Crushing a good plan

HOW depressingly predictable. Within hours of a genuinely imaginative pilot scheme to free up beds in overcrowded hospitals emerging, an alliance of social services chiefs, Health and Safety, and the Labour party tries to strangle it at birth.

It’s a simple but thoroughly sensible idea. Instead of patients languishing on wards after minor surgery because there’s no-one to look after them at home, people with spare rooms would be paid to take them in.

The proposed rate is £50 a night, compared with the average £400 daily cost of a hospital stay.

But a barrage of hostility from the Left has made the NHS think twice. They claim patients – especially older ones – would be at serious risk of accident, neglect or abuse.

This is, of course, blatant scaremongering. The scheme would apply only to people who are medically fit to be discharged and don’t suffer any cognitive impairment. Their hosts would be expected to cook and clean but not to be professional carers.

Yes, there must be proper safeguards, but this is an idea which deserves serious consideration – not knee-jerk hostility from the usual Left-wing suspects.

Not only would it alleviate hospital overcrowding, it would provide support to recovering patients in a warm family atmosphere – rather than the often impersonal surroundings of hospital wards.

And it would give British people – among the most charitable on Earth – a chance to express their innate compassion and sense of social responsibility in an eminently practical way.