Care for the elderly will be hit hard by local council cuts

Anna Bawden looks at how harsh spending cuts will hit those who use frontline services

Pam Edmonds, 88, has been attending a day care centre near Exeter twice a week for seven years. It has been a lifeline ever since spinal problems left her unable to walk. A resident of Broadclyst, a small village a few miles outside Exeter, Edmonds, who lives alone, was isolated until she was referred to the day centre. “I couldn’t go out on my own ever,” she says.

Attending the Clyst Centre has revolutionised her social life. Volunteer drivers collect her and take her home, and in addition to the quizzes, playing cards and games, a highlight is the hot meal. “The dinner’s always very good,” she says.

The centre, located in a building attached to Pinhoe and Broadclyst GP surgery, is run by Clyst Caring Friends, a charity set up at the request of local doctors to help bring patients into the surgery and reduce the hours GPs were having to spend making home visits. It quickly expanded to provide a range of day care services, including chiropody. But funding cuts mean that the centre’s future is precarious.

Until now, Devon county council’s adult social care has funded the 24 places. But cuts mean the charity is faced with a £6,000 (20%) shortfall. As a result, Carole Traer, co-ordinator of Clyst Caring Friends, has already reduced her hours from five to three days a week and she fears that unless the centre gets more support, it will have to shut in a couple of years with detrimental knock-on effects for other services.

“A lot of what we do is carer support,” she says. “Without that, the people who are caring for their spouses at home would never have a day off.”

The charity’s financial problems are symptomatic of the scale of cuts faced by public services. Many organisations are already feeling the effect of the summer’s emergency budget, when initial cuts of £6.2bn were made. And many more are bracing themselves for next month’s comprehensive spending review as the government sets out to tackle a £156bn deficit. The Office for Budget Responsibility has calculated that more than 600,000 jobs in public services will be lost by 2016.

In an open letter to staff last week, Stephen Hughes, chief executive of Birmingham city council, wrote that because the NHS and, to a lesser extent, defence and education have been protected, the rest of the public sector – including local authorities – will have to cut spending by 30% or more. “Our best estimate at present is that the city council will need to reduce its net expenditure by £330m over the next three to four years. That is about a third of our net spend … It is really difficult to convey how big a problem that is.”

Birmingham, Glasgow and Leeds have been identified as the areas that will suffer the biggest public sector job losses in the next few years, according to a recent report by the Local Futures Group. But it is in rural areas such as Castle Morpeth, in Northumberland, where the public sector accounts for 52.6% of total jobs, that the impact of the cuts will be much greater.

According to public sector trade union Unison, 22,000 local government jobs have already been axed in the past year, and it predicts hundreds of thousands more. The government has pledged to protect frontline services from cuts but Dave Prentis, Unison’s general secretary, points out that if you reduce administrators and back office support staff, then “the frontline crumbles”.

Analysis by Unison has found that care homes, day centres, libraries and children’s homes are already shutting their doors, while charges for services such as homecare, meals on wheels, and nursery places are increasing. A report published yesterday by the Learning Disability Coalition paints a bleak picture, with 10% of local authorities in England already cutting services for their learning disabled residents. In Bolton, the council is consulting on proposals that would limit care services to adults with critical or substantial needs by November.

Ann Gill, 41, who lives in Bolton, cares for her husband. He has a congenital heart condition and cannot walk far. She says that her family would struggle to cope if her husband no longer qualified for 14 hours of support. “Quite a substantial part of that [support] is at a moderate-care level. If that goes, he will lose his social time, which is in effect my respite care,” says Gill. She also cares for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, and her mother-in-law, who has dementia.

But the cuts could additionally cost her the part-time job she has as carer to two women who receive a direct payment for eight hours’ support a week. “If their package goes, I’d lose my job,” she says. Speaking for many, she adds: “I’m worried about how I’m going to cope.”

Some names have been changed.