Councils hit by forum’s backlash amid disparity in care home fees
A Welsh care group has left a fees forum in protest over claims some Welsh councils are ‘deprioritising care’. Local authorities said the rates were set based on inflation, sector costs, the allocation from Welsh Government and consideration for council t
AN ORGANISATION that represents care providers in Wales has dramatically left a group set up to discuss fees.
The decision by Care Forum Wales (CFW) to resign from the North Wales Care Fees Group comes amid claims that the region’s councils are “deprioritising care” even though they have been given more money by the Welsh Government to pay for it.
In response local authorities said the rates were set based on inflation, sector costs, the allocation from the Welsh Government and consideration for council tax bills for local ratepayers.
The group includes representatives of each of the six local authorities in north Wales, the Health Board and Mary Wimbury, the chief executive of CFW.
A recent investigation by CFW revealed that the fees paid by local authorities in the north are up to £11,000 a year less per person than those on offer from one local authority in south Wales.
They say the issue was brought into sharp focus when Torfaen council announced big increases in its rates – 17% for residential care and 25% for nursing care.
The increases at north Wales councils ranged from 4% to 14% depending on the authority and type of care. UK inflation is currently just over 6%.
It means that a 50-bed care home in Torfaen will receive £546,000 a year more for providing residential EMI care than a similar-sized home in Anglesey, Wrexham and Flintshire for exactly the same levels of care.
In the cases of Denbighshire and Gwynedd, it equates to an extra £494,000 a year and £444,600 more than a home in Conwy.
The fees paid in Torfaen are also well above the rates paid for care in Swansea, Pembrokeshire and Neath Port Talbot.
According to Ms Wimbury, the group’s work on setting fees was “completely disregarded” despite
council leaders and chief executives emphasising the need for higher pay rates for staff. The north Wales leadership board of council leaders and chief executives had recognised that
social care was underfunded and had written to the Welsh Government to raise the issue.
In the resignation letter to the North Wales Care Fees Group, Ms
Wimbury said: “However, it appears all north Wales local authorities are currently deprioritising care in their own spending, with fee increases in general not coming close to matching what the sector needs to meet inflationary pressures.
“We are continually told that is all local authorities can afford, yet we see percentage increases in fees significantly lower than the increase those same local authorities are seeing in their Welsh Government settlement – it would therefore seem clear that this is because other areas for spend are being prioritised.
“For some years now there seems to have been a significant disparity between fees paid in north Wales and those in south-east Wales in particular, and this is starkly highlighted by Torfaen, who have undertaken a detailed exercise this year to understand providers’ true costs which have led to increases of between 17 and 25%.”
They said all average fee increases in north Wales were between 6.21% and 7.4% despite local authorities receiving a settlement of between 8.8 and 9.5% from Welsh Government.
Around two-thirds of all care providers’ costs related to staffing, and one of the main problems was that the formula being used by councils to calculate fees was not allocating sufficient staffing hours.
Ms Wimbury added: “Given the complete disregard so far in setting this year’s fees of the work undertaken by the North Wales Care Fees Group to start to rectify the issues in current fees we can see no point in continuing to participate, particularly when such participation is used by local authorities to legitimise the fees set. We will therefore be withdrawing from the group unless or until there is an absolute assurance from those in leadership positions across north Wales that our concerns will be taken seriously.”
CFW chair Mario Kreft said: “The main problem at the moment is that we have an unjust postcode lottery of fees as a result of having 22 local authorities and seven health boards often doing their own thing, creating a totally dysfunctional system.”