Southampton Learning Disability Partnership Board

My name is Charles Hodgson and I work to make “Valuing people” happen. I promised the Southampton Learning Disability Partnership Board that I would work with a group of people to look at all the things in the White Paper called “Choice and control.” 

The 5 things that I promised to work on are:-

• Person centred planning – a lot of time is spent in helping people to learn about making their own plans and start up circles of people who will help them.
• Advocacy – over the last two years we have looked at how people can get advocacy in the city. We have been given some money to help self advocacy groups to become stronger.
• Direct payments – is something we can do better. We made a book about how to get Direct Payments, but we need to find more people who want to try having control of how to spend the money on their care.
• Making information easy to understand – We produced a report called “Clearer Information for all” which tells people how they need to give information in ways that people understand. The Council has given some money and we have started a project, mostly run by people with learning disabilities, which aims to make things better.
• Involving people  - this involves making sure that people worth learning disabilities are involved in planning services the being part of the decisions that can affect their lives. Eight people with learning disabilities are supported to talk about the work of the Partnership Board and attend the meetings.

What do I do?

I go to the Partnership Board and LIG meetings. 
Sometimes I go to meetings in London to tell people what we are doing in Southampton. 
I act as manager to Pete Collins the PCP worker. 
I organise the Clearer Information for all Project. 
I act as chair of the steering group.

Something about me

I used to be a teacher and an adviser of schools in South Yorkshire. I moved to Southampton about twenty years ago. I only spend some of the week on Valuing People work. My full time work is as manager of Choices Advocacy, which started in 1994 when Tatchbury Mount hospital was going to close. It provides independent advocacy for people with learning disabilities across South-West Hampshire