Duffield & Belper South Hustings .............. Tuesday April 25th

Not to be missed.

Vote Jyoti Wilkinson for Alport & Derwent (including Belper North)

Alport & Derwent is mainly a rural division of Derbyshire County Council with main centres of population being Crich and Belper North. Referring to the Derbyshire Observatory Area Profile of Alport & Derwent we find that it comprises a population of 11,523 living in 5,035 households. These good folk usually return a Conservative Councillor but the Tory majority has been dwindling in the past few elections.

Jyoti Wilkinson standing for Labour

I would normally write something here about Jyoti; very well known in the area and a really good candidate. However, he has produced a very good video so my words are really not needed:

Oh no, I had hoped to embed Jyoti's video here but blogger says that the file is to big ......... so you can access the video here: Jyoti Wilkinson video on Belper have your say and you can find out a bit more about him here: Jyoti Wilkinson on the web ............. but I do urge you to look at his video as it is really informative.

................ and here he is supporting the NHS in Crich:

I'm sorry but I have no idea who took this photo. Credit will be acknowledged once I find out

David Taylor standing for the Conservative Party

David Taylor was elected to Derbyshire County Council in a 2014 bi-election. He is also of course an Amber Valley Councillor with a responsibility for housing in the current AVBC Conservative administration. You can access his page on Amber Valley Conservatives website here. I notice that he states that one of his three priorities is:

Protecting our greenbelt and preventing the over-development of our villages.

Remember the wise words of Tonto

Of course we have to check this out. We are in the middle of the consultation period for the latest attempt by AVBC Tories to deliver a local plan which you can reference here: Amber Valley Borough Council Local Plan consultation document. It is safe to assume that the councillor responsible for housing in the borough will be a steering hand to the plan so, given Clr Taylor's priority to protect the greenbelt it is a surprise to find the proposal to build on the greenbelt north of Denby, nigh on doubling the size of that village with 1,100 new houses. There are also plans to build on green field sites such asn120 houses on Belper Lane and 80 houses in Crich (where there are "environmental constraints"). Not forgetting the 150 houses being planned for Bullsmoor in Belper, a much loved green open space. None of this squares with David Taylor's priority  to protect the greenbelt and prevent over-development of villages.

If we delve deeper into the Local Plan we find that it contains a watered down commitment to provide affordable housing which is desperately needed in our area:

Policy H5 - Housing development proposals on any sites of 0.5 hectares or more (or 15 dwellings or greater) will be expected to provide up to 30% of the gross number of dwellings, in the form of ‘affordable housing’, subject to considerations of viability. 

There then follows a raft of clarifications of the term "viability" which does not really strengthen the councils hand in negotiations with developers ....... from page 65 onwards. Looking back at page 61 we see the council estimates of housing build but if they fail to negotiate with developers the 30% affordable or correct size of home needed for both market and affordable then we can expect the numbers of homes to be built to be something like this:

To be honest this is a projection and may or may not be accurate. If anything I may have under-estimated the number of 3 bed semis but it  If I was a councillor with responsibility for housing then I would not be happy with this. Kevin Buttery the Tory leader of AVBC says that David Taylor is a strong man but he would need to be superhuman to hold developers to the 30% affordable homes target, let alone their desire to build 3 bed semis on greenfield sites. AVBC Belper councillors Ben Bellamy, Maurice Neville and Erik Johnson tabled an amendment at a recent council meeting for an increase in brownfield instead of greenfield development with a greater proportion of 1 and 2 bed dwellings ........... as advised by in independent housing needs assessments of the area and also in line with residents wishes but all the Tory councillors including David Taylor did not support the amendment.

It might be said that I am commenting about AVBC business and not DCC but it is fair to compare what a person in public life says they will do against what they actually do.

Two other candidates

There are two other candidates for Alport and Derwent:

Paul Smith - Liberal Democrats 

William Macfarlane - The Green Party

I can find no references to their candidacy online other than this produced by Amber Valley Borough Council: Statement of persons nominated

Proud to live in Derbyshire .............

