Social Care Charge Hikes Dumped

Huge increases in charges for day care and meals on wheels for pensioners in Shetland have been dropped after councillors backed down from an earlier decision. The move was greeted with delight by pensioners and disabled groups who were facing hikes of 172.7 per cent for day care and 81.8 per cent for meals on wheels.

Instead charges for those services, including laundry, will rise by a modest five per cent as of 1 January 2007. A raft of other measures, including charging for home helps and personal care, are being put on hold until the council has discussed the future development of social care at a meeting on 8 February next year.

Back in September, the council voted to implement drastic increases in a bid to save £350,000 from the social care budget. At the time only four councillors voted against the measures. Yesterday, they unanimously decided to reverse the move.

Earlier this month a petition with 190 signatures was handed in to Lerwick Town Hall calling on the council to think again.

Former chairman of the council’s education committee, 87 year old Bill Smith, said pensioners will be happy with the decision. Speaking after the meeting he attended together with chairwoman of the Shetland branch of Age Concern, Wilma Halcrow, Mr Smith said: “If these charges had been levied as decided in September, quite a number of people would have found it very, very difficult to take advantage of the services. On the whole I am quite pleased with the decision, and the other parts of the measures are probably too complex to reach a decision in one meeting.”

Mrs Halcrow said: “There has been a lot of concern in the community. I am glad that councillors have seen sense. An increase of five per cent is acceptable.”

Looking ahead to the next council meeting in early February, she added: “I sincerely hope they are not going to put up the charges in the way they said they would do. The council seem to think pensioners are wealthy and get plenty of benefits, but the reality is that if you are one pound over the threshold you are not entitled to benefits.”

Councillors had been inundated with representations by local people who had expressed their disgust with the previous decision. They had been told that pensioners and the disabled were more than happy to pay their share for services but refused to be charged excessively.

Yesterday everybody around the council table was prepared to back down and to put in place a better and fairer system. And there was agreement that those entitled to state benefits had to be assisted in accessing the funds they were entitled to.

Councillor Gussie Angus warned his fellow councillors that they were back discussing the issue of social care charging again because they refused to acknowledge the underlying problem which was that in the light of falling school rolls and increased needs for social care spending priorities of the local authority had to be altered radically.

“We unwittingly targeted the most vulnerable by agreeing across the board cuts. The money has to come from the education budget,” he told the meeting.

Councillor Leonard Groat said islanders needed to get used to being means tested as this was the best way to ensure that services could be targeted to those in need. This, he said, should be underpinned by steps to ensure that claimants could access all the government benefits they were entitled to.

As such a service did not exist within the council’s social care department at the moment, ways of introducing this in conjunction with the Citizens Advice Bureau should be investigated. “We want to make sure the people of Shetland are getting the best care that is possible,” he said.

Councillors finally agreed with a motion made by council convener Sandy Cluness to restrict the increases to five per cent, hold an internal council seminar with social care department officers and consider the way forward on 8 February 2007.