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Protesters march to the Town Hall to demonstrate against cuts including meals on wheels |
Penny-pinching on pensioners is taking a cheap shot at elderly
Saving money by handing services for the elderly to the private sector sells our most vulnerable residents short, writes Sally Gimson
MRS C has lived in Camden for all of her 84 years. But now she has broken her hip.
Her daughter is worried about her living at home and would like her to move into sheltered housing. But there is no sheltered housing available in Camden for an old lady who was persuaded to buy her council house in the 1980s. Her daughter has been told that if she wants that kind of accommodation for her mother, she must move her out of the borough.
There are many like her. New housing for the elderly will be built over the next few years in Camden, with government subsidies, but no-body is planning to build much more than already exists and no projections have been made public that show what the elderly population in Camden is going to look like in the future – the Office for National Statistics be-lieves the number of people in England over 85 is likely to treble in the next 50 years.
The strategy looks very much like one of fulfilling minimum requirements with the hope that those who need more care or cannot afford private provision will choose to leave the borough. But as people said at the meeting we organised into services for the elderly last month, it is hard to know. Information is difficult to come by as the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives bring forward measures by stealth to conceal the unpalatable truth, even from themselves perhaps.
It certainly fits the rather crude current council slogan of “better and cheaper” and yet we will all grow old, and when we do we must fear our borough will reject us as not fit, rich or beautiful enough.
For that is where much of the money saved is going – to beautify the more well-off areas and improve their services.
The uncomfortable fact is that the old and vulnerable are expensive – they need people looking after them and looking out for them.
Of course, old-fashioned planners and commissioners are literal minded and have seen personal relationships as uncontrollable, expensive and time-wasting, but that attitude at central government level is changing and Labourministers increasingly recognise that personalisation is the key to health and education.
There is a recognition that when you start taking everyone off the ground, it is the most helpless who suffer.
Take council house repairs. It may be right that a few council tenants have become too dependent on the council to carry out every sort of tiny repair in their home. It may seem logical for the council to try to ration it. This is undoubtedly the thinking behind the current call centre for housing repairs.
The trouble is that if you are old or mentally ill, you may not be able to get a sink unblocked or you may lock yourself out of your house. If you have to wait on the phone for hours for an understaffed call centre and then be told you will be charged up to £150 for a council locksmith, you are likely to despair. But it is a consequence of an impersonal system which does not differentiate.
Call centres are cheap to run and the council is now to put housing officers into call centres and privatise the council caretaking service. Meals on wheels is going out to tender to a private company. These measures will save millions of pounds, but they will also impersonalise the service.
For it is the trusting personal relationships which makes life tolerable. It is that caretaker who looks out for us, not because it is in his or her job description, but because he is local and knows the old people who live on the estate.
Would an employee on a strict contract in a private firm do the same? The quality of meals on wheels might well be improved, but would private contractors look out for old people and hold keys to their flats in the same way that council workers currently do?
And will the estate officer sitting in a call centre know that the elderly person who has not paid their rent has not done so because they are suffering from Alzheimers, and will he/she just send in the bailiffs?
And all of this is before we begin to consider the extra money the elderly are now being charged for their care at home – where the council is charging many more people for home-help than it did a year ago and going into elderly people’s homes to means-test with unprecedented zeal.
Our borough is rich – some of the wealthiest people in London live here. We have a tradition of being caring. We should be looking at our wealth and thinking how radically to improve the personal service the old and ill get, rather than letting a regressive council push us back into a brutish and primitive Thatcherite dark age.
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