Living With Wheels

Simple Autobiography

Lament for a 'Lost' Service

Milton Keynes Community Care Service (MKCCS) was the service's name when I moved into my first flat in June 1984. In spite of it being funded in the same way as the 'classic' residential service for people with disabilities, it was a potential leader in the field of supported living options for disabled people.

 

MKCCS is made up of twenty-six properties. Each flat is entirely self-contained with its own kitchen, bathroom and front door. Tenants are - or were - encouraged to live as independently as they wanted to, going out when they wanted, eating what they wanted (even if that was over-cooked sausages or toast).

 

Sadly The Spastics Society didn't follow through with its forward-looking service delivery and the service began to stagnate. True, the service was fully occupied by the end of the 1980s, but the limitations of being funded as a residential service were beginning to show, with the burgeoning of 'Care in the Community', as some of the clients were starting to chafe against the regulations that were part of being a residential service.

 

The Spastics Society then began opening group homes in the early 1990s that were touted as being the organisation's first foray into independent living. The Milton Keynes service had been completely forgotten by The Spastics Society's Press Office!

 

MKCCS was being left behind even before it changed its name in the mid 1990s, first to Milton Keynes Community Support Service, then to Milton Keynes Support Service before becoming Milton Keynes Services as part of a merger with what once was Neath Hill Professional Workshop (itself later re-born as Milton Keynes Resource Centre).

 

By the time I left it, MKCCS was starting to fall apart - though at that point the main problem was recruiting, and keeping, staff. Milton Keynes had virtually 0% unemployment by June 2001 and because of the fixed pay structure Scope uses

across the board MKCCS couldn't compete with even cleaning posts in the city centre complex.

 

Now, however, the service is being strangled by regulations designed to bring every residential service in England and Wales up to the same minimum standard.

 

It looks to this Scope-aware outsider as if Scope is allowing the regulations to choke what life there still is in the twenty-four year old service. Back have come the bath thermometers (I just escaped that in the early years of the service's existence) and food thermometers and fridge inspections have joined them, not to mention things like radiator guards and the strict compliance to all the minor regs that previously had been unofficially permitted.

 

Soon the tenants of the service will have to ask permission to leave their own flats if they want to go visiting or to buy a bar of chocolate!

 

Certainly the staff are drowning in paperwork - just one very small example is that they have to sign in and out of each flat and specify what they have done while there!

 

I don't think the service will see its thirtieth birthday - it might see twenty-six, but not that much more unless something radically different happens.

May 2004.