By any measure, personalisation has not been a success. There is widespread confusion as to its purpose, a marked unevenness in its implementation and a veritable chasm between government rhetoric on the issue and the harsh reality of its practical application. Crucially, the context in which it is being imposed is making any future success increasingly unlikely – at least for most service providers and (often, would-be) users.

In April 2013, a series of major benefits cuts began, representing ‘the biggest contraction in Britain's welfare state since its foundation in the 1940s’. As Sue Marsh has put it:

The restrictions to Housing Benefit include the ‘bedroom tax’. Its firstknown victim, Stephanie Bottrill, left a suicide note that simply said: ‘The only people to blame are the government’. The Independent Living Fund, which tops up council social care packages for those most severely disabled, has been closed to new clients, and will be scrapped completely from 2015 onwards. It has been estimated that the cuts to benefits and services will rob 3.7 million disabled people of £28 billion by 2017/18. The human costs are, of course, much harder to calculate.

Even before most of these cuts were announced, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights believed there to be ‘inadequate legal safeguards to protect and promote the right to independent living’. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, upheld the right of Kensington and Chelsea Council (the UK's richest borough) to leave a disabled woman lying in her bed wearing incontinence pads for 12 hours each night, rather than supplying her with the help that she needs to use the toilet.