Rishi Sunak: his policies left a carer in darkness because she could not afford a lightbulb for her kitchen; meanwhile he has had the National Grid upgraded in his local area so he can heat his private swimming pool.
After a carer was left without enough money to buy a lightbulb for her kitchen, Rishi Sunak – prime minister and richest man in the UK – tried to say he was putting more money into social care, as if that was going to help her:
In our Panorama on the UK economy, we heard from a woman in Cornwall called Nicky – who couldn't afford to replace a broken lightbulb until the next pay day. @jonkay01 asked the Prime Minister about Nicky's situation on @BBCBreakfast this morning. This is the exchange. pic.twitter.com/gUwYrU16Np
His claim – that the best thing he can do for Nicky and others like her is to reduce inflation – is pure bunkum bafflegab.
Cutting inflation isn’t cutting prices! They’ll keep climbing but at a slower rate. And he’s absolutely, dig-his-heels-in-the-ground adamant that he isn’t giving carers any more in wages. That money is for billionaires!
Oh – and the amount he’s putting into social care?
He’s halved it (allegedly) before even starting to hand it out:
It’s clear that we can’t trust these politicians to give us the facts.
Every interview like this should be followed by a fact check report, explaining whether the claims made by the politician concerned are correct – or if that person is lying through their teeth.
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Care: the head of NHS England once said he wanted change but now it seems clear it will be for the worse.
The Tory government promised to revitalise social care in the UK – but seems set to renege on that vow.
Is this the next big Tory scandal?
Ministers are poised to cut £250m from investment in the social care workforce in England, it has been reported, in a move that providers say could set back care “for years to come”.
With more than 165,000 care worker jobs vacant, and low pay driving staff to quit for better wages in retail and hospitality, care providers and councils have been clamouring for investment in recruitment and retention. Inadequate staffing levels are frequently noted as a cause of neglect and poor care by the Care Quality Commission.
However, according to the Health Service Journal (subscription), the government is poised to water down a promise it made in the December 2021 social care white paper to dedicate £500m to “investment in knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing, and recruitment policies [that] will improve social care as a long-term career choice”. This amount could be cut to £250m.
Care: this is the most illustrative image I could find that doesn’t show the people involved in the story – but how many severely disabled people are getting the care they need?
This is a serious breach of care. It seems care home staff and a UK city council spent a severely disabled man’s money on things that weren’t for him – and lied to his family about it.
Ian Reeves was a resident at Marston Court Care Home, Leicester, from 2007 until he died in February 2021. His next of kin, sister Sharon McConnell, developed serious concerns about the care he was receiving and how his money was being spent after their mother died in 2018.
She found that his bedroom was bare and he was sitting in a broken wheelchair, so she asked for control of his finances – but was refused.
So she applied to the courts to become a deputy – with the council retaining the role of appointee – and this was granted. Then she requested information on what had been done with his money.
She found that thousands of pounds had gone into and out of his bank account over the years – being spent on women’s and children’s clothes, cosmetics and toys he could not use.
She also found her wheelchair-bound brother’s money had been spent on Zumba classes and chiropody, which she also found strange. The council told her the Zumba classes were specially adapted and he enjoyed taking part.
There was much more (see the source article – link below – for details). Ms McConnell wanted more information but was frustrated by the response, so she urged the council, the police, the Care Quality Commission and the ombudsman to carry out their own investigations.
The police and the CQC very quickly backed out. The council concluded the home had mismanaged her brother’s finances and that more than £1,500 of his money was ‘unaccounted for’.
It ordered the home to apologise, pay the missing money back and carry out a review of its policies for managing residents’ finances. But the home did not accept the council’s findings and claimed the spending on Zumba classes, clothing and toys all met Ian’s needs.
Both Marsden Court and the council have been found guilty of failing her brother and maladministration by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.
The ombudsman concluded both the council and home mismanaged Ian’s finances. Its report, which refers to Ian only as ‘Mr C’, highlights a catalogue of mistakes by both organisations.
Ms McConnell has been offered apologies and £500 in compensation – to make up for the loss of thousands of pounds.
But bosses at the home, while acknowledging they had to learn lessons on good practice from the case, have said they don’t recognise other concerns that had been raised.
They said the home had received a clean bill of health from the Care Quality Commission (which had backed away from investigating, remember) and the council (which had admitted failings) and other professionals regularly visited the home and viewed Ian’s room.
That’s where this story ends. But it raises questions about the care of other severely disabled people at homes around the UK – the most obvious being the following:
How many other people have received – or are receiving – the same or similar treatment to that received by Ian Reeves?
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The cache of 100,000 WhatsApp messages by Matt Hancock about Covid-19, from 2020, in which he discussed delaying or failing to test people going into care homes from the community, got a thorough airing on the BBC’s Politics Live and in Parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions.
PMQs focused mostly on the fact that information about the government’s behaviour during the Covid crisis is starting to drip out piecemeal, meaning it is now a matter of urgency that the independent inquiry into the response to the pandemic be concluded and report in good time.
