Elderly care facing crisis

No policy summed up Margaret Thatcher's brutal, callous, dogmatic rule better than throwing thousands of mentally ill people out of psychiatric wards into "the community."

Most were deeply vulnerable. A small minority were dangerous. At best they were left in the care of families who struggled to cope. At worst they ended up on the streets. The legacy of failure persists to this day.

So alarm bells should be ringing after the new NHS head said this is the model he wants to apply to elderly care.

After their vicious attacks on every other vulnerable section of society it would be no surprise to see David Cameron and Nick Clegg leap on Sir David Nicholson's comments as an excuse to go after OAPs.

We must be ready to stop them. And yet Nicholson's comments contain an important truth.

Mental health care desperately needed reform. Mentally ill people needed a system which treated them with dignity and helped them to live a full and productive life instead of consigning them to Victorian institutions which were little better than prisons.

But that system could never be created by the likes of the slash-and-burn ideologue Thatcher.

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Elderly care now desperately needs reform too. An ageing population and rising life expectancy are putting strain on a system which is struggling to cope.

Local authority care budgets are being slashed. Those lucky enough to have saved for retirement see it drained away by means-testing.

And the elderly face a stark choice. Be effectively institutionalised in a residential home. Or try to live independently with the support of overstretched domestic carers and NHS hospitals which are not set up to offer long-term care.

We must have change - in the shape of an NHS-style national care service that does away with means-testing and is free at the point of need.

A state-run network of care homes would do away with the postcode lottery and the fear of abuse or neglect by undertrained staff.

And properly funded support centres and domestic care would help elderly people to live a dignified and independent life in retirement.

We hope this is what Nicholson has in mind by "care in the community." But given the Con-Dems' record on the NHS so far this is not what he will get.

Home truths

Housing is the other great crisis of our time alongside elderly care. Rents are rocketing, tenants are stuffed into crumbling, overcrowded buildings owned by unscrupulous landlords, overseas speculators are hoovering up our housing stock and the idea of getting a mortgage is increasingly a pipe dream for ordinary people.

And again we have to utter the name Thatcher, as it was she who gutted council housing, for which we are all paying the price decades later.

Decent housing is a basic right and the only way to ensure it for all - the only way we abolished the slums of the 19th and early 20th centuries - is state provision.

The private sector simply can't do the job. It can't build enough homes and it can't make those homes available at a fair price - a lesson everyone in Britain has learned painfully since Thatcher brought in the "right to buy."

So we stand 100 per cent behind Ucatt's call for councils to be given back the right to build thousands of urgently needed homes.

It would make a dent in the growing housing crisis. It would put thousands of builders back to work as we enter a triple-dip recession. And it would again reveal the toxic Tories and their ideology for what they really are.