Since October 2014 people eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare were given the legal right to have a personal health budget.
[4] Birmingham Hospice has a Personal Health Budget Team which brings personalised social care to end of life patients.
[8] Personal budgets have been widely adopted in social care and have been championed by, among others, Liz Kendall, who advocated extending the idea into health services.
Simon Duffy, who was the chief executive of the influential social enterprise company In Control, was one of the creators of Self Directed Support which piloted the idea with people with learning disabilities.
"[9] His ideas were formulated in the Deinstitutionalisation of social care, where there has been much greater progress in the development of personal budgets.
He was awarded the Albert Medal by Ivan Lewis who was at that time the minister for social care and championed his ideas in the Department of Health.
He says this would "free up a lot of resources for better outcomes and at a lower cost.”[10] A survey by Pulse in September 2015, based on Freedom of Information requests to Clinical Commissioning Groups was headlined "Revealed: NHS funding splashed on holidays, games consoles and summer houses" and generated considerable publicity.
There were reports of fraud and improper behaviour by brokers who handled money on behalf of vulnerable people who were not able to manage the budget themselves.