The discussion on the talk show was more about the content of the messages – and did, in fact, touch on the fact that these messages all came long after the big decisions about testing for Covid-19 in care homes had already been made.
Hancock had known since February that year that people from the community, coming into homes, were infecting the people living there, and since March that people there were dying of Covid-19.
He chose to do nothing about it until April – and then, as the messages indicate, he didn’t do enough.
So, is this a storm in a teacup?
Judge for yourself:
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Matt Hancock: the current WhatsApp controversy makes it seem he only considered testing people in care homes from April 14, 2020 – but existing information shows he had been ruling it out for around two months (since February) despite mounting deaths.
No wonder Isabel Oakeshott was so liverish on Politics Live – she was about to become the centre of a new Covid-19 controversy.
Ms Oakeshott is the person who leaked 100,000 Matt Hancock WhatsApp messages that seem to suggest he has not been altogether truthful about government plans for Covid-19 testing in care homes during 2020. She had access to them while “helping” him write his memoir.
Spokespeople for Hancock have said the messages have been doctored to present a false impression.
But my recollection is that the controversy at the time had little to do with what these messages say. I made my point on Twitter as follows:
I'm confused about this #MattHancock#Covid19#CareHomes story. At the time, the problem was that people leaving hospital WEREN'T being tested before going into homes and were infecting people there. Workers were also spreading the disease from home to home. #PoliticsLive 1/
3/ Testing in #CareHomes was not put in place at all until April 15, 2020. Advice from SAGE said on February 10 that "there is already sustained transmission in the UK" – in the community, but this was ignored. Official guidance from Feb 25-Mar 12 was … #PoliticsLive
5/ Whatever decisions #MattHancock made, it is clear that #CareHomes were NOT given the resources they needed, when they needed them, and he was responsible for that. He should have sent people to #NightingaleHospitals rather than the homes. #PoliticsLive
So there you have it. Despite advice from SAGE in February 2020 that Covid-19 was already being transmitted between people in the community, Hancock put out official guidance saying there was no such transmission and nobody in a care home was likely to be infected.
Care home staff who moved from one home to another were also not tested, meaning they were able to catch the disease from patients at one home and transmit it to those at any others they visited.
This remained official advice until March 12, 2020, despite the fact that care homes had been recording deaths related to Covid-19 from March 2 onwards – 10 days previously.
The UK only went into lockdown on March 23.
Care homes did not start testing for the disease until April 15 (of people leaving hospital), and regular tests of all staff and residents did not start until July.
Now check this against the current story (I’ll use the BBC version as the Telegraph, which broke this story, is behind a paywall):
Government guidance later mandated tests only for those leaving hospital.
In one message, dated 14 April, Mr Hancock reportedly told aides that Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medial officer for England, had conducted an “evidence review” and recommended “testing of all going into care homes, and segregation whilst awaiting result”.
The message came a day before the publication of Covid-19: Our Action Plan for Adult Social Care, a government document setting out plans to keep the care system functioning during the pandemic.
Mr Hancock said the advice represented a “good positive step” and that “we must put into the doc”, to which an aide responded that he had sent the request “to action”.
But later the same day, Mr Hancock messaged again saying he would rather “leave out” a commitment to test everyone entering care homes from the community and “just commit to test & isolate ALL going into care from hospital”.
“I do not think the community commitment adds anything and it muddies the waters,” he said.
A spokesman for Mr Hancock said this followed an operational meeting, where he was advised it was not possible to test everyone entering care homes.
When the care plan was published on 15 April, it said the government would “institute a policy of testing all residents prior to admission to care homes”, but that that would “begin with all those being discharged from hospital”.
It said only that it would “move to” a policy of testing everyone entering care homes from the community.
The WhatsApp messages have it that Hancock was only advised to start testing everybody going into care homes on April 14.
But in fact, SAGE had warned him in February – two months previously – that Covid-19 was already being transmitted in the community, and it is clear that community transmission was considered likely to cause infections within care homes from the government advice that was published on February 25.
And death figures from care homes clearly showed that Covid-19 had caused deaths there from March 2 onwards, so Hancock had no reason to believe that these homes were unaffected.
But he waited nearly two months before doing anything.
The lack of testing kits in sufficient numbers has been blamed for the failure to test everybody who needed it – but this is not an acceptable response. The government had known of the threat since late 2019 but had not bothered to take timely action, and this is the reason too few testing kits were available.
And more than 43,000 people died.
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Money: the cost-of-living crisis means more cash is needed to cover the care of severely disabled people – but councils don’t have enough.
Here’s a little-known consequence of the cost-of-living crisis: disabled people are being evicted from charity-run care homes because local councils are refusing to pay increased costs.
These are people with severe disabilities whose care can cost anything between £85,000 and £150,000 per year.
The charity Leonard Cheshire said it had served 11 eviction notices on contracts with councils that had been under re-negotiation without agreement since February. Two were rescinded after councils agreed to pay uprated fees.
The fee increases reflect the rising costs of wages, energy and food due to the cost-of-living crisis that has been largely caused by the UK’s Conservative government, due to Brexit and energy privatisation that has led to failures to upgrade to cheap, locally-generated energy.