I want to be a bit more positive with this post because the subject of care for the elderly is a serious matter and should be way above political skirmishing. If by some miracle BelperStuff was asked to create a UK Bill of Rights then respect, love and care for the elderly would be up near the top of the list. I do not understand how anyone who is elected to power can even contemplate cutting the funding that underwrites services for the elderly in their own homes or the provision of facilities such as care homes and day centres ............... yet we have a Conservative government who have been cutting grants to councils who then have to decide which departments will bear the brunt of underfunding. In this respect the Labour controlled Derbyshire County Council have done an amazing job of shielding adult social care from the harshness of these Tory cuts.

Proud to live in Derbyshire

Last year BelperStuff attended a meeting of senior care providers, member's of parliament, academics and journalists to discuss the deterioration in social care to all age groups and the predominant theme was the plight of the elderly. Frontline care workers spoke from the floor of their daily struggle to look after their charges; the lack of resources, the gradual loss of staff who had to care for an increasing number of people ............. I'm sure you've heard this litany before. I was struck by their compassion but also the feeling of helplessness in the face of impossible odds. It was abundantly clear that this same frustration was felt by all care providers as senior managers and even those at the helm of regional and national care organisations spoke of the crisis that was already upon us.

When I spoke from the floor about Derbyshire County Council and their fight to keep care homes in council hands the meeting burst into applause. Let there be no mistake about this, despite what Derbyshire Tories claim, Labour have performed brilliantly in maintaining a level of services that are seen as an example to follow by other authorities.

Barbara Keeley MP

The keynote speaker was Barbara Keeley MP, the Shadow Minister for Mental Health and Social Care. Looking back at my notes I see that her main points were:

• We need an extra 275,000 care workers
• 191,000 care workers are from the EU
• £5 billion has been taken out of social care by the Tories in the last 6 years (remember she was speaking in 2016)
• 26% less people receiving care from care system as a result of these cuts
• 1 in 7 unpaid carers are over 80
• 417,000 people providing care are over 80.

Her passionate closing remarks were:

"Why is there no outcry about this?"

"Now is the time to be outraged".

Thinking about it, why didn't BelperStuff make a report about this meeting back in 2016? I apologise.

So what is happening in Derbyshire?

I can already feel the urge to plunge straight into a critique of the Tory manifesto but first I'll speak about Labour:

Labour

Labour regained control of the DCC in 2013 and promptly squashed the outgoing Tory plans to close DCC run care homes and enter into contracts with private providers. Despite cuts in funding (£13 million less per year for care services from central government) Labour have increased the amount in the budget for care; the amount spent per head of population for Adult Care rising from £250 in 2016/17 to £268 in 2017/18 and Children's Services from £115 to £117. Obviously this has to be funded and a combination of shifting money from one pot to another plus an increase in council tax has had to adopted ((can be found here online).

Reading from their council tax leaflet,  I see that Adult Care is provided to almost 17,000 older, vulnerable and disabled people and supports 21,000 carers across Derbyshire. Nearly 1,000 home care staff, 2,200 residential and day care staff and teams in hospitals supporting NHS colleagues, helping people to be discharged into the community.

There are 22 residential homes and community care centres including specialist care for people with dementia and commissions 215 schemes which support people to live independently; with 1,254 minor adaptions and nearly 131,000 pieces of equipment worth up to £8.25 million.

John Owen enjoys a cup of tea when visiting the Ada Belfield

There are of course other schemes such as the new care home being built in Belper to replace the Ada
Belfield, from 26 rooms with shared bathrooms to a modern 40 en suite room facility in Derwent Street (I cannot resist making the point that Belper Town Council - 16 Conservatives - has been opposed to this scheme right through the planning process but it was finally passed last week after an intervention by John Owen at the AVBC planning meeting).
BelperStuff visited the Ada Belfield care home late last year with John Owen, County Councillor for Belper and we found real enthusiasm from both staff and residents for the move. (John is pictured opposite, chatting over a cuppa with staff and residents - but I forgot to ask permission to use a photo of them on the internet so I've cropped them out - sorry).

