Guide
The three questions every family is actually asking
They sound like one question. They have three different kinds of answer, they fail in three different ways, and answering one tells you nothing reliable about the other two.
Why this matters before anything else
Families arrive with a single question: what help can we get? Every organisation they ask answers whichever third of it they happen to handle, and the family leaves with a partial answer they reasonably believe is a whole one.
Separating the three is the first move in Senior Support Navigation, because each one is answered by a different kind of evidence and each one goes wrong in a way the others do not.
Question one: what are we owed?
This is a statutory question. Somebody wrote a rule with an income limit, an age floor, a residency requirement, or a service record, and published it with a date. It is the only one of the three where a definite answer exists in advance.
How it fails: a family is told no by someone who half remembered the rule, and stops looking. Money they were legally owed goes unclaimed for years, and because nobody is told, nobody ever discovers the error.
What a good answer looks like: the specific rule, where it was read, when it was read, what fact would change the answer, and who actually decides.
Question two: what is actually open?
This is a local, capacity-limited question. A programme can exist, be perfectly real, serve eleven zip codes, have a waitlist eight months long, and have had two openings last Tuesday. Nothing in any rule tells you that.
How it fails: a family is handed a list of organisations that all technically serve their area, rings nine of them across two weeks, and finds every one full, closed, or serving a different population. The list was accurate. It was also useless.
What a good answer looks like: open, waitlisted or closed, with the date it was last confirmed, and an honest distinction between an organisation that provides the help and one that refers you onward.
Question three: what happens next?
This is neither statutory nor capacity limited. It is sequencing, paperwork, ownership, and who is waiting on whom.
How it fails: everything was approved and nothing began. The plan named twelve correct things and no order to do them in, and four months later a household with an entirely accurate plan has started none of it.
What a good answer looks like: three things, in order, each with one person's name attached, and a date to check back.
The test to apply to any advice you are given. Ask which of the three it answered. Most answers cover exactly one and are presented as complete. That is not dishonesty, it is that each organisation genuinely only knows its own third.
Why they get collapsed
Because from the outside they look identical. All three are answered by the words "you can get help with that", and a family has no way to tell whether the person saying it is describing a statutory entitlement, a service with a waitlist, or a general possibility.
It also happens because collapsing them is easier for whoever is answering. A single list of resources is quick to produce and impossible to act on. Three separated answers take real work and are the only version that turns into anything.
How they fit back together
They are answered separately and then assembled into one plan, so the family never has to hold the distinction in their head. That is the whole design: the seam is our problem, not theirs.
The three are covered in detail at entitlement, availability and follow-through.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026
All three, answered together.
One check, one plan, with the reasoning shown on every line.