NHS leader defends expansion of personal health budgets to 100 000 people by 2020

Experts have clashed over the strength of evidence used to support rolling out personal health budgets in England.

Sam Bennett, NHS England’s head of personal health budgets and integrated personal commissioning, came under attack for saying that the case for a big extension of personal health budgets was “compelling.”

Peter Beresford, a social policy professor who heads the Centre for Citizen Participation at Brunel University, accused NHS chiefs of adopting the same model for personal budgets that was shown to have failed in social care and said that this would undermine NHS principles. He said, “We have a social care system that everybody including ministers says is in utter crisis, and yet we are turning to that policy for improvement to …