2.2.08

Tendring Topics

 

Does the LIFT work?

 

            Who do you imagine has overall responsibility for the 'construction and management of new facilities for the delivery of health care', in Colchester and the Tendring District?

            No, it isn't, as you may imagine, the NHS.  They merely pay for it.  Responsibility now rests with a limited company called Realise Health Ltd established by a partnership between the Colchester and Tendring Primary Care Trusts with the Mill Group, and Partnerships for Health, set up under the Government's LIFT (Local Improvement Finance Trust) initiative.

            The first two projects undertaken by Realise Health Ltd were Harwich's new Fryatt Hospital and Dovercourt Care Centre, and the new Primary Care Centre in Colchester.   I don't know how Colchester's Primary Care Centre is getting along but the Fryatt Hospital has made the regional news bulletins on radio and tv by having buckling floors, ill-fitting doors and, so it was alleged on tv, a kitchen unsuitable for use, within just over two years of its official opening.

            Among their future projects, so the company's web site proclaims, is the provision of the Great Clacton and Holland Primary Care Centre.  Readers of the web site unacquainted with local geography might well imagine that Great Clacton and Holland were immediately adjoining communities and that the Primary Care centre was going to be equally convenient for residents of both of them.  They do not adjoin and the best that can be said for the chosen site off Clacton's Valley Road is that it is equally inconvenient for them both.  It is situated on an industrial estate with not a single human habitation within easy walking distance!  The only possible way the sick and disabled of both Great Clacton and Holland-on-Sea will be able to visit it will be by mechanical transport – a private car? A taxi? A special bus service perhaps?   Hardly a good idea from the point of view of global warming – or that of the interests of folk needing medical care!

            The published CVs of the Directors of  Realise Health Care Ltd reveal an impressive record of achievement in finance, in the management of major building and engineering projects, and in marketing.  None of them though appears to have had experience in the front line (or even back at the base!) of the practicalities of the provision of health or welfare care.

            Perhaps, in the twenty-first century, knowledge and experience of the management of material and human resources and of their financing, is considered more important than detailed knowledge of the use that is made of those resources.

I would have thought though that that would have included a knowledge of where not  to provide a facility for use by the sick and disabled, and how to build a structure that doesn't develop major structural faults within a little over two years.

            It was interesting to hear on 'Look East' (BBCtv) our Conservative MP, Mr Douglas Carswell, questioning the value of the whole system of LIFT and PFI (private finance initiative) under which the Fryatt, and other hospitals and public buildings have been built and are managed in recent years.   These schemes, which give commercial enterprises an interest in vital public services, were, of course, welcomed – indeed created – by the New Labour government.

            I suspect that the pioneers of the Labour Movement – Keir Hardie, George Lansbury and their contemporaries – must be turning in their graves.

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                     The Price of Fitness

             When deciding the charges that it will make for the provision of a service to members of the public, any commercial firm will try to maximise its profits by setting those charges at the highest level that sufficient of its customers are prepared to pay – but, quite obviously, not so high that a rival can undercut them.

            The aim of a public authority should surely be quite different.  It should consider any subsidy that it considers reasonable to make from national or local taxation and then set the charges at the very lowest rate at which it can continue to offer the service.

            I wonder if Tendring Council really followed this principal in setting the new charges for their 'Lifestyles Fitness Suite' (a posh name for a gym!) at the Clacton Leisure Centre.   It is true that the suite recently had a revamp at the staggering cost of £2.77 million.  Did the existing customers – on whom the gym has depended for its existence in the past – really want a revamp on this scale, or was it done in the hope of attracting another lot of overweight, and well-heeled, customers from 'out there somewhere?'

            The switch from a £21 a month contract to £35 (without the use of sauna and solarium) quoted in the Clacton Gazette does seem staggering to me.  I take the point that there are lower fees for those on means-tested benefit but I have little doubt that there is a biggish income gap between those whose income is low enough to attract benefit and those who are sufficiently well off to be able comfortably to afford the new charges.

            It is claimed that 220 customers have already signed the new contracts.  On the other hand a similar number have already signed the petition protesting and, no doubt, both numbers will continue to rise.

            How committed are the protestors to their cause?  I think it likely that the Fitness Suite needs its customers even more than its customers need the Fitness Suite.  A boycott of the new Suite by the members of the 'Fighting for Fair Fees' Group (if there are sufficient of them and they are sufficiently resolute) accompanied by low-key and – of course – peaceful continuous picketing, might well have more effect on the Council than any number of signatures on a petition

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'It seems but yesterday………'

 

            One of the odder effects of old age (my old age anyway) is the way in which time gone by concertinas.   Events that, on reflection I know took place fifteen or twenty years ago - seem to be no more than a year or so in the past.

 

            When, for instance, we read in the press the depressingly frequent reports of yet more British soldiers killed by Taliban fanatics among the mountains and on the plains of Afghanistan it seems to me but yesterday that the press, the politicians and many members of the public were applauding and covertly supporting the killing of similar soldiers, by much the same fanatics in those same places.

 

            Then, of course, the press didn't refer to the killers as the fanatical Taliban but as gallant Mojihadin ('holy warriors') and their victims weren't 'our boys' but members of the Soviet armed forces.  Believe me, Russian and Ukrainian young women feel the pain of widowhood every bit as much as their British counterparts.  Nor do their children suffer less as orphans than ours, or their parents and grandparents grieve less for the loss of their sons or grandsons.  Pain and loss know nothing of national, ethnic or ideological boundaries.

 

            Although, to us, our forces and their purposes seem fundamentally different from those of the former Soviet Union, I doubt very much if they appear so to the 'Holy Warriors' of Afghanistan.  Both our forces and those of the Soviets, were armies of foreigners and of infidels.  Both were intent on undermining centuries of Afghan tradition by, for instance, attempting to break the power of the local war lords,  stopping the cultivation of opium poppies, educating girls and boys equally, permitting women to 'dress immodestly' and 'behave like men', and preventing such divinely ordained punishments as the stoning to death of women for adultery and the exaction of the death penalty for 'apostasy'.

 

            From that viewpoint I doubt if there is much discernable difference between our Union Flag, and the Soviet Red Flag with its hammer and sickle.              

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