What do the Tories propose?

We are back to the Tory manifesto but this time leavened with comments from the Amber Valley Tory website. The salient points are:

• Restart our £30m Care Programme to provide new modern care homes - scrapped by Labour
• Derbyshire Conservatives implemented a self financing building programme that would have provided new homes for older people across the county. We agreed to invest £30m in partnership with housing associations and the private sector. Savings on the running costs of former old people's homes would have paid the debt charges on our £30m contribution. 

This is a PFI scheme and I am mindful of  a report by the National Audit Office in 2011 which was critical, finding that the use of PFI "has the effect of increasing the cost of finance for public investments relative to what would be available to the government if it borrowed on its own account" and "the price of finance is significantly higher with a PFI"(see here for that report).

By cutting funding from central government the burden is shifted to council tax payers; compounded by ill thought out privatisation which inevitably costs more.

There is of course nothing wrong in principal with housing associations providing care services (as long as they use properly trained staff and pay them a decent wage) but I am fearful of finance deals that might be involved. I recently talked with a director of a local housing association who told me that their financial backers were looking for an 11% return on their investment. One has to ask who would be paying that 11% if those same investors were involved in the Tory scheme and the answer is Derbyshire County Council.

An example of a PFI scheme in Amber Valley

We also have an example of a Tory PFI scheme in Amber Valley where the borough council signed up with DC Projects (Amber Valley) Ltd in 2009 with what seems to be a 31 year contract involving the refurbishment/building/management of three leisure centres in Alfreton, Heanor and Ripley. A quick look at the financial outturn of this project in 2016 (Amber Valley Borough Council Statement of Accounts 2015/16 - turn to pages 104 and 105) and we find that during the remaining 25 years there will be service charges of £18.85m (subject to inflation), repayment of finance liability of £18.262m, finance interest of £25.189m which comes to a total of £62,301,000. So the total cost of the project is that last sum plus whatever else has been paid between 2009 and 2015/16. Unless they had a payment holiday in these initial years then the total project will probably come out somewhere over £74 million given that the annual payment for 2016/17 alone is £2,614,000. The finance charge would seem to be around 8.32% which doesn't look like a very sharp deal when we compare it to the £22m AVBC holds in a variety of bank accounts that are earning on average less than 1%.

A mitigating factor is that the leisure centres generate revenue but how much of this is passed back to the council is not very clear in the accounts.

So what could the Tory PFI scheme for Derbyshire care homes look like

Given that this is an example of the sort of PFI that Derbyshire Tories have entered into (the leader of Amber Valley Tories is Kevin Buttery and he is standing for the county council in the Horsley division) it would not be too much of a stretch to imagine that the £30 million that they want to tie up to their  "self financing" care home scheme would be in many respects similar. If we assume that the finance charges will be comparable then the cost of finance over say, 30 years would be nigh on £52m so the much vaunted "self financing" scheme would entail each care home contributing an annual saving of £100k. The £30 million investment would, we are told, be matched by a minimum of £100 million from private investors so if they also expect a return of 8.32% the total saving per care home would have to be in the region of £600k per year resulting in a net reduction to the adult care budget (for 18 homes) of  £12m. The annual cost of financing plus repayment of the loan would over 30 years amount to £354 million or nigh on £1 million per month and that, for an already squeezed budget is before we add in wages for staff and all the other ancillary costs plus maintenance.

