Recommendation 25

We asked about the design of the scheme and why the Department had not defined the rules more tightly.43 The Department explained that the scheme has an element of prescription – the eligibility criteria and the five principles.44 At the same time, the scheme’s guidance needed to be fairly loose because a person’s impairment, their job role, and the size of their employer influenced what it would be reasonable for an employer to provide and therefore what the scheme might fund. The Department said that it could make the scheme more prescriptive but people would not like it as they valued the flexible and personalised nature of the support provided. Its view was that having a stricter scheme would not help people or deliver the outcomes it was seeing at present.45