Costs cap won’t fix social care system

Widdecombe

THERE may be sense in capping the amount the elderly have to pay towards their care but it is surely only an interim solution. With rising longevity, ageing baby boomers and medical advances almost every week the state cannot truthfully give an indefinite pledge. We have seen where that leads with the NHS and the answer is to rationing, with the poor suffering most. No thanks.

So what is the long-term answer? It is more than reasonable to expect the old to pay up if they can. Savings for a rainy day should be called upon when the rain pours and property is how most people save. The state has no duty to secure anybody’s inheritance.

That however leaves a glaring inequality with those who have been prudent penalised and those who have been feckless rescued. Furthermore those who cannot pay are themselves divided into those who couldn’t save and those who wouldn’t.

I suspect that in the end there will have to be some kind of compulsory insurance with those on benefit obliged to pay something as they were under the old poll tax arrangements, with benefits raised to take account of the necessity. Nevertheless I know from having been the minister in charge of elderly care 26 years ago that even then there was doubt that any scheme could cover the costs. So there will probably have to be a combination of cap, insurance and subsidy.

Yet there is one other measure which would make an enormous difference. It was once the case – and still is in some countries – that the primary duty of care fell on the children, with the state stepping in only as a last resort. We may yet have to rediscover that model. A COMPLAINT of blasphemy has been made against Stephen Fry to the police in the Irish Republic after he called God an “utter maniac” in a TV interview. Yes, that is blasphemous but blasphemy is now as common as sun and rain so why make a martyr out of this egoist who loves to be the centre of attention? Fry was railing against the Almighty for the suffering and wars caused by man. If he is that intellectually muddled then just shrug and let him rant on because being ignored is the last thing he wants.

THERE’S MORE TO RUNNING A BUSINESS THAN OBSESSING ABOUT TARGETS

I THOUGHT it only happened in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity but no, if you work for Central Claims Group in Manchester and miss your sales target you can find yourself flat on the floor with a squid being laid across your face. Eeeek!

It is not obligatory but those with higher sales figures can ask colleagues who have achieved less to pay a forfeit, of which this experience is an example.

Central Claims Group, which helps people reclaim mis-sold PPI, is the last firm in the country to whom I would turn had I the need of such services. That is not because employees there go in for these schoolboy forfeits but because the ethos is so patently target-driven.

Quality and sound advice are much more important than scripts, forms and targets. A worker might spend a long time on the phone only to decide the claim is going nowhere but the service is in the advice not the tick-in-the-sales box.

You cannot – or at any rate should not – treat human beings as if they were cans on a production line. Sadly too many companies now do exactly that.