DHSC Building the Right Support Action Plan: BASW England response

The release of the Action Plan and the Red Quadrant independent report on funding flows reflect a major step forward for campaigners

BASW England’s Home Not Hospitals campaign group welcomes the long-awaited publication of the Building the Right Support for People with a Learning Disability and Autistic People Action Plan.

The plan is the latest from the Department of Health and Social Care, reaffirming its commitment to ensure that people with a learning disability and/or autistic people can live in their own communities, with access to the support they need and thereby reducing reliance on specialist inpatient care in mental health hospitals.

The aims of the Action Plan are supported by BASW England and our Homes Not Hospitals campaign, which was launched because too many people with learning disabilities and autistic adults are being failed by the housing and care system.

The Homes Not Hospitals campaign group have regularly engaged the Department for Health and Social Care on its work around this. The campaign group have lobbied for urgent action to reduce the number of people held in hospital settings and for system issues linked to funding, which will enable investment in the right type of community-based support and housing to be addressed.

The release of the Action Plan and the Red Quadrant Independent report on funding flows reflects a major step forward for campaigners. We will be reviewing the report and the financial analysis closely, responding in due course once members have been engaged.

Ahead of its release, the campaign group met with the Minister of State for Care, Gillian Keegan MP to discuss the Action Plan and to press for assurances that the Government understood the severity, depth, and complexity of the system-wide challenges and that we would not see action kicked in the long grass, as we have done previously.

We were reassured that the Minister understood the importance of this issue and will continue to engage as we move towards the implementation of the Action Plan.

We will release a more detailed response following engagement and consultation with members and the Homes not Hospitals group outlining the next steps.

We will soon consult members on the Action Plan and the Red Quadrant funding flows report - if you have any thoughts to share in the meantime, please contact england@basw.co.uk