Week 29 2012

Tendring Topics.......on line

An Ageing Population!

          As a nonagenarian I have a direct interest in the government’s plans to meet the needs of an ageing population.  I don’t really feel that I have so far been a very great burden on the state or the local authority.  I have cavity wall infilling to my bungalow, double glazing, a solar panel to augment my gas hot water and central heating system and an electric mobility scooter to give me mobility, all at my own expense.  I did take advantage of a government grant to have my roof space properly insulated and Essex County Council Social Services have provided me with a handrail to help me make my way safely from my front door to my front garden path.

            My age and disabilities have obtained for me the lower rate of attendance allowance which helps with cleaning the bungalow, keeping the garden tidy and keeping my mobility scooter ‘on the road’.  And that is about it.  I am thankful that I have as yet needed neither domiciliary care nor residential care in a care home – and I very much hope that I never need either.

            That kind of care is expensive and the great debate among the politicians is how much they can expect old people to pay towards its cost.  Currently they have produced a plan for the future that could justifiably be called Much ado about Nothing, or at least about very little!  There must, so they are agreed, be a ‘ceiling’ to the amount the old person receiving care can be expected to pay towards its cost – but it’ll be another couple of years (just after the next General Election perhaps?) before they decide where that ‘ceiling’ should be.  Well, I am 91 and it doesn’t seem very likely that they’ll make up their minds in time for me to cheer……or otherwise!  

            One thing that has been resented by many old and disabled people has been the need to sell the family home, into which a lifetime’s savings may have been poured, to meet the cost of residential care.   The government has come up with a brilliant (well, they clearly think so) ground-breaking scheme to make this unnecessary.   Local authorities will now be required to make loans of the cost of care to care-home residents who apply for them.  These loans, plus reasonable interest, will be repayable only after the borrower’s death, and will be a charge on his or her estate.  Thus, say the government, care home residents will no longer need to sell their homes to pay the cost of care.

             I can see how the government and the care homes might benefit from such a scheme.  The money for care starts to come in directly the loan is approved without any tedious and uncertain business of selling the family home.  For the life of me though, I can’t see any advantage whatsoever for the old person involved.

            Why is it that most of us are so reluctant to sell our homes even when it is quite obvious that we’ll never be able to live in them independently again?  It is because those homes represent the greater part of our life’s savings.  We’d like to be able to pass them on to our heirs when the time comes.  This may be a thoroughly unreasonable, antisocial and irresponsible desire but it is surely a very natural and understandable one.

It is a desire that the government’s scheme does nothing to satisfy.  Our homes will still have to be sold when we die to repay those loans and – in addition - our heirs will have the extra burden of the interest payments that have accrued in the meantime.  They will be worse off than they would have been if the family home had been sold directly the old person had entered the care home.

            Finally – and I have only just learned this – like so many of the government’s brilliant new initiatives, there’s nothing new or ground-breaking about it.  Such a scheme already exists with just one difference; it provides that loans made by local authorities to pay care home fees and repayable only on the death of the home resident are interest free!

And the rest of us!

          The rest of us oldies – the ones who have managed to keep out of care homes and don’t need social services care in our homes – needn’t think that we are going to escape the attention of those posh boys who don’t know the price of milk. Perhaps it is fortunate that in the nature of things, none of us will have to put up with that attention for very long!

            A Conservative MP, and I’d be surprised if he is alone in this, has drawn attention to the benefits that we get for no other reason than the date on our birth certificates.  Free bus passes, free prescriptions, cut price (though not by much!) rail fares, generous winter fuel allowances; they should all be abolished or means tested.  In an ideal world, he says, it would be wonderful to be able to have all these universal benefits but, in the present economic climate, the country simply can’t afford them.   Funny thing though – he didn’t explain how it is that we can afford to cut the level of income tax for the wealthiest members of our society, those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year!

            We don’t live in an ideal world.  We never have done so and we never will – but that shouldn’t deter us from striving for one.  Even in an imperfect world it is astonishing what can be afforded when it is really needed.  In 1939, for example, the world was even less perfect than it is today.  Yet the government managed to afford millions of pounds every week for six years, in pursuit of the war.  Thousands of young men and women couldn’t afford to interrupt their early careers for six or seven years to help destroy Nazism and Fascism.  Yet we managed it.  Is it so unreasonable to expect that those of us who have survived and have paid (without either evasion or avoidance!) our taxes for over half a century and are still paying them, but  are now very old, should expect a share of the comforts of civilised life without having first to prove that we are desperately poor and in dire need?

            MPs who seek to means-test or withdraw the benefits of the old should remember that there is one privilege enjoyed by everyone over the age of eighteen and by rich and poor alike.  That is the right to vote in parliamentary and local elections.  Statistics indicate that we oldies are far more likely to exercise that right than those in younger age groups – and universally permitted postal voting now makes it easy for even the most disabled of us to do so.  If I were an ambitious member of parliament, or hoped to become one, I would think twice, and then again, before provoking the wrath of a large, and growing, number of electors!                                          

           

 What the Council costs us!

            Leafing through the back pages of a copy of the daily Gazette a few weeks ago I found, among the adverts for used cars and lonely hearts, an official notice from Tendring Council ‘Members’ Allowances 2012/2013’ setting out the annual cash allowances received by each councillor.   It made fascinating reading.

            Every councillor gets a basic allowance of £4,962 a year.  On top of that the Council Chairman gets £6,070 and Vice-Chairman £2,140.  That’s reasonable enough.  They both have ceremonial and hospitality responsibilities and need a bit extra.

            Then we get the political (or, as they put it, ‘Special Responsibility’) allowances, all in addition to the basic allowance.  The Leader of the Council (the leader of the majority political grouping; much more important nowadays than the mere Chairman) gets an extra £17,862 and his deputy £10,494.  Cabinet Members (that’s the little clique of members of the majority group who actually make all the executive decisions) also each get an extra £10,494.  Opposition Group Leaders get a lump sum allowance of £1,473 plus £174 for each member of their group.

            Then come the Chairmen of the eight committees.  The Chairmen of the Planning Committee and of the Licensing Committee each get £6,072, the Chairman of the Audit Committee £4,467, the Chairmen of the Corporate Management; the Community, Leadership and Partnership Committee; the Service Development and Delivery Committee; and the Human Resources Committee each get £3,573.  Then there’s the Vice-Chairman of the Planning Committee and the Chairman of Licensing Sub-Committees.  They each get £1,965.

            A footnote explains that, ‘in addition to the above, a Dependent and Childcare Allowance continues to be made available to those members who are eligible.’   

            Local government has changed a great deal since my early years in the service when, certainly in the smaller authorities, party membership was simply an indication of a councillor’s general political outlook – not an expectation that, on every issue, there would be a ‘party line’ that all members were expected to follow.  Those were the days when councillors were motivated solely by public spirit and received no payment beyond their out-of-pocket expenses. 

            It seems to me that we are getting into the era of the ‘career local politician’ in a local government that has adopted (or had forced upon it) most of the nastier features of that lot at Westminster!