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!

Week 8. 09

Tendring Topics……on line

Primitive Art

My elder son and daughter-in-law, taking a short break in the Caribbean from Britain’s climatic and economic winter have sent me this photo from St. Kitts. It is a centuries old rock drawing by a Carib Indian, one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island most of whom were exterminated between the 16th and 19th centuries by English and/or French settlers in a practical demonstration of the ‘unfettered natural selection’ that I referred to in last week’s blog.

The drawing seems to me to have similarities in style to examples of Australian aboriginal art that I have seen reproduced, and even to that of the 3,000 year old Uffington White Horse, carved into the turf of the Berkshire Downs. Perhaps it is due to my own age that I much prefer it to some of the examples of modern ‘art’ with which we have become familiar.

What does it represent? To me, it suggests a St.Kitts cricket enthusiast who has taken his daughter to a local derby, perhaps between St. Kitts and nearby Nevis. The captain of the home team has just hit the ball for six and completed the first century of the match! Of course I know that it couldn’t possibly have been that ……perhaps some equivalent local contest? I hope that it wasn’t a bloodthirsty one!

Whatever its origins, it is an artwork that has been an object of curiosity, interest and amusement for many generations of passers-by. How many people do you suppose considered Jaywick's £40,000 piece of modern art (now, I believe dismantled) worth even a second glance?

Pictures - above left, rock drawing on St. Kitts.
Right - £40,000 worth of modern art in Jaywick.

Care Homes…..like Prisons? Why not like Hotels?

No-one would accuse Lord Hanningfield, Essex County Council’s leader, of shrinking away from controversy. He thrives on it! There was the ‘Home Rule for Essex’ comment, that we were hastily assured was ‘only joking’. There were the promises to purchase failing post offices (one promise of which I thoroughly approved) and of ‘Essex contracts for Essex firms’. Then there were the ideas of the County Council updating the A12 if the government failed to do so, of financial relief for hard-up pensioners and for service-men and women’s families, and of a County Council Bank to help cash-strapped Essex firms. There was also the assurance that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he knew that a ‘silent majority’ wanted two Colchester schools to be closed and their pupils bussed elsewhere across the town. And, of course, we mustn’t forget the putting out to competitive tender of virtually the whole of the county council’s services.

Now he has ventured into another field, one in which, thanks to the date on my birth certificate, I have rather more experience than he has. Lord Hanningfield knows what old people want and, he says none of us, ‘want to go into a care home … it’s like prison. They want to stay in their own homes. As soon as we abolish care homes the better and people can stay in their own homes with care and support. We are not doing it to save money. It’s more expensive to keep them in their own homes, but it’s what people want. They want to remain in their own home with their own possessions’.

Many of us, probably most of us, certainly do want to stay in our own homes for as long as we can. I certainly do….but then I have a comfortable, relatively modern home, and have no serious financial worries. I have plenty of interests (this blog for instance!), a loving family, good friends and neighbours. My strength and mobility are increasingly limited but I can afford to have others do tasks, in the home and the garden for instance, that are now beyond me. As far as mobility is concerned I can walk but not far and not fast. However, for journeys in and about Clacton I have a mobility scooter. For longer journeys I can use public transport (free or at concessionary rates), hire a taxi or enjoy a lift from a friend or relative. Of course I want and fully intend to stay at home. I hope to end my days here.

November 1957. Heather and I with our two young sons outside our bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. We had moved in just over a year earlier and I am still living here. Heather's life ended in this bungalow in July 2006 and I hope that my life will end here too.

It wouldn’t need a very big change in my circumstances though to make me feel differently. Supposing my financial circumstances changed so that meeting regular bills became a constant worry, or my health or sight failed so that I could no longer pursue my interests or get out of the house. I don’t really think that I would then want to stay house-bound in this bungalow, relying on meals-on-wheels, regular visits from carers and occasional visits from neighbours, friends and relatives. The last of these would begin to dry up as, inevitably, I became more and more irritable, impatient and bad-tempered. Then I really would feel imprisoned…..and in solitary confinement!

In such a situation I might well crave to be free of responsibilities, and welcome the company of other people in a good care home. Certainly none of the measures on which the County Council is spending £4 million (which include alarms and health monitors or sensors which would detect a fall, fire or gas) would make me want to stay at home.

Perhaps it is true that more and more of us old people will want to remain in our own homes longer and will be able to do so. Even so, we may well still need at least as many care homes as we have now because, as we are constantly being told, there are more and more of us every year. There will certainly always be a demand for some care homes and these should be a lot less like prisons and much more like good residential hotels. It is toward that end that Lord Hanningfield should be devoting some of his unbounded energy and enthusiasm. Some part at least of that £4 million should be spent on bringing any of the care homes that that the County Council hasn’t yet sold off, up to hotel standard.

Incidentally, I wonder if when they sell off those homes to private enterprise, they mention to the purchasers that they are ‘like prisons’?

Juvenile Precocity!

Even case-hardened tv commentators seemed to have been shocked at the news that a thirteen year old boy and a fifteen year old girl had just become parents; the latest incident in the continuing saga that has already made ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe!

The totally predictable answer to this problem from ‘progressive’ educationalists is even more and even earlier sex-education………..despite the fact that, in the between-the-wars years, when schools offered no sex education whatsoever, a schoolgirl pregnancy was a very, very rare occurrence.

No, I wouldn’t really want to go back to those days. Nor can I pretend that I do know the answer to juvenile pregnancies. I am sure though that it doesn’t lie in more sex education.

‘Ah’, say the educationalists, ‘but we need to teach children about relationships, not just about the anatomy and physiology of sex’. That, I think, is something that just can’t be done. You can teach the practicalities of sex, warn of the dangers and instruct in the techniques of ‘safe sex’ and contraception. Curious and adventurous children will think it all sounds very interesting and exciting. Risky too; but then they have been warned about the dangers and how to avoid them. ‘At school they’re always telling us to find things out for ourselves. Let’s get on with it!’.

So much for the practicalities, but the nature of a loving relationship capable of lasting a lifetime has to be discovered by each individual – and it can only be discovered at the right age. I don’t believe that it can be taught to anyone, least of all to pre-teenage and early-teenage boys and girls. Their minds are most unlikely to have developed to a point at which they are capable of appreciating what it means.

It is, in fact, the kind of appreciation that continues to develop throughout life. A few lines from a pre-war song come to my mind. The first line was, I think; 'At seventeen, he falls in love quite madly, with eyes of the deepest blue' and the last lines, the most important ones, were 'But when he thinks he’s past love, it is then he meets his last love, and he loves her as he never loved before'. The really fortunate ones are those of us whose last love is the same as our first.

That is the kind of relationship of which Shakespeare wrote: 'Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bended sickle’s compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours or weeks, but sticks it out even to the edge of doom’.

I defy anyone to teach that kind of relationship.

As for what to do about teenage pregnancies, I think that we might try rediscovering moral values and stop blurring the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. Some things that we are very much inclined to do (an earlier generation would have said ‘tempted’ to do) are not just foolish, irresponsible and dangerous but wrong. Among them are precocious sexual activity, promiscuity and what, in our old-fashioned mid-twentieth century way we used to describe as ‘getting a girl into trouble’!

Nowadays many people may contemptuously reject as childish superstition the idea that there is a God 'to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid', to whom we will one day have to answer for all that we have thought, said and done ...........but in an earlier and 'less enlightened' age it was certainly a thought that tended to modify adolescent behaviour!