Recent reports have made clear just how many disabled people are struggling to pay rising council care charges with increasing numbers getting into debt. Now, a post-graduate student is aiming to produce detailed research which will aim to capture and analyse the true impact of social care charges on the lives of disabled people.
“I first came across this as a journalist making a BBC programme two years ago” says Claire, a post-graduate student at University College London. I realised then that most of the public- including me – just had no idea how much disabled people have to pay for even the most basic support from Adult Social Care.”
She was even more surprised to find that there had been almost no academic research on care charging since the 1990s. “There were all these warnings about the possible damage charges would do when they first came in, but nobody seems to have followed up on them,” she says.
Claire is now trying to remedy that through her master’s dissertation on the impact of social care charging on working-age adults. She’s talking to disabled people from 18-64 – and in some cases, members of their families – to get a detailed picture of the experiences they are having.
If you have direct experience of care charging and would like to take part in the research, please contact Claire.Bolderson.21@ucl.ac.uk or via Facebook Messenger or Twitter. All interviews are confidential and anonymous.