Leonard Cheshire has spent millions of pounds from its own reserves over the last few years, subsidising care services that councils have failed to fund adequately – but now says it can no longer afford to continue doing so.
Mencap has not evicted anybody because it generally doesn’t own the properties they occupy – but is subsidising one in five of the state-funded care packages it provides to 4,000 people – so that’s 800 of them. The cost to the charity is millions of pounds.
Evicted residents are unlikely to become homeless because their council or NHS funder has a duty to provide alternative care.
But the concern is that moving will disrupt the care that people get, and cheaper alternative arrangements will be of poorer quality or based far away from their family support network.
Ironically, the evictions are prompted by concerns that the level of council funding no longer guarantees basic safety and quality standards.
Inevitably, the government has claimed it provides plenty of money to support adult social care services – with the £7.5 billion available over two years constituting the biggest funding increase in UK history.
Conspicuously missing is any comment on whether this is enough money to cover the increased costs of care.
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Tory leader candidate Liz Truss would divert £13 billion earmarked for the NHS to social care, to catch up on delayed Covid treatment there.
Is that a good idea? It’s certainly populist. But isn’t diverting funds away from the NHS when routine asymptomatic Covid testing is about to end – and the disease has this summer caused almost twice as many deaths as last summer – extremely foolhardy?
Nobody expects the ending of tests to last because a surge of new Covid cases is expected in the autumn. But the decision to end asymptomatic testing has alarmed health experts who have cautioned against dismantling the surveillance of Covid while cases remain high.
As it is, the chief executive of health think tank the King’s Fund has said handing the money to social care is “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.
Richard Murray said it was “not a sustainable solution to the health and care crisis”.
In any case, it is unlikely that the money will actually materialise.
It is supposed to come from increased National Insurance contributions announced under Boris Johnson last year – but Truss wants to scrap the rise and find the cash from the general tax take (which is a contradiction in terms; public funding and taxation doesn’t work like that).
So as the NHS faces its worst winter crisis yet, the front-runner to be the new prime minister wants to take the imaginary money that was going to help it, and let it do its nonexistent good in social care. LUNACY!
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Help! One can imagine the person inside the care home saying that to their relatives.
Tory Health Secretary Steve Barclay is looking abroad for employees to plug the gaps in care home staffing. Didn’t we quit the EU to stop people from foreign countries coming to the UK and taking our jobs?
Details indicating the scale of the problem are here.
Workers have been walking out to take less stressful, better-paid jobs in supermarkets, hospitality, hairdressing and factory work, according to care home managers.
Common reasons for quitting are low pay worsened by high inflation, and burnout.
Social care reforms focusing on capping costs for service users have been criticised for failing to address the staffing shortage or increasing pay.
So Barclay is going to foreign countries, asking people there to come to the UK to work incredibly hard ministering to people’s needs – for very little pay.
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Money: Rishi Sunak is offering cost of living payments of £800 for people with disabilities – but are government assurances that the payment won’t be taken by councils worth the time taken to provide them?
Are you convinced by this?
Concerns had been raised that people with disabilities will not gain any benefit from government payments of £650 for those on means-tested benefits, and another £150 for recipients of disability benefits.
This is because disabled people receiving social care provided in their own homes by their local council must make a financial contribution – usually everything above the minimum income of £94.15 per week.
So, in theory, all £800 of the cost-of-living support provided by the government could be taken by local authorities in care charges.
Challenged on this by Disability News Service, the Department for Health and Social Care has said it does not think the payment will be taken by councils.
The DHSC reckons that, because the payment is a one-off, it will not be considered as regular income and so will not be included in disabled people’s regular incomes and affect the so-called Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG).
That’s all very well – but why not simply make an announcement to that effect?
If the government stipulates that this money may not be considered in council’s calculations, then councils will have to accept that, and leave the cash alone.
Without such a rule, there is no cast-iron guarantee that this will happen. I wonder why the Tories haven’t bothered to make it already. And I wonder how many other people are in a similar situation.
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Sunak: he’d rather hand social care to profit-making American companies than invest in a UK-based service that might actually help people.
Here’s a good investigation from iNews: Rishi Sunak tried to get US-based social care companies to bring their businesses to the UK.
He tried to get social care firms Honor and Unite Us, healthcare data firm Komodo Health, health insurance firm Devoted Health, and cancer detection company Grail (whose parent Illumina is advised by former PM David Cameron) to profit from UK citizens’ care needs.
They all turned him down:
According to partially redacted Treasury minutes of the meeting… “US healthcare firms want to focus on their domestic market before contemplating expansion, because i) it’s so vast: population and spend per capita much higher than e.g. in the UK; ii) it’s complicated and idiosyncratic; it’s not a portable approach.
“UK healthcare has historically not been especially innovative, but some participants reported positive engagements where they’ve worked with the NHS recently.”
This is particularly telling:
A Government spokesperson said: “We have a strong track record of promoting overseas investment to the UK to boost our economy and level up the country.”
Is that because it’s easier than investing in doing it ourselves?
Trouble is, the profits go out of the country too – leaving the UK even more impoverished due to Tory policies.
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