Independent Living Fund to be shut down by 2015
The fund helps people stay out of residential careA fund which supports more than 21,000 people with severe disabilities is to be phased out by 2015.
The £359m Independent Living Fund pays out an average of £300 a week, to help people pay for carers so they can live at home and not in a care home.
It was already shut to new applicants for this year and will now shut to new claims permanently, said the minister for disabled people, Maria Miller.
Payments to existing users are to continue until 2015.
Ms Miller said: "An independent discretionary trust delivering social care is financially unsustainable."
But Richard Hawkes, chief executive of disability charity Scope, said the decision to phase out the fund was "bemusing".
BBC News | 13 December 2010 - read full report :
