Type of document: Scottish Minutes of recipient/stakeholder groups
This is an Easy Read set of Minutes to say what happened at a meeting.
In this document the Independent Living Fund Scotland is ILF Scotland for short.
The meeting was on 2 April from 11 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon.
Jim Elder-Woodward - Chairperson
Andy Higgins
Steven Hanlon
Maree Todd
Chris Mercer
Chloe McKee
Gordon McKee
Justina Oguguo
Martha Shortreed
Joan Turner
Kate Walsh
ILF Scotland Staff
Peter Scott
Lee House
Harvey Tilley
Emma O’Neill
Karen Burnett
Robert White
Jim welcomed everyone to the meeting.
Lee will record the minutes.
The minutes were checked and agreed.
The Communications Team will put them on the ILF website.
Terms of Reference explain the work of an organisation and how it will be done.
2. ILF Scotland will draft a letter for Jim to send to ministers to ask about timescales for removing Available Income charges.
Available Income charge is an amount of money that a recipient pays towards their ILF amount.
A Recipient is a person who gets ILF money.
Jim asked everyone to introduce themselves to Maree before starting the meeting.
Each group member described:
Jim will email Maree with anything that could not be covered in the time they had at the meeting.
Jim asked Maree if available income would be stopped.
Maree said thank you to everyone for their hard work to get the ILF Scotland fund re-opened.
The Scottish Government is still deciding about having non-residential care charges.
These are charges for anything other than personal care which is free.
Maree understands why the group are frustrated that this is taking a long time.
ILF Scotland funding will not be stopped while she is Minister for Health and Social Care.
It has been difficult to do the recommendations of the Feeley report – this was the review of adult social care in Scotland.
Recommendations are what a group thinks should happen.
We are working with COSLA and setting up an Advisory Board to help with this.
Maree would like more money to be put into Social Care across Scotland.
The Scottish Government cannot make social care better if local councils are not involved.
If nothing changes there will have to be a change in the way it is dealt with.
Jim asked if a Group Member would be on the Advisory Board.
Maree said the Board will be led by someone who has:
Maree said the Scottish Government wants social care workers to have higher pay.
Peter talked about the re-opened ILF Scotland fund.
It is the second year of the re-opened fund and there have been more than 7 hundred applications.
ILF Scotland will need to spend the money well and not spend more than is in the budget.
At a review visit an assessor visits a person who gets ILF funding to check:
An assessor checks if something is working well.
Robert said the assessor team did 1 thousand and 60 reviews in the last year.
The time for reviews to be done has come down to 1 hundred and 21 days.
It takes a long time for local councils to tell people what package of care they will get.
The re-opened fund now has 7 hundred and 93 applications which each take around 90 days to complete.
This is still too long.
PVG is short for Protecting Vulnerable Groups.
The PVG scheme checks if people have a criminal record and should not be working with children or adults at risk of harm.
Karen talked about the new PVG laws that started on 1 April 2025.
Personal Assistants (PAs) must join the PVG scheme and get a PVG before they have done their job for 3 months.
There is information on the ILF Scotland website about this.
Karen has asked members for any information about PAs joining the scheme.
All the feedback from the events is in a draft report for the Group to say what they think about it.
Linda said there will be a 10th Celebration event happening in June and the team are working on getting a place to have the event.
The next meeting is 29 May 2025.
There could be a joint November meeting with the Northern Ireland Advisory Group.
This is the end of these Minutes.
