Fife Council Will ‘Never Take Away Services’

QUESTIONS over Fife Council’s new home care charges have been circulating for several months. In this exclusive one-to-one interview with the Fife Free Press, Peter Grant answers the key questions on the controversy.

Is the home care service at crisis point?

I wouldn’t like to go as far as saying it’s in a crisis – but certainly there’s a lot of difficulties affecting the service and some of the other services within the Council.

The home help service we had nearly 20 years ago was where almost everything was free to anybody over 60 or 65. I don’t think there’s a government, council administration or opposition anywhere in the UK that would claim we could ever afford to go back to those days. There are just so many more people who need the service now.

If the opposition were in power and had introduced this policy, how would the SNP have reacted?

We would certainly have reacted to it – there’s no doubt about that. The job of opposition is to put the administration’s policies under the microscope, to identify weak points, expose them and get them changed.

I don’t like it when people deliberately inflame the situation by making statements when they don’t know what they’re talking about or they know what they’re saying is not true – especially when we’re dealing with services for vulnerable and elderly people.

Anyone making statements that make the policy out to be much worse than it really is, is frightening people.

Do you have any regrets over the way the policy was first communicated?

I wish we’d got it right first time. I wish we could get things right first time every time.

In the real world we can’t – it’s unfortunate that by getting it wrong this time, some of the people who were affected were people who did get scared, did get alarmed, and it means that we’ve been playing catch up.

We’ve had to work very hard to reassure people that they’re not going to lose services just because they can’t afford to pay.

How long it will take us to make that good, I don’t know, but we’ll keep on putting that message across until we’re certain that people fully understand what the decision was.

I wish we hadn’t got it wrong, I would love us to get everything right first time.”