Following 39-year old Luke Davey's challenge against Oxfordshire Council's cut to his care package, comes news of two families success in challenging West Berkshire Councils cuts to short breaks for their children: "West Berkshire families win court battle over care cuts"
In this latest case, the judge, Mrs Justice Laing, ruled the council's decision was "unlawful". In a written ruling, the Judge also said that the council's decision-making process was flawed because "members' attention was not drawn" adequately to relevant laws. In short and put bluntly, neither officers nor members (also known as local councillors) had a clue what they were doing or what the Law required of them. This was not a problem directly attributable to government cuts or austerity, nor even a conspiracy against disabled adults or children and their families - it was down to sheer incompetence.
In both cases, families were represented by Irwin Mitchell. Alice Cullingworth, who represented the families in the West Berkshire case, is reported by the BBC to have said (somewhat laconically, it seems to me) that the Council should "take a new decision - this time complying with all their legal duties".
A very much wider problem of Council failure to "comply with all their legal duties" is hinted at in that the BBC report also quotes a Mencap spokesperson saying that Mencap's "own research showed more than half of local authorities had cut spending on short breaks for families." (Is this research publicly available, one wonders?)
In the recently published "Variations In Care: An Analysis Of Cerebral Palsy Provision", Action Cerebral Palsy highlighted the wide variation in care across local authorities in England. More striking was the lack of data on cerebral palsy and the poverty of specialist training in understanding what might be required in far too many local authorities.