost of your support, and we will be able to let you know exactly how much you will have to pay when we have completed a full financial assessment.

Options

We then give you several options. 

• You can organise your support yourself. We call this a Cash Individual Budget.
• You can choose someone else to organise support for you, though they may ask you to pay them for this. We call this an Individual Service Fund.
• You can choose to have the Council organise your support. We call this a Virtual Individual Budget.
• You can have a mixture of any type of payment described above
• You can opt for a cash lump sum for an item that you and your care manager have agreed is necessary for you.

A Cash Individual Budget gives you the ability to organise your own support. The council pays you an agreed amount of money. You can then hire the support service of your choice. That way they work for you and not for the council. A checklist of other things you need to know about Individual Budgets can be found in the following pages.

Even though the money for all or part of your support might come from an Individual Service Fund or a Virtual Individual budget, you are the customer. You have a right to be listened to and your opinions should be respected. Whoever provides support for you, they are there to help you and should do everything possible to respect your needs.