Personalisation was a big issue again in the conference I went to on Friday on safeguarding adults. There is a serious concern that the government is limiting its sights to ‘cash for care’ to save money rather than expanding its horizons to ensuring that people get a personally tailored response to their care needs. This is like British governments always have with innovations in social work, we only have to think of care management, which was intended to make social work with older people and people with disabilities more flexible. The credit crunch and its budgetary aftermath is depressing for the future of social work. Lucky the older, frail person who has a flexible, high-quality charity or social enterprise in their area, that isn’t into making money or cutting budgets, because it looks as though that is going to be the standard form of social care services for the foreseeable future.