Given that the income of these care homes is derived from payments from Derbyshire County Council such a PFI scheme, if following the AVBC Leisure Centre arrangement, would result in a payment to private investors of at least £12m per year. It would make much more sense to generate this sort of sum internally from the total DCC budget and use it as a rolling annual budget to be invested in improvements and, where necessary, new build facilities such as that in Derwent Street in Belper. Without the benefit of being fully briefed on the DCC Adult Care budget this is just a back of fag packet calculation but I would suggest that care infrastructure costs are a small proportion of the total cost when set beside that of staffing and other more general care home costs. The private sector exploits this fact by reducing wages and benefits to staff once they take over a contract.

Derbyshire Tories advocate transfer of social care to private sector as the private sector is collapsing

The warnings of Barbara Keeley are sadly being proved correct as there are an increasing number of private care home contracts being handed back to local authorities. Outsourcing care for the elderly and other vulnerable adults has become unattractive to private investors. It's those Tory government cuts again as cash strapped councils try to pass on the squeeze in funding to private contractors.

See this informative Guardian article - Care contracts cancelled at 96 UK councils in funding squeeze

and

BBC news item - Social Care system beginning to collapse as over 900 carers quit per day

I have copied these bullet points from the BBC article:

• An estimated 338,520 adult social care workers left their roles in 2015-16. That is equivalent to 928 people leaving their job every day.
• 60% of those leaving a job left working in the adult social care sector altogether
• The average full-time frontline care worker earned £7.69 an hour, or £14,800 a year. The median average UK salary last year was around £27,600 for full time workers.
• One in every four social care workers was employed on a zero hours contract.

Tory mismanagement of social care is a disgrace

"Now is the time to be outraged"

A brief note on the method of calculation. If anyone reading this post has knowledge that would indicate that the calculations are wrong or the methodology is in any way seriously flawed then I will gladly amend what is written here. I'm not talking of comments and opinions but hard provable facts. You can make your point via the comments button at the foot of this post.

Tories have already cut funding for TV licences and Winter Fuel payment

I wanted to move on to a more constructive debate about the issues involved in our County Council elections but, like a moth to a flame, I find myself once again drawn back to the defensive comments of Barry Lewis, the leader of the Derbyshire Tories:

"It is the Government that is responsible for these allowances - not the County Council. And the Conservative Government has spelt out its intention in its 2015 Manifesto - it will protect pensioner benefits including the free bus pass, TV licences and Winter Fuel payments. You can't get clearer than that."

In the last two posts I concentrated on the threat to free bus passes and ignored Barry's claims about TV licenses and winter fuel payments, both benefits to pensioners. Cavalier and unresearched statements during an election have to be scrutinised.

TV licences

The Tories have already cut central government commitment to fund free TV licences for 75 and overs. What they actually promised in their 2015 manifesto was a freeze until charter negotiation .............. which has now happened. The Tories refused to fund TV licences for this group and have passed the responsibility to the BBC who will have to pay for this out of the money raised by licences for the under 75's and other commercial activities. This is being phased in from 2018/19 and would currently cost the BBC around £650 million a year, over a fifth of the BBC's income. 

For more information you can check here: BBC news item relating to over 75's TV licenses and then here: BBC news item "BBC may ask over 75's to give up free TV licence".

So Barry ... Tories have cut TV licence funding for over 75's

Winter Fuel Payments

Click on this link to get the basic facts on Winter Fuel Payments

There is some history here as the benefit, introduced by the then Labour Party Chancellor Gordon Brown was subject to cuts by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government in 2011/12; cuts imposed by the Tory Chancellor, George Osborne. See here for a Guardian article about this in 2011.

This has always been a political hot potato and every year brings a fresh crop of politicians (admittedly from all parties and persuasions) arguing for some form of means testing over this benefit. What many fail to realise is the level of heat that older people need to keep healthy through the winter. Most of us set our thermostats to lower the temperature when we go out to work but a pensioner sitting at home all day needs a constant level of heat ............. and that isn't at a comfortable for a wooly jumper wearer level but is more likely to be  well above 20 degrees. Now that takes a lot of fuel as many pensioners live in older, barnlike buildings that take a lot of fuel to heat.

