FORUM: We must all care about privatising care

Published: 9 June, 2011

ALMOST by definition, for-profit companies cannot provide crucial care services for society’s most vulnerable people.  

Their primary duty is to assure profits to shareholders.  

Once profit motive is the raison d’être for an organisation to exist, that’s where the trouble starts.  

You cut corners, economise on this, have fewer care staff, save a person’s salary and pension scheme, buy cheaper, less healthy food and what happens to the people who need the care is immaterial.  Because it’s the money the scheme’s making that counts. 

And I do feel passionately about it.  

That massive, privately-run company, Southern Cross, with 31,000 people in homes nationwide, was supposed to be the way of the future, privatisation of care and social responsibility.  

It’s the model being imposed throughout the public sector.  

Like councils, government ministries and PFI schools, it sold off assets, buildings and land, for a quick financial fix, then agreed to rent them back on rising rents.  

What happened to the millions it made from the sales?  

Did they reduce charges to residents or increase pay to their care staff?  

Or did they reward shareholders and directors?  

Now their chickens are coming home to roost. Local authorities are trying to reduce, not increase, the amount they pay to private care homes.  

Should centenarians like me go out to work to pay increased rent?

Government policy is based on myths about property generally, like working-class people buying their council flats somehow solving the housing crisis. 

Of course, it all depends on the understanding of the people doing the job and that I don’t know.  

What education have they had for the decisions they are taking? Housing the elderly is a necessary social service and one day, they are going to be elderly too. 

However wealthy they may be today, nobody can guarantee that will continue. 

Just like no one could give assurances about profitability of private old people’s homes.  

Oh, profit, money!  

It’s like when one of the residents here said, “There will always be wars.”  

My response was.  “Certainly! As long as there are certain people who make money out of them.”  

Why is the Mary Feilding Guild home, where I live, so wonderful? Partly because it’s a charity and doesn’t have to make a profit.  

Of course, I’m lucky. At 105 I haven’t needed to experience the care side of things because I’m still mentally and physically able to do a great deal myself.  

Nobody makes my bed or unmakes it.  Nobody makes my breakfast.  

Yes, I get my dinner and now choose to have my supper cooked for me and don’t have to wash up afterwards. 

One thing about the staff here is that nobody does anything grudgingly, not like some places where you hear of residents having to slip staff extra money to get services they’re already paying for.  

At Christmas and new year I contribute to gifts for the group of domestic and care staff but never to an individual and they are not allowed to accept money individually.  

It’s so unlike that dreadful Bristol care home for people with learning difficulties.  

Staff were effectively untrained. 

Nobody seemed to be in charge. Government and local authority cut-backs mean external inspection and supervision are really non-existent.  

The committee that runs this place and the staff know the residents, genuinely care about them and all perform little kindnesses towards us. And I have to say that I now rate innate goodness and love for your fellow human beings as being more important than qualifications.  

You can walk into a place and feel the ethos, the atmosphere.  

My daughter Celia, a social worker in the geriatric wards at the Whittington hospital, got to hear about this place and recommended it to patients and to me.  

We’re part of the community. We have contacts with Highgate Primary School, St Michael’s, Highgate School.  

Children perform concerts and sing us carols at Christmas.  Older ones visit and read to us.  

I go to speak to the children at Highgate Primary School about peace. They ask their teachers, “Is the old lady who lives up the hill still alive?”  

But much as I love them, despite David Cameron’s enthusiasm for “Big Society”, I would not expect or want the local school children to take on full-time care of the elderly any more than I want a private company to take over this place.

• Hetty Bower, who lives at the Mary Feilding Guild home in Highgate, was speaking to Bernard Miller