Barnet Council intends to make a saving of £1.347 million in Barnet Adult Social Care in 2014/5. The proposals to do this are called the Community Offer – CADDSS believes this is a cut price way to offer inadequate services to support Barnet residents in their own homes. So what’s on offer? At the Annual Review each person being assessed for social care receives, social workers should persuade people to choose direct Payments to pay for the

Join us at 7 pm in Hendon Town Hall to submit close to 1000 signatures of residents calling the Cabinet to bring Your Choice Barnet, services for adults with learning and other disabilities, back in-house. At that Cabinet meeting the Task & Finish Group's report about Your Choice Barnet will be submitted. The outsourced local authority trading company that provides day services and residential care for Barnet residents with learning and complex

If you want to get a flavour of one of the most enraging and frustrating council committees' meetings that active residents from CADDSS (the Campaign Against Destruction of Disabled Support Services) and BAPS, along with other disabled residents who use Your Choice services and their family carers had to endure – read Mrs Angry's Broken Barnet blog.         It was so frustrating because it became clearer than ever that Barnet's

  Your Choice Barnet (YCB), formerly a Barnet Council service for adults with disabilities, and now a Local Authority Trading Company, has accumulated losses since it was formed as a profit-making provider, resulting in detrimental changes to service users and staff alike. We have been working with the parent/carer campaign group CADDSS (Campaign Against Destruction of Disability Support Services) to bring this failing service back under the

Apparently, Your Choice Barnet, to whom Barnet council outsourced the services for severely disabled people, is charging disabled service users VAT if they receive direct payment. Janet Leifer of CADDSS was puzzled by this and followed it up. Janet also asked who regulates the day care services and as you will see below Mr. D’Costa told her these are carried out by “our Integrated Quality in Care Homes Team.” This team is made up in part from

Anita Woolf is the mother of Carl Woolf, who is a user of one of the Your Choice Barnet day centres, Barnet Independent Living Service (BILS); she contacted CADDSS via this website recently following a CADDSS letter in the local press.  BILS is designated for closure and the centre is to be demolished in 2016, with no plan by Barnet council or Your Choice Barnet to move the service or rehouse the service users. Read here Anita's and Carl's letters

The Campaign Against Destruction of Disabled Support Services (CADDSS) welcomes the appointment of the new Care Quality Commission chief inspector Andrea Sutcliffe. CADDSS congratulates Ms Sutcliffe on her clear views about the way to ensure good quality care services and hopes that her appointment will provide an opportunity for the CQC to look again at the most effective way of safeguarding vulnerable people. CADDSS hopes that the new chief inspector

Following a recent incident when a person attending a day centre for people with learning disabilities fell down a manhole, members of CADDSS, a local group campaigning on behalf of disabled people in Barnet wrote to the Care Quality Commission and were shocked to discover from them that this statutory regulatory body has no brief to inspect or monitor day centres for people with learning disabilities in spite of their website saying 'we check a

CADDSS (Campaign Against Destruction of Disabled Support Services) welcomed the creation of the Task and Finish Group of councillors to review services provided by Your Choice Barnet to adults with severe disabilities.  However, CADDSS was very disappointed that the Task and Finish Group made no effort to contact service users or their carers to ask them about their experience of using services provided by Your Choice Barnet. Read the latest press