Like it or not the Winter Fuel payment is the way that we ensure that the elderly have sufficient means to pay for the extra winter fuel costs. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that a pensioner is 14 times more likely to use the Winter Fuel payment to pay their fuel bills though there are an increasing number of pensioner households where a choice has to be made between fuel or food. 

Locally, the rate of fuel poverty in Derbyshire is 12.8% of all households.

See here for an overview - Derbyshire's Anti-Poverty Strategy 2014-2017 and I quote from that document:

Fuel poverty is an issue on which Derbyshire performs poorly when compared with the country as a whole, reflecting the fact that it has many rural areas (where fuel poverty tends to be more prevalent), a higher proportion of elderly residents (one of the groups most at risk of fuel poverty) and pockets of very deprived urban areas (in which high proportions of households are on low incomes). The proportion of households in fuel poverty in Derbyshire (12.8 percent) is well above the national average figure of 10.4 percent and in 2012 Derbyshire was ranked 23rd out of 152 counties in England, with the county ranked 1st being the one with the highest proportion of fuel poor households. None of the districts in Derbyshire have a fuel poverty rate below the national average (Amber Valley, Derbyshire Dale, Chesterfield and High Peak) have fuel poverty rates above 13 percent).

Photo source - The Independent

This article in the Independent is very informative -  Fuel Poverty crisis leaves 1 in 3 pensioners in turmoil There are countless references to fuel poverty in the media and online but still we struggle to heat our homes. 

Each winter, one older person dies every 7 minutes from cold weather

This issue should be beyond party politics and there needs to be a national consensus on how we heat deprived homes. The elderly are particularly vulnerable as a major factor is poor insulation in older housing stock and no suitable alternative homes being built for older folk to move into; from draughty buildings that would cost them a fortune to modernise into well insulated cheap to run apartments and houses. The Winter Fuel payment is but a stopgap and what is needed is a complete rethink into how we can provide proper housing for everybody ............ young and old. I am particularly impressed with this article in the Guardian by Dawn Foster Nordic countries have much harsher conditions in the cold months, yet mortality rates are lower than in the UK where she points out that female pensioners have a higher rate of poverty than do men ....... 5% to 8% higher. I believe that fuel poverty cuts right across class lines as many seemingly well to do pensioners struggle to make ends meet. The fact that you now live alone in a large family house does not automatically mean that you can afford to heat it.

In her article Dawn reminds us of the Labour Government initiative to tackle fuel poverty, the Warm Front deal which insulated 2.3 million homes. This was scrapped by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government in 2012 and replaced by the Green Deal which they then scrapped in 2015 with only 15,000 homes being insulated. 

The simple truth is that by voting Labour you keep more pensioners alive through the Winter.

In the meantime the Winter Fuel payment is all we have and it must not be degraded in any way. We have seen George Osborne cut this payment in the past and we can but hope that Barry Lewis's faith in the Tory Party to resist the urge to cut once again is well placed. The Labour pledge to fight any cuts is valid to keep pressure on the Tories in Westminster.

Tories try to defend plan to cut free bus passes

It didn't take long for Derbyshire Tories to respond to the Labour pledge to fight to keep free bus passes for pensioners and the disabled.

They are particularly upset at the petition organised by Glossopdale Labour Party which you can access here: https://www.change.org/p/hm-government-retain-free-bus-passes-and-winter-fuel-allowance-for-pensioners and to yesterday's BelperStuff post Tories plan to cut bus passes and brand this as Labour scaremongering.

The Derbyshire Conservative group has responded through their leader Barry Lewis and he says:

"It is the Government that is responsible for these allowances - not the County Council. And the Conservative Government has spelt out its intention in its 2015 Manifesto - it will protect pensioner benefits including the free bus pass, TV licences and Winter Fuel payments. You can't get clearer than that."

