How are direct payments being spent specifically?

Dear Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead,

My full name is [name removed].

☆For the attention of Adult Social Services☆

The term data in the heading refers to the actual activity/service/goods that a direct payment was/is used for and not the broader category that it falls within. Of course, the broader category can be included as well if you wish. Where direct payments are used for personal assistants (PA), these can be excluded from the dataset.

The primary purpose of this request is to receive a full breakdown of how individual users are spending their direct payments (aged 21-55). The amount of each payment would be very useful but not essential. The total direct payment amount each person receives is very important though and this can be displayed weekly or monthly or whichever is easiest for you.

So, as I have mentioned, please provide all data in relation to how direct payments are specifically being used by users aged 21-55 - all other ages can be excluded. The more comprehensive and detailed this list is, the more useful it will be for this FOI request. For example, data showing DPs being used for a gym membership (including how much it costs) would be far more valuable than data showing DPs being used for "leisure activities" which would be too broad; nonspecific and unhelpful.

If you require dates to extract this data could you extract it from the following financial years:

• 2018-2019
• 2022-2023

I appreciate that this data can be quite laborious at times, especially if extracting the data from a manual trawl of individual care and support plans. It may or may not be easier to consider past audits and current monitoring systems to extract the same data.

To compliment the core request, could you kindly send me your direct payments policy including your practice guidance for practitioners. Could you also send me your Care and Support Planning Policy along with your practice guidance for practitioners. Please send any other policies you feel are relevant or related to the policies and practice guidance documents requested above.

Yours faithfully,

[name removed]