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Home care handover
• ISLINGTON branches of Unison and GMB unions have informed us that Islington Council is privatising its home care service. It is also introducing a “gate-keeping” procedure which could lead to more people needing home care being refused this support. These clients are people with dementia, mental health problems and severe physical disabilities.
Consultation is a democratic necessity. Those whom we elect should consult us about actions they take on our behalf. They have a particular obligation to council tax payers whose money contributes to the services the council administers.
Why did not the council consult residents beforehand about this major change? It seems likely it did not because it foresaw that the measure would be extremely unpopular.
The vulnerable people hitherto in receipt of home care need to know who is responsible for their support, and to whom they can refer for information or to make complaints where necessary.
A private commercial company has no such obligations. All too often its affairs are shrouded in “commercial confidentiality” and its primary concern is to make profits for its management and shareholders.
On behalf of Islington pensioners generally – those receiving home care and those who may need it in the future – we protest strongly against such policy decisions being taken without explanation through public consultation and against cutting services to vulnerable people all too rarely able to protest themselves.
Angela Sinclair
Islington Pensioners’ Forum
• STAFF and trade unions in Islington have recently been told there is to be a wholesale privatisation of the existing in-house home care service.
The council intends to back senior managers in housing and adult social services (HASS) and outsource the service. There will be a gateway service established but that will only be to save money by pushing customers through the service in six weeks.
There has been no consultation with the service users to find out whether it is their wish to have their council-run services outsourced.
There has been some discussion with the trade unions, but HASS director Gwen Ovshinsky and her supporters have not listened. They have decided that the managers who run the service will not even be allowed to mount a bid to win the contract, which is quite unusual.
One would have thought the council would have learned by the mistakes recently highlighted by the report commissioned by chief executive Helen Bailey into the Care UK fiasco, but it seems the agenda is still to proceed gung-ho with yet another privatisation of a valued in-house social care service.
There is a foretaste of things to come in the decision to proceed apace with individual budgets and self-directed care. The executive is now committed to a policy of doling out cash to service users, with few guarantees or protection for staff.
Individual budgets mean that users can buy their own services anywhere, even get a sister to provide home care.
If the service then collapses, the local authority has to continue to foot the bill and provide care. This is a recipe for disaster and the government needs to think how it will make these new ideas work.
Mike Calvert
Assistant branch secretary, Islington Unison
(writing in a personal capacity)
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