Now there are several reasons why we don't believe Barry Lewis; most notably that the leader of the Tories in the Local Government Association (LGA Tory Lord Gary Porter who has been elevated to a Baronetcy quite recently) is very close to current government thinking so when he says that free bus passes should be cut and the money "saved" spent on care for the elderly it will be safe to assume that this is being discussed in Westminster.

We can also look at the LGA saying that free bus passes are under threat as long ago as 2014 in a Sky news video from youtube:

The LGA spokesman in the video speaking about the threat to fee bus passes is Tory Councillor David Simmonds CBE.

Here is that link again for those who receive this blog by email without embedded video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_HpYEdELRM

So who is scaremongering now Barry Lewis?

I also note that Barry has complete faith in Tory manifesto promises:

" ............... the Conservative Government has spelt out its intention in its 2015 Manifesto - it will protect pensioner benefits including the free bus pass, TV licences and Winter Fuel payments. You can't get clearer than that."

Barry Lewis with the Tory minister who promised
 railway electrification then did not deliver it.

Oh what a trusting soul you are Barry. How have other Tory 2015 manifesto promises been honoured:

1. Promise not to cut child tax credits - forgotten when child tax credits cut.
2. Protect child benefit despite freeze - the reality is that the value of child benefit will have fallen 24% by 2021.
3. Promised to electrify railways (in East Midlands by 2019) - reality - many schemes cut back and we have no idea if the electrification between Derby and Sheffield will ever be started.
4. Tax free childcare by 2015 - still waiting.
5. Three days off with pay for volunteering - reality - shelved as too expensive.
6. Social care cap at £72,000 for elderly and younger disabled to be introduced in 2016 - shelved until 2020 but to be reviewed. look out for this one in the 2020 Tory manifesto.
7. No increase to NI for self employed - Hammond tried to increase this tax but a Tory rebellion has forced a rethink.
8. Have to include the big one from 2010, no increase to VAT - reality was that VAT was increased within months.
9. Protect the environment, most green government ever - the reality is more fracking and licenses for open cast coal mines.
10. Added 18/4/17 - David Cameron/Teresa May - No general election until 2020

If you need any more help Barry I suggest that you check this out: Daily Mirror article - 21 broken Tory promises

As Barry says, "......You can't get clearer than that."

Tories plan to cut bus passes ............ Labour pledge to fight to keep them

The Conservative Chair of the Local Government Association (LGA) has stated that the way to help fund council services is to end free bus passes for pensioners. The LGA Chair is Lord Gary Porter of Spalding and in an interview earlier this year he proposed that councils could save money if the right to travel free on buses was withdrawn from pensioners. He later claimed:

"............ It would still encourage people to use busses and allow companies to generate cash".

source: Huffington Post

Free bus passes for the over 60's were introduced in 2007 by the Labour Chancellor, Gordon Brown and benefited 11 million people. It was also a welcome boost for hard pressed bus companies with, by 2014,  £2.3 billion of central government subsidies being made available, administered by local authorities such as Derbyshire County Council. (2014/15, subsidies in the UK were £2.3 billion, made up of £826 million for London, £516 million for metropolitan areas outside London and £951 million for non-metropolitan areas such as Derbyshire).

Unfortunately, in line with the pushing back of the pension age the bus pass is gradually changing and by 2020 will be available for those reaching the pension age of 66. This change has saved the treasury over £200 million a year. The Tory plan to cut back even further would mean taking away from pensioners even more. Tories plan to cut back pensioner benefits whilst using that money to fund tax cuts to the wealthy .............. such as the £400 cut in tax per year for those earning between £45,000 and £100,000 which was a measure in the last Tory budget ............ and there are so many more examples.

If you want to bore into the facts about the bus pass scheme then this is a good place to start - the Greener Journeys group analysis of free bus passes. I urge you to click on this link to read this paper which highlights the fact that:

For every £1 spent we gain a benefit to our society and economy of £2.87.


"Half of the benefits accrue directly and immediately to concessionary travellers themselves, around 20% of the benefits to other bus passengers and other road users from transport network improvements, and the rest to the wider community from wider economic and social impacts and in particular from improvements in health and wellbeing".............. I am quoting directly from the Greener Journeys paper I linked to above.

