All Party Parliamentary Groups, or APPGs as they’re more commonly known, are groups of MPs and members of the house of Lords (Peers) who form informal groups which promote, discuss and campaign on particular issues. Whilst they perform an important function of bringing experts, people with lived experience and politicians together on an issue, they have no official status in parliament. There are hundreds of All-Party Parliamentary Groups (see p128 of this document):

The first guest speaker was Sally Percival who co-chairs the organisation TLAP and the National Coproduction Advisory partnership. Sally shared with us her deeply personal experience of creating a care team around her son and how coproduction and co-design meant that he was able to live his life not the life others chose for him. The lack of coproduction meant he would be doing activities built on assumptions which he had no interest. A coproduced support plan meant her son’s self-esteem sky-rocketed and his skills increased. He has now moved out of her home and into his own, which meant not just independence for him but a new career and life for Sally.

For Sally, coproduction is about:

The first panel tackled the question of “who decides what my care and support looks like?”. Unfortunately, there weren't any people with lived experience on this panel but there were plenty of social care advocates including Vic Rayner (Executive Director at the National Care Forum), Kathy Roberts (Chief Executive of the Association of Mental Health Providers), Christine Eade (Manager at The Pod, Coventry City Council), Rachel Mason (Family Carer and Associate Consultant, Self Directed Futures) and Steve Scown (Chief Executive at Dimensions). 

Vic Rayner pointed out that the social care system for accessing care and support is frustratingly complicated and that personal budgets are one way to enable person-centred care where care is delivered by very skilled workers. Vic gave one of the most powerful statements when she pointed out that 

The second panel had the task of discussing “How do we make best practice common practice?”

James Bullion had some clear messages for social care:

Helen Hayes also pointed out the lack of funding as a failure of government. She agreed that the aim should be on delivery and that we should stick to ‘nothing about us without us’, with the system involving people at every stage of engagement and putting diversity at the heart. Helen felt that there should be a renewed focus on the pay for care workers and the value of relationships – something she felt isn’t, but should be, represented on the balance sheet of all organisations. Her final points included encouraging people to engage with their local members of parliament before the chancellor’s budget in March.

During the questions section for this panel, Becky – from Shared Lives Plus asked Helen Hayes whether she had attended the Social Care Future’s event, where people with disabilities, advocates for the sector and progressive sector leaders discussed the “language” used in our modern discourses of social care. Becky highlighted research being done involving social care futures and carried out by Lancaster University (something Neil Crowther discussed in our up and coming podcast with him). According to the research so far, using the word ‘crisis’ to discuss the care debate effectively shuts down the conversation. Suggesting that when the sector is described as being in crisis, people feel that it’s effectively a foregone conclusion and nothing else can be done. Becky pleaded to Helen that politicians start talking about other ways of framing social care.