Introduction

This chapter evaluates the successes and challenges experienced in developing a Community Care Development Project. In recognition of the lack of joint work on ‘community care’ and ‘community development’, a three-year pilot project was established in Hull in 1999 by a partnership of local statutory and voluntary sector agencies to find out whether the community sector could be supported in addressing unmet low-level support and care needs. The chapter begins by outlining the national and local background to the project, before moving on to document the approach taken. The extent to which the project had a measurable impact on communities is then considered, and, in particular, the extent to which it met the community care needs of local communities.

Policy background: why a ‘community care development’ project?

Community care has, for the most part, been narrowly defined. In the 1990s, central government policy on community care encouraged limited statutory resources to be increasingly targeted on those with the highest level of health and social care needs; and away from lower-level, often preventative, services (Audit Commission, 1998). At the same time, the numbers of people with support needs living within the community in ordinary housing increased (Burrows, 1997). However, the importance of low-level and preventative support for both traditional community care users and for a much wider group of ‘vulnerable’ people (for example, homeless people) was re-acknowledged by the end of the decade (Quilgars, 2000). In particular, the Supporting People programme, launched in April 2003, provides housing-related support to 1.2 million vulnerable people to help them live more independently.

The government recently identified how Supporting People works with three needs groups: people who are also in receipt of care services, people living independently with support only, and people experiencing or at risk of social exclusion (ODPM, 2005a). However, connections between Supporting People and Department of Health agendas have remained limited (Audit Commission, 2005), while those with social exclusion agendas have been weaker still. Although it has been recognised that ‘supporting people to live independent lives is an important element of building better communities’ (ODPM, 2005a, p 4), Supporting People continues community care's primarily individualised approach to delivering assistance to people in defined target groups (including a recent suggestion to introduce an individual budget approach).