The Comission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) has delivered its fourth annual report to Parliament on the state of social care in England. One of its main themes is the extent of of the implementation of the Government's personalisation programme. The aim of personalisation is to make social services, such as help in the home and respite care, more responsive to individual need and to move away from a "one size fits all model". This is an issue of particular relevance to frail and vunerable elderly people because of their reliance on these services.

The report concluded that local authority social services departments have taken steps to address the personalisation agenda and there have been some outstanding examples of people's lives being radically transformed. However social service departments are at an early stage of transforming social care and developments are patchy and vary between different groups of people.

CSCI is the inspectorate for social care in England and also has responsibility for assessing local councils' social services performance but will be superseded by the Care Quality Comission in April 2009. The full report can be downloaded free from http://www.csci.org.uk/default.aspx?page=2629&key