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What are social services doing?
• MONTHS ago we were shocked to learn from the Tribune that Islington Social Services had outsourced their residential homes to a private company called Care UK, which subsequently cut the salary of 82 care staff by 50 per cent.
We are extremely grateful to the Tribune’s sleuths for telling us about this, and naturally the unions were deeply concerned. Surely, this was information which social services should have provided to everyone likely to be interested, especially council tax-payers.
Even before hearing this startling news, I had, on behalf of Islington Pensioners’ Forum, repeatedly over the years asked social services for regular reports, since many older people are users of their services or may become so.
Yet ignorance about social services is widespread, since they have never, to my knowledge, described or even outlined their provisions publicly. For instance, how many residential homes and sheltered housing projects are there, with how many beds and how many staff, and what do places cost?
How many older people are receiving domiciliary care, from how many care staff, and what services do they provide? There have been many scandals about the neglect or abuse of the elderly in homes throughout the country. How may we be sure they do not happen here. Are the services monitored (since the council stopped funding Islington Age Concern’s lay visitors) or does the council rely solely on the national Commission for Social Care ?
To get answers to such questions I attended a public consultation meeting called by Islington Adult Social Services on May 17. It took place in a small room at the Peel Institute at Percy Circus, not, as one might have expected, in the Town Hall or the offices in Goswell Road. Perhaps this unusual location was the reason why fewer than 10 people turned up.
I looked forward to getting an up-to-date report from senior officers as to what social services were now doing – their successes and their problems – followed by an opportunity to ask questions. But we got no report, only a paper asking our views on their “strategy”.
What strategy? I had to assume this referred to a fairly recent (though undated) Summary of the Older People’s Joint Commissioning Strategy 2005-2009, prepared jointly with Islington’s NHS Primary Care Trust.
This summary provides much valuable background, demographic information and forecasts, much of it from the Primary Care Trust, and inevitably generalised since a four-year period is a long time.
But when one seeks the nitty-gritty about what social services are doing here and now, it is disappointingly vague. The overview of “objectives and strategy” states: “We want to help people age well.” How nice! Much of what follows is about aims, intentions, targets, focus and improvements aimed at – in the future tense, or giving percentages with no actual figures to base them on.
There have, it’s true, been meetings and opportunities for discussion in January and March on the social services budget and priorities, and service users have been given information affecting themselves.
But what the public surely has a right to know is missing: a report on what services Islington’s social services are providing now, both those which they retain and those they have outsourced. We were never consulted, for instance, about the basic issue (likely to be unpopular) of the outsourcing policies.
This letter is therefore a plea for regular basic reports, with facts and figures, from social services, perhaps quarterly or at least half-yearly, since clearly changes are ongoing.
Older people, particularly, want to know whether other services are being outsourced, whether there is a waiting list for places in residential or sheltered care homes, and whether domiciliary services are being reduced. From compassion for those care staff whose salaries were so drastically cut (even if they were offered a sum in compensation), many people would also wish to know whether they resigned, to be replaced by less qualified staff.
An old-fashioned idea, but surely a reasonable one, to expect a public service to report on its provisions to those who pay for them, as council tax-payers do – especially when its senior staff award themselves salary increases while claiming problems about maintaining service standards.
ANGELA SINCLAIR
Islington Pensioners’ Forum |
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