Personalisation and adult social care: future options for the reform of public services

This article reviews the advent of personal budgets in English social care. While debate has tended to focus on the processes/outcomes associated with personal budgets, this article conceptualises this way of working as a form of ‘conditional resource entitlement’ (a situation in between direct service provision and income adjustment in which the individual is given direct access to resources, but with conditions attached). Viewing personal budgets in this way enables a number of different futures to be imagined, and the remainder of the article sets out different options for future welfare reform.