202508 - Scotland Advisory Group Minutes - August 2025 (Easy Read)

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 28 August from 11am to 1pm.

Jim welcomed everyone to the meeting.

Lee will record the minutes.

The minutes were checked and agreed.

All the actions have been done including updates from the meeting with the then Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport, Marie Todd.

There were no other issues in the last minutes.

An agenda is a list of things we will talk about at the meeting.

There was nothing new to add it.

The new Minister for Social Care and Mental Wellbeing is Tom Arthur MSP.

Peter and Anne-Marie had a good meeting with him but there will not be much change to policies before the election.

Policies are the rules and agreements of an organisation.

Important issues are:

• having people who have been in care on the National Care Service Advisory Board
• stopping ILF available income charging of 43 pounds a week

An available income charge is an amount of money that a recipient pays towards their ILF amount.

ILF Scotland will write to the new Minister to tell him about the group and invite him to a future meeting.

This has now happened and the Minister has been invited to come to the December meeting.

At a review visit an assessor visits a person who gets ILF funding to check:

• if they are getting their money okay
• if the money is helping them to live independently

An assessor checks if something is working well.

ILF assessors are having longer more complicated visits because people who get ILF money are finding things difficult.

The re-opened Fund can give money to 1 thousand 400 people.

More than 1 thousand applications have been received and 6 hundred people are getting payments.

The most important issues are:

• employing and keeping Personal Assistants (PAs)
• assessors giving support when there is not enough council support

• social work services not having enough money and having to reassess people
• organisations giving back social care packages they think they are too small

• high costs from organisations that provide social care services

UNCRC (The United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child)

This will be discussed at the next meeting because of staff illness.

Flexible Funding (Policy 41)

People who get ILF money can now apply for one-off payments for things that support them to live independently.

The money must be for things that they agreed as part of their ILF Scotland award.

Group members think this is a good change and asked to get the policy link.

ILF Scotland Board Update

There are spaces for people on the Board and the Scottish Government is working on getting people for this.

Peter said the Board must have a mix of different kinds of people from different backgrounds.

The most important work for the Board is:

• getting more money for the Transition Fund

This is a grant of up to 4 thousand pounds for young, disabled people in Scotland to help them try something new and help them get active in their community.

It has stayed at 5 million pounds for 10 years even though more people are applying for money from the Fund.

• making sure the re-opened Fund can keep going and grow to have more than 1 thousand 4 hundred recipients

Charter for Involvement

The most important work is:

• PA recruitment and retention
• telling more people in colleges and job centres about the ILF

Kath will go to all meetings to make sure assessor work links with the work in the charter.

Feedback strategy and customer charter – this is our plan for listening to people who get ILF money to:

• understand their experiences
• use this information to make what we do better

The Group have checked a new version and ILF Scotland’s Senior Management Team and Board will approve them before they are put online.

A final version will be sent to members for feedback.

We talked about the difficulty of advertising for PAs across Scotland.

Indeed and MyJobScotland have different results across regions.

There has been some success getting PAs using local Facebook groups, Job Centres, Nextdoor.co.uk, and colleges and universities for recruiting students.

ILF staff will look at working with Skills Development Scotland, Job Centres, colleges and universities.

We know recruitment is difficult because of low pay, not enough training and agencies working in different ways.

The next meeting will be on Thursday 11 December including the Christmas meal.

Members would like to meet in central Glasgow near transport links.
ILF Scotland will email ideas about this.

There could be a joint November meeting with the Northern Ireland Advisory Group.

1. Lee will send out Policy 41 Flexible Funding to the Advisory Group

This is the end of these Minutes.