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What is the true cost of a nought per cent tax rise?
• FOLLOWING the reporting of changes to our Careline services, I would like to clarify our proposals for the service for vulnerable older residents and reassure residents that the level of service will not be changing.
There has been a very thorough review of this service which started last spring under the previous administration. We have involved external organisations, such as the London Ambulance Service and the Primary Care Trust and considered what other authorities, such as Westminster and Kent do.
Following careful consideration we have agreed that the double-handed callout, which is not done elsewhere, should be continued in Camden.
This enables our staff to not only gain access to someone’s flat if they have a fall, but to pick them up and make sure they are okay.
Often this means there is no need to call an ambulance. Whilst we found that in most if not all other boroughs this is well beyond the service available we agreed that we would not seek to make savings by reducing this side of the service.
However, we found that the same staff who carry out the visits are also answering the phone. The economics of this don’t make sense, especially when there are experienced call handling centres, which operate for a fraction of the cost.
We have specified that the call handling must maintain standards and be with a specialist social alarm provider as well as cutting costs. We are confident that as a result of this project we are likely to see an improvement in the service as well as a saving in costs.
Cllr Martin Davies Executive member for Adult Social Care and Health
• THANKS to the CNJ for exposing plans by the Lib Dem/ Tory council to raise huge sums of money on the back of elderly people’s care homes.
It must be very tempting, given the price of property in Camden, to raise money in this way. But this is councillors behaving like property developers and taking huge financial risks with public money, and with the lives of elderly people.
What if property prices crash? Or finance rates go up? What if loans cannot be paid off? It is council tax payers who will have to foot the bill and the most vulnerable elderly who will pay the price of half-built replacement homes.
SALLY GIMSON
Chairwoman Gospel Oak Labour Branch
Oak Village, NW5
• I TOOK Councillor Martin Davies, Executive member for Social Services, to task when he told a packed Elderly People’s Liaison Group meeting at the Charlie Ratchford Centre on Monday February 26 that it was planned to demolish the centre and transfer it to Crogsland Road where some flats would be built above a new centre.
The reason, he said, to close the Charlie Ratchford Centre was that it was not accessible enough.
I would remind him as that instead of demolishing centres for elderly people like this one they could, for very little cost, engage an access auditor specialising in all matters to do with improving the accessibility of venues for disabled and elderly people.
Why demolish a perfectly good and viable centre on the excuse it isn’t accessible in parts? and build a new centre at great cost right by a school football pitch? But I forget…the demolishing of this and other centres like Ingestre Road is simply to make some cash by selling off the centre and its land to private developers for luxury housing.
Oh yes, so that it is part of the move to a nought per cent rise in council tax.
Elderly people like the Charlie Ratchford Centre for its atmosphere and facilities – they have done for 40 years – I only wish councillors like the late Charlie Ratchford were alive today.
The nought per cent increase went through at the February council meeting – but at what cost to the elderly, to social housing, to advice services and those seeking advice?
I wonder how this council will justify going for that nought percent increase for the next three years and at what cost? More job losses, more cuts to what the vulnerable need.
CLLR ROGER ROBINSON
Opposition Lead on Adult Social Care
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