Whenever UNISON members working in adult social care gather to talk about personalisation some key themes crop up:

• • window-dressing for cuts;

• • additional bureaucracy;

• • reduced social work involvement;

• • loss of local services and jobs; and

• • increase in safeguarding concerns.

Day centres being closed, meals on wheels services being cut, management pressure to trim care packages – all these are being done in personalisation's name.

Councils are focusing their efforts on hitting the crude target of everyone on a personal budget, while facing growing need with shrinking resources. The direct consequence is the strangling of the principles of empowerment and control in a tangle of bureaucracy. Resource allocation systems, in all their complexity, make rights more difficult to keep in focus, and rationing easier to disguise.

As Peter Beresford has pointed out, personalisation is a policy that has been sold by anecdote. But it is proving much harder to get an airing for the anecdotes that practitioners are telling us, for example:

• • The elderly parents and carers of a learning-disabled man who used to attend a day centre five days a week. Now the centre is closed, he has a direct payment that is only enough to pay for a support worker to take him out a few hours a week. The rest of the week, he is at home, bored and his parents are finding it hard to cope.

• • The disabled woman who has a direct payment that pays for a team of personal assistants (PAs). Things are getting very difficult as one of the PAs (a UNISON member) has been injured at work but the woman does not believe that it is her responsibility to have employers’ liability insurance, and the council is not helping to resolve the issue.

Practitioners responding to a UNISON survey felt that they were implementing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to personalisation, driven by sign-up targets. This has been exacerbated by the 2010 announcement by government ministers in England that ‘direct payments should be the preferred option’ for receiving a personal budget. Respondents do not feel that this is real personalisation because the focus is on process not outcomes.