Old And Disabled Lose Out In Cuts

Shetland Islands Council is to cut staff and services while increasing charges in community care as it struggles to bring its spending habits into line. Services to the elderly and disabled dominated a package of savings agreed by councillors, as they endeavour to meet their target of five per cent cuts across the board for the whole of the authority. It emerged the main reason for some of the cuts was the lack of key staff rather than shortage of available cash. However members were warned the authority would have to “lever in” huge sums of money into social work in the face of an ageing population and falling school rolls.

One suggestion that all community care charges be scrapped altogether was voted down, while proposals to increase inter island ferry fares and reduce ferry sailings were taken back to the drawing board.

Councillors did approve 10 measures, which will save around £500,000 in this year’s budget, on the understanding that they would have a “minimal impact” on front line public services to the Shetland public.

Hardest hit will be the elderly and disabled receiving care at home. Home care for the elderly and infirm is in ever increasing demand, but now it will be restricted to the most urgent cases. This could lead to a reduction in staffing levels.

Day care will now be charged at £6 per session, home care for the under 65s will cost £7 an hour while meals on wheels, laundry services and domestic tasks will all go up to £4 per meal, laundry bag and hour of work respectively. The amount of meals on wheels available in Lerwick will also be cut from five to three times a week.

“Considerable hardship and stress” for some people could be brought about by the decision to target day care in care centres to those in greatest need. People who use the centres to maintain a social life could be recompensed by the establishment of more social clubs, it was suggested.

The Eric Gray Resource Centre for people with learning disabilities will be opened just three days a week instead of five, while the new Kantersted residential service for adults with special needs will be opened in April instead of January.

Also one social care worker at the Stocketgaet Independent Living Project, in Lerwick, will lose their job through natural wastage or redundancy.

The cuts would save £1.7 million a year, but because they are not being implemented until the beginning of October, they will only reduce costs by just over £400,000 in the current financial year.

Councillor Cecil Eunson called for all community charges to be scrapped altogether. “I say these charges should not be made. There’s money being spent on other things, and they don’t need to start charging the elderly and the disabled,” he insisted.

But councillors baulked at his demand when community care manager Christine Ferguson warned them that dropping the proposed increases would force them to cut a further £400,000 worth of services.

Councillor Gussie Angus, himself a former social work manager, said he agreed with Mr Eunson “one hundred per cent”, but there was not enough money in the pot for his dream to be realised. Mr Angus said the council had yet to grasp the nettle of shifting resources from education to social work that had to be done to meet the changes in island society.

Council projections suggest the next 10 to 15 years will see the islands’ adult working population falling by up to 16 per cent, while the number of elderly folk increases by 40 per cent, reflecting similar trends elsewhere in Britain.

Mr Angus won support for his suggestion that the community care service be managed under a single budget to make it less complicated. He said: “There are no additional funds unless it comes from the reserves or the charitable trust and in the absence of that we have to accept this with the caveat that we need to have one budget (for community care) and we look at a future date to levering in additional resources.”

A proposal by ferries management to increase fares by 15 per cent, remove one sailing a day from the Whalsay and Yell Sound routes and run the Skerries ferry to Vidlin instead of Lerwick were withdrawn.

Instead the ferries board and management will seek other methods of saving more than £300,000 “in consultation with the communities involved.” Ferries board chairman Josie Simpson said reducing the speed at which the ferries travelled would be one way ahead.

Other savings which were agreed were a reduction in grants to voluntary groups by £11,338; a grant cut to the Shetland Council of Social Services of £850 a year; skip hire charges to go up by £2 an hour; an increase of £1 or £2 for waste collection from commercial premises; £1,000 removed from the budget for cultural links with Faroe; a review of the Lerwick to Sumburgh bus services which could save £10,000 a year; a review of the Papa Stour air service with unspecified consequences and a saving of £15,575 by no longer paying teachers’ membership fees of the General Teaching Council.