MP Challenges Care Home Charges Injustice

12.38.29pm BST (GMT +0100) Wed 14th May 2008

MP Vincent Cable introduced an Adjournment Debate in Parliament on Friday on the issue of 'unfair' charges in residential homes following the revelation that local care homes - like Care UK's Laurel Dene - are charging self-funding residents over £200 a week extra, over council nominees, for exactly the same service.

As Vincent Cable pointed out in the debate, this practice of 'cross-subsidising' charges is common in the UK but it can involve low-income pensioners paying £10,000 a year to subsidise other care home residents solely on the basis that they have a house, however modest. Most care home residents and their relatives are not aware that, in addition to the formidable costs of care homes, they are also subsidising other residents by large sums to help the private residential and nursing homes balance their books. The story only emerged locally a few months ago when Mrs Tracey Blackwood discovered, in respect of her mother, that there was a 25-year agreement between the Council and Care UK under which this large cross-subsidy occurred. No-one had explained when she approached the Home for a place that this penalty was involved - though it is now a statutory requirement that it should be declared.

Vincent Cable said, after the debate, that he was delighted that the Minister (Ann Keen MP) had conceded that there was an injustice and the Government would establish the scale of the problem and seek to deal with it: "Ultimately this comes down to money since if private care homes were paid the full cost of caring for NHS and council nominated residents, who cannot afford the commercial rate, then they would not be raiding the pockets of other residents. But, even in the absence of more public money, a lot can be done to make the whole process more transparent.

"What is utterly iniquitous is that 'self-funders' not only subsidise other residents but enjoy fewer rights. They can - as we saw in the case of Lynde House several years ago - face expulsion if they complain and there is no Human Rights legislation to protect them."