Why the Henwood and Hudson report failed in Justifying the Closure of the Independent Living Fund
•
The Condem Government claimed that the Henwood and Hudson Review of the
Independent Living Fund (ILF) 2007 found it unsustainable and supports their
proposals for its functions to be assumed by Local Authorities.•
Analysis of the Review reveals a number of limitations which renders it an
inadequate basis on which to build government policy on the scale that closing
the ILF entails.•
The value-base for the Review is founded in an understanding of a shared
commitment to independent living that cannot be assumed in our current
political climate.•
The Review compares an evidence-based assessment of the inadequacies of the
ILF against the theorisation of cutting edge personalisation without
acknowledging the barriers to realistic implementation of the latter.•
The main arguments used in the Review to point to inadequacies in the ILF
could equally and in fact more strongly be applied to the idea of Local
Authorities assuming its functions. These are inequity, lack of transparency,
inaccessibility and self-determination. In this way the Review fails to
support current government proposals for the future of the ILF.•
Rather than finding the ILF unsustainable, the Review made a number of
recommendations which would have required substantial extra funding in order
to be implemented.•
The gap in support provision for disabled people to live in the community with
the closure of the ILF contravenes Article 19 of the UN Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities and evidence from different local
authority areas is already showing the impact of this.