Note that an appraisal of commercial benefits such as increased shopping on local high streets or visits to local attractions has not been included so the benefits could be much higher. I note that nationally, 54% of free bus pass journeys are made to go shopping and the money saved on bus tickets is available to be spent in those shops. The boost to the local economy is undeniable.

Without the wider commercial benefits this translates as a cost/benefit ratio of 2.87. Compare that with the cost/benefit ratio of the new railway scheme between London & Birmingham, HS2 which has dipped below 1.5 and does include wider commercial benefits ............. investment in bus passes for elderly and disabled  gives a much better return. We should ask why Tories propose ending concessionary bus passes but still actively promote HS2 when investment in bus services gives a return that is twice as good as the HS2.

Three Labour council candidates pledge to keep bus passes and winter fuel allowance
John Porter (Horsley), Clr John Owen (Belper), Jyoti Wilkinson (Alport & Derwent)
Carol Angharad (Duffield & Belper South), unfortunately not on the photo shares this pledge
Thanks to Cheryl Pidgeon for the photograph

The number of pensioners (65 and over) that would be affected by these Tory proposals living in the 4 Derbyshire electoral divisions being contested by these 4 Labour candidates are:

Alport & Derwent - 3,148 (27% of the 11,523 electorate)
Belper - 1,997 (17% of the 11,673 electorate)
Duffield & Belper South - 2,673 (23% of the 11,805 electorate)
Horsley - 2,801 ( 22% of the 12,552 electorate)

Plus the number of younger disabled folk who are eligible for a free bus pass. More research would be necessary to unearth that figure.

Source :Observatory Derbyshire

In conclusion

There is only one way to ensure that free bus passes are not cut by the Tories and that is to vote Labour in the elections on May 4th. This will send a strong message to Lord Porter of Spalding and Derbyshire Tories that free bus passes must not be cut. You will know that you have elected a Labour County Council that pledges to keep them.

Generous Derbyshire Tories promise that unpaid carers can have one afternoon off every 18 years

Ok so I realise that the title of this blogpost may seem like a cheap dig at Derbyshire Tories but I've just been reading their election manifesto and ............ well ...............read on;

I was rather taken aback with more than one of their claims but this one takes the biscuit:

• Provide 5000 half day breaks to support Derbyshire Carers

It prompted me to do some research and I found that there are 92,763 individuals being looked after by unpaid carers. It took me about an hour to come up with that figure which can be gleaned from here: Observatory Derbyshire Area Profiles Website

Now if we assume that these generous Tories will be making a provision for 5,000 afternoons off per year then by the time of the next election in 2021 there would be 12,763 carers still waiting for their few hours respite.

If however the 5000 afternoons are to be spread over 4 years then the last carer to benefit will have waited over 18 years for their few hours of freedom.

Obviously I am calculating by the number of folk listed as receiving unpaid care which results in these ridiculous assumptions. "Derbyshire County Council provides services to almost 17,000 older, vulnerable and disabled people and supports 21,000 carers across Derbyshire", and here I am quoting the DCC website directly. Perhaps the Tories are targeting the 21,000 with the 5,000 afternoons off. More of this in another post.

Then there is the cost ............ no I'll not go into that ........... I did do some rough estimates but it's all nonsense. Of course carers need respite time off and we all have a part to play in this. If councils were properly funded and not subject to Tory government cuts we could have a meaningful crack at sorting out Care in the Community. Despite those Tory cuts Derbyshire Labour promise to give registered carers free travel throughout the county ............ now that can be delivered.

Of course, none of what the Derbyshire Tories propose adds up ............. it's just an ill thought out election gimmick and will fool nobody. If it took me just one hour to bottom out this nonsense why didn't the Tories check it out before making it an election pledge?

Just one reason why voting Labour ensures that adult care is treated seriously