Issue - meetings

To consider a report of the Strategic Director of Children, Families and Adults (to follow).

Martin Middleton, Direct Payments Project Manager, attended to provide an update on the status and progress of the Council’s prepaid social care card product – known as the Empower Card. It was reported that as of March 2012, there were approximately 2000 Empower cards in existence (not all active) holding in the region of £2.5m in prepaid social care funding (including client contributions). Martin explained that such a rapid take up of the process in its formative period had created a number of issues, both with the product itself and the associated processes. As a result the Council had approved a three month ‘pause’ in the roll out of the Empower Card in November 2011 as part of a post-implementation review.

Martin described that the review was under way and that the service had collated and analysed issues from a variety of sources including service users, carers, the third sector and internal departments among others. Initial analysis of these responses had suggested that on balance most people were happy with the card and liked the concept. Having said this, Martin also outlined that a number of areas for improvement had emerged, mainly as a result of getting the existing infrastructure and established mechanisms to adapt to the new ways of working. Martin asserted that these issues did not originate from any single source and many pre-dated the Empower card. As a result of these findings, it was described how task teams had been put in place to undertake a detailed review on all the 3000 or so Empower and Direct Payment accounts on the Council’s books. Internal administrative processes had been reviewed and improved and training for all relevant staff on the revised processes was planned for April 2012. Martin also noted that work was ongoing to identify whether any alternative products were on the market which could better meet the needs of Cheshire East residents.

Lisa Quinn, Director of Finance and Business Services, attending as a member of the Strategic Empower Steering Group added that the Empower ‘pause’ was part of a wider review of client social care finance. She also reasserted that the ‘pause’ had been a useful mechanism to review what had been going well with the Empower card and where there was need for improvement. As this had yet to be completed she described how the Steering Group had asked for the ‘pause’ to be extended indefinitely until the Council was confident that all the issues had been fully rectified.

It was described how the Committee had been recently informed that there was occasionally money in service users’ Empower accounts that was not being used and was therefore sitting idle. It was queried what could be done to retrieve this money. Martin explained that if identifiable unused money was sat in client’s accounts, it was moved to the Council’s holding account with Citibank and from here to the Council’s budget. He reported that Citibank had recently cleared £500k to be transferred back to the Council from  ...  view the full minutes text for item 54