We spend £1 billion on foreign aid consultants as care homes serve elderly inedible mush

WHAT a wretched mess! Ministers have decided to raise council taxes in a much too belated attempt to solve the crisis of elderly care.

Otherwise, according to Martin Green, chief executive of Care England (the body that represents care home providers), the whole industry will topple ‘like a house of cards’.

Not to mince words, the alternative is for thousands of elderly people to die in squalor.

We’re told that Chancellor Philip Hammond wanted to announce a rise in local authority ‘precepts’ for social care —that is, increases to council tax — in his Autumn Statement last month.

However, he backed off amid government concerns that the subsequent squeals of anger from voters (who have already paid billions in taxes, some of which they quite understand-ably expected to go towards elderly care) would take the gloss off his speech.

Now, though, ministers have caved in. They had no option.

Normally, I admire politicians who ignore campaign organisations, lobbyists and vested interest groups who shroud- wave and issue apocalyptic warnings that some system or other will collapse without a further injection of public cash.

Not this time. The Care England boss is spot on. The care home industry is — if you’ll excuse the metaphor — tottering like a nonagenarian who could have a deadly fall.

NHS managers are terrified that the private providers of long-term care will cut their losses and shut up shop in view of ever-rising costs. If that happened, the burden would all fall on the State. Miserable

I share those worries. For my 93year- old mother receives roundthe- clock care in a good private home that — although the fees eat up her life savings — looked as if it might close.

My brilliant sister, who knows how to manage these things, could have found another home, but the move would have shortened my mother’s life.

My mother is luckier than most. Countless other elderly people have been parked in care homes that depend on local authority funding. Many of these are miserable places. Old folk needing urgent attention can spend too long waiting for a surly member of staff to end a private call on their mobile or to finish a chat with a colleague before offering them help.

Alternatively, growing old in a rundown council flat is even worse. So, in the short term, the Government’s action to raise council taxes is necessary, even if it adds another £100 to the typical family’s annual bill — which is what will happen if councils are allowed to push up social care precepts by seven per cent.

But in return for governments of all colours having shamefully failed to tackle this crisis for decades and for the Theresa May government now to impose extra charges, Mrs May and Philip Hammond must promise one thing.

That is, if more money must be raised from taxpayers to invest in better elderly care, the Government must stop squandering our cash on vanity projects and ‘foreign aid’.

For example, almost daily we learn of some new shocking example of money having been misspent by the Department for International Development (DfID) — or, as cynics call it, the Department for Hosing Down African Dictators and Dodgy Asian Start-ups with British Tax Revenue.

If the connection between DfID’s obscene spending spree and the care home crisis does not seem obvious to ministers, let me spell it out.

The £1billion — yes, you read that correctly — spent on foreign aid ‘consultants’ is £1billion not spent on training care home assistants to treat their elderly residents with dignity rather than behaving inhumanely towards them.

For example, the money wasted on a Ghanaian shopping mall and language lessons for North Korean officials could have gone towards paying for fresh linen and palatable food in old people’s homes. (No primary school in the country would dare serve the rebarbative mush that passes for ‘dinner’ in some residential homes I’ve visited — parents would storm the gates.)

DfID civil servants take home the highest median salaries in Whitehall: nearly £53,000 a year — not counting bonuses. Small wonder, then, that they are so lavish with other people’s money. Unscrupulous private contractors and fat-cat charity bosses use the DfID like a cashpoint machine. Surrender

There was a time, not so long ago, when the private sector could also make a handsome profit from the care home sector. No longer. Neither well- off pensioners nor local authorities can afford the fees.

There’s no getting around the fact that looking after old people — especially the growing ranks of 90-year-olds and those with dementia — is a very expensive business.

Even the care-home ‘cowboys’ are giving up the business, now that they have to pay staff the new living wage. You might think that’s no bad thing but the alternative is worse.

The truth is that the words ‘demographic time-bomb’ have been tripping off our tongues for decades — but successive governments have fobbed us off with compassionate rhetoric. Indeed, Tony Blair deliberately made the situation worse by dramatically increasing Britain’s population thanks to his openborder immigration policies which were cynically designed to give Labour more voters.

Perhaps he calculated that, by the time those immigrants needed residential care, it would be someone else’s problem. He was right. Unfortunately, David Cameron’s Coalition and Tory Cabinets also tried to kick the problem into the long grass.

Last year, there was a sign that the Tories had understood the magnitude of the problem. Their election manifesto promised to cap charges for residential care at £72,000 — ‘so no one has to sell their home’.

However, that pledge was broken so fast — just three months after Cameron’s election victory — that, in hindsight, it smacked of an outright lie to shore up the Tory vote.

But, even if it had been a genuine promise, talk of ‘no one’ selling their home was fantasy politics. And, sure enough, we learned earlier this month that thousands of old people have been forced to surrender their homes to their local authority to pay their care home bills.

So- called Deferred Payment Agreements (DPAs) mean that councils can seize a property when someone dies in order to settle any outstanding debts.

That may sound sinister but, in fact, the DPA plan was wellintentioned. The problem is that, while some councils can be trusted to run the complex scheme, others can’t.

Only a third of local authorities have disclosed how many homes they have acquired the right to seize. Meanwhile, some council busybodies have taken to rifling through citizens’ private records to spy on parents who sign over homes to their children in order to conceal their property wealth and thus avoid care home fees.

How did we get into such a shameful mess?

A key factor, I would argue, are the flawed priorities of all politicians who have been in power since 1997.

Cocooned in Westminster and their ministry chauffeur-driven limos, they have been blithely unaware of the realities of daily life of the elderly who need roundthe-clock care and the financial sacrifices it requires. Dilemma

They were more interested in trying to grab the moral high ground with overseas philanthropy than looking after those people at home who paid their wages and who had paid taxes into the system for decades in the understandable expectation of getting a decent level of state care when they got older.

In the case of Labour, I believe the attitude was that there weren’t votes in such a policy. As for Tories, they cynically believed that such people would vote for them anyway.

The looming care home crisis didn’t keep millionaire Cabinet ministers awake at night.

But Theresa May, like me, is a child of the middle class. The awful dilemma facing retired savers is closer to home for her than Cameron and his rich chums in London’s Notting Hill.

Mrs May now has the chance to find a way of helping those who have been betrayed by her predecessor last year.

That means rescuing our existing care homes and building new ones. Of course, that’s easier said than done.

A first step would be to review Britain’s foreign aid budget, which will rise to £16 billion by the end of this decade.

And then take an axe to it. That way, our oldest citizens might get the comfortable and dignified quality of life we owe them.