Adult Social Care Glossary, v 0.6

Care and Support Statutory Guidance 11.24 Regardless of the process used, the most important principles in setting the personal budget are transparency, timeliness and sufficiency. This will ensure that the person, their carer, and their independent advocate if they have one, is fully aware of how their budget was calculated, that they know the amount at a stage which enables them to effectively engage in care and support planning, and that they can have confidence that the amount includes all relevant costs that will be sufficient to meet their identified needs in the way set out in the plan. The local authority should also explain that the initial indicative allowance can be increased or decreased depending on the decisions made during the development of the plan. This should prevent disputes from arising, but it must also be possible for the person, carer or independent advocate (on the person's behalf) to challenge the local authority on the sufficiency of the final amount. These principles apply to both the indicative upfront budget and the final signed=off personal budget that forms part of the care and support plan. Transparency Authorities should make their allocation processes publicly available as part of their general information offer, or ideally provide this on a bespoke basis for each person the authority is supporting in a format accessible to them. This will ensure that people fully understand how the personal budget has been calculated, both in the indicative amount and the final personal budget allocation. Where a complex RAS process is used, local authorities should pay particular consideration to how they will meet this transparency principle, to ensure people are clear how the personal budget was derived.