Who will fix social care funding?

Social care funding needs fixing, the head of England’s largest housing association, Jane Ashcroft, tells David Brindle

Jane Ashcroft is worried. “I’m normally an optimist, I hope I’m wrong,” she says. “But so many things are affected by decisions about funding long-term care and I’m anxious that it’s going to get kicked into the long grass again.”

The chief executive of Anchor, England’s largest not-for-profit housing and care provider, is one of a growing number of experts concerned at the uncertain prospects for social care, once the Dilnot commission on reform of care funding reports, scheduled for July. There’s no doubt that economist Andrew Dilnot and his team will produce a cogent and considered report; the anxiety is whether a preoccupied government will have the focus and nerve to do anything about it.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I think we can’t miss. The system is broken,” says Ashcroft. “But it is a really complicated subject and it’s hard to make it play with the electorate, I guess.”

Anchor’s reach – 50,000 older people use its services every week – gives its chief executive a bird’s-eye view of the demographic challenge facing the nation. When you are dealing routinely with centenarians – Anchor’s oldest resident is 111 – you are unfazed by forecasts like last week’s government projections that one in four of today’s children will live past 100. A small but growing trend is for mum or dad to be in an Anchor care home and their son or daughter to be in its sheltered housing.

Ashcroft is talking at Edmond Court, a sheltered scheme in Sheldon, Birmingham, where the age range of residents ranges from 62 to 100. Two people have been there since it opened 26 years ago. Although there are five Anchor care homes in the city for residents to move on to if they choose, the aim is to keep them in the sheltered flats if possible and care support is brought in.

“One of the things that really excites me about Anchor is that because of the range of services we have, when people contact us, we don’t need to automatically refer them to a care home or to sheltered housing: we can look at what somebody needs and see how we can best meet those needs,” says Ashcroft. “In some ways that’s a practical reflection of what’s happening on the national policy agenda: joining up services and being more creative about things.”

To underscore this offer, Ashcroft has acted in the 12 months since she became chief executive to refresh, unify and simplify the organisation’s brand. Under the rallying cry of “one Anchor”, she has brought all its housing and care operations into the same structure and sold the repairs and maintenance division to Mears.

This has been driven partly on efficiency grounds, but largely to give Anchor a clear identity in a fast-changing market. Whereas previously, councils were often the customer, arranging housing, care and support for older people, it is now increasingly older people themselves and their families. The shrinking of eligibility criteria for local authority funding, combined with the spread of personal budgets for people who remain eligible, means that 50% of Anchor’s business already comes from the individual decisions and choices of older people – whether self-funders or holders of personal budgets – and Ashcroft expects it to be at least 70% by 2015.

Retirement villages

By then, she anticipates, Anchor’s turnover will be £365m. Last year it was £286m, including in a new departure, £8.4m from the sale of leasehold properties at extra-care schemes (sheltered housing with full on-site care) near Leeds and at Denham Garden Village, Buckinghamshire.

Ashcroft thinks that the popularity of Denham, and village-style retirement communities developed by other organisations, should cause critics of extra-care housing to rethink. “I’ve had lots of discussions with [local authority] directors of adult services who worry about ‘older people’s ghettos’, but that’s not our experience at all,” she says. “Older people are very much part of their local communities and we encourage those communities to come in. What we’ve tried to achieve at Denham is a combination of the American concept of security and the European concept of integration with the community, so it’s taking a fine line.”

Anchor’s success – a £21m trading surplus last year and development plans for 1,100 new houses or flats and five or six care homes over the next four years – contrast with the fortunes of some other care providers. But as chair of the English Community Care Association, the umbrella body for the leading providers, Ashcroft is reluctant to comment on the plight of Southern Cross, the biggest care home operator, which is reportedly teetering on the brink of insolvency. She does, however, express alarm at the effect that such publicity could be having on people contemplating care and support for themselves or their parents. “Southern Cross will work its way through, I am sure. My concern is that all this creates more anxiety; people are anxious anyway about older people’s services.”

She is notably more forthcoming about the performance of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the sector’s regulator, which has angered many providers by both increasing its standard fees this month and announcing that it will charge a separate fee for social providers who wish to register for its new social care “excellence” ratings coming into effect next year. Although the scheme will be voluntary, providers think they will have little option but to pay up.

“It’s all a bit depressing, really,” says Ashcroft. “I have been very keen to support a national regulator – I think national consistency is very important – but we have got to the stage where I find it very difficult to support CQC. I appreciate they have got a wide remit and budget cuts, but kind of ‘welcome to our world’ really. I want to pay my staff more, to spend more money on services that we run; I don’t want to pay the regulator more money.”

Ashcroft adds that she was shocked by comments attributed to Dame Jo Williams, CQC’s chair, in describing how the organisation intended to scan inspection reports for potential concerns about providers by using software deployed by MI5 to sift documents for evidence of terrorism plots. “I thought, I can’t believe you have said that, Jo. You’re a sensible woman. It feels indicative of where the relationship has got to, which is a real shame because we should all be in it together.”

As chief executive of the largest housing association, employing 10,000 staff in 1,000 locations across England, it may be unsurprising that Ashcroft is the best paid in the sector. But her salary of £275,000, plus a £15,000 car allowance, continues to excite controversy even though it is significantly less than the £391,000 notoriously paid to her predecessor, John Belcher, before his sudden resignation in November 2009.

Pay committee

“My pay is determined by the remuneration committee made up of all of our board members,” she says. “We look at external comparisons. It’s not a topic that comes up very often in the organisation.

“I want Anchor to be an organisation that recognises everybody’s contribution and pays people well. So we are looking to make sure our reward systems are fair. My pay was frozen last year, quite rightly, and I would anticipate that would continue for a while.”

She stresses that, although she was an internal applicant for the post (she was managing director before becoming chief executive) and, at 44, might be considered young for the responsibility, she faced a rigorous appointment procedure. One year on, Anchor’s performance and her rising profile – last week fronting the launch of the organisation’s Grey Pride campaign, seeking to raise a 100,000-signature petition for England to have a dedicated older people’s minister – suggests that the board will be well satisfied with its decision.

Liverpool-born Ashcroft was taken out of the city at the age of two, when her family moved to Hampshire, but she spent every summer as a child back on Merseyside with her grandmother, who was the tea lady at Liverpool FC’s training ground. So the city has never quite been taken out of the girl – and she fully expects that it never will.

“Older people are just you and I with a few more miles on the clock,” she says. “I shall still be a gobby Scouse woman who likes reading and drinking gin. That’s not going to change.”

• Anchor’s petition for an older people’s minister is at gopetition.com/ petition/44649.html