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Camden News - by CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
Published: 11 December 2008

Elderly residents ‘fobbed off’ as council racks up £1m saving

Campaigners warn that means-testing has left many without vital services

ELDERLY residents may have missed out on help at home while council chiefs racked up £1 million in social services savings.
The Town Hall has claimed it has saved the money because fewer people have asked for home visits in recent months. But Age Concern Camden, the leading charity for pensioners, said the recent introduction of care charges and means-testing has scared off some elderly clients from using services – even if they still need them.
Chief executive Gary Jones said people searching for care services were being “fobbed off” at the first hurdle on the telephone, while others were struggling to get an assessment booked to see whether they qualify for free help.
He said: “Instead of the saving being evidence of low need, Age Concern Camden believes that the council may have reduced expectations and demand by the way it is assessing people.
“We have clients who have had to push to receive a full assessment of their needs through a home visit and felt ‘fobbed off’ with the first stage telephone contact.”
The charity has fired off a letter to council urging it to rethink its spending for the next year.
While many home care services were once free, Camden began charging last October and now means-tests all service users to see how much they can afford to pay.
In October the New Journal revealed an 89-year-old woman had reduced her baths from two sessions a week to just one after she was sent invoices of nearly £500 a month for the service.
A campaign group, Campaign Against Care Charges, are also fighting the bills and have described them as an unfair “tax” against society’s most vulnerable.
Carer Clem Alford, 63, from Bloomsbury, said one in six clients had cut their care or at least reduced it on the grounds of cost – regardless of whether they needed it or not.
He said: “They don’t go anywhere or do anything – they’re only just surviving and just stay home.”
A Camden Council press officer said yesterday that people were receiving the care they need. She said: “All clients that have been assessed as having a critical or substantial need have had their needs met through provision of care and support.”
She added that while council figures show 13,505 hours of care were needed per week in November 2006, need had declined since then and now stood at around 11,000 hours a week.

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