David Ward: City’s experience brings home vital issue of social care

To provide a local context, Bradford has 79,000 people over the age of 65, and that number will increase during the next 10 years to 85,000.

The cost of caring for people over 65 in Bradford will increase by £30m by 2025, on demographics alone; that does not take into account the increasing level and scale of need that people over 65 will have.

Across the Bradford district, it is estimated that 5,500 people have dementia, but only 52 per cent of those people are currently diagnosed.

We felt that this issue was so important that we could not ignore it. We carried out a survey; 35,000 survey forms were distributed. We also carried out interviews with carers, users and stakeholders, and we held a summit.

Reading the case studies that were submitted to us was the most disturbing aspect of this process.

We can look at statistics, figures, trends and analysis, but when we look at how the care system treats individuals – I have to say that very often such care is not very good – the importance of this issue really comes home to us.

Funding is a crucial issue. Yes, we can say that it is for local authorities to make priority decisions within their own areas, but that is happening against a background of a reduction in funding. There has been a 16 per cent reduction in spending on social care in Bradford in the past two years, and there is a proposed further reduction of £7m for 2013-14.

We found that enormous contributions are made by family, and often also by friends, towards paying for the costs of care. In Bradford, 65 per cent of the residential homes charge top-up fees, and 21 per cent of the contributions to pay for those fees comes from family and friends. I must say that the Dilnot proposals and principles received widespread support from the people we contacted.

In particular, it was interesting to note that when we talked about the funding of social care, although the average age of respondents was over 65, many of them regarded the funding of social care from universal benefits to wealthier older people as being their favoured way forward in order to address the funding gap. The average house price in Bradford is £94,000, so people can immediately see the benefit to a place such as Bradford of having a £123,000 threshold by 2017.

There was an issue that cropped up time and time again, and not only in our research; it is the issue of isolation and loneliness for the elderly. There are indications that this may, in certain cases, lead to premature death.

To provide more local context, some cultural barriers to ethnic minority communities’ acceptance of residential care were identified. We believe that this issue needs to be reviewed on a national basis.

People’s increased dependence on online access to information was not accepted as being the best way forward. There is still a desperate need for face-to-face contact so that information can be transmitted to those who are often in a vulnerable position and who are entering a world they have not been in before.

I recently visited a gentleman who had suffered an occupational injury. He was tetraplegic and after receiving fantastic intensive support in Pinderfields, including occupational therapy, he was returned to his own home, to another world. He received some support – four times a day he was visited to help him get out of bed with a hoist – but the rest was left up to him. He had no idea. His wife was in despair, unsure about what financial support would be available. In addition, a ramp – a simple thing, some might have thought was taking months to arrive.

The disparity between the first-rate service in the NHS and the level of support received once the gentleman returned home was stark and depressing.

Approval for the ramp was given, but its delivery and implementation was simply dumped on the man’s wife, for her to sort out herself. A temporary ramp was installed that the ambulance service refused, for health and safety reasons, to use.

We want a good place to grow old in, but that will not be achieved on the cheap. It is to the credit of the Government that they have not waited until better times but have identified the burning need to address the issue of the funding and quality of social care.

However, we must address the problem of how this is funded. Mine is unashamedly a Bradford perspective, but as with all research the key is to look at the generalisations that stem from it.