| Hello Thomas Happy New Year - welcome to the first Independent Living newsletter of 2014! Contents: 1. Looking Forward In 2014 2. Councils Not Meeting Care Costs 3. Nutrition & Cognition – Volunteers Wanted 4. Bedroom Tax & Discretionary Housing Payments 5. Care Bill Latest 6. News Updates """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 1. Looking Forward In 2014 Having listened to the Chancellor at the beginning of this week, clearly one thing we will be looking forward to is more financial cuts – and probably in just the same areas that have already been snipped away at, given the avowed intention of politicians to avoid losing the goodwill of older voters by messing with universal retirement benefits. I know that we need to reduce the deficit, and I certainly don't advocate penalising pensioners, whose incomes may have been going up at a higher rate than working people, but from a very low base. It just seems unfair to take yet more from the same people who have already borne the brunt of the cuts, slicing another £12 billion from the welfare budget, which has a disproportionate effect on carers and people with disabilities. This subject will be debated in the House of Commons sometime soon, following the success of the WOWPetition, which attracted more than the 100,000 signatures necessary to be considered for debate. But getting a debate is just one step - MPs need to turn up and support the motion for a full assessment of the impact welfare cuts and benefit reform are having. You can find some tips about how to approach your MP on this subject, here, and if you aren't sure of your MP's contact details, you can find them here. It would be great if we could move beyond the shortsighted cuts – such as the bedroom tax (more below) – which even cost more in financial terms than they save, quite apart from their human toll. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 2. Councils Not Meeting Care Costs An issue that is unlikely to go away any time soon, given the continuing pressure on local authority budgets: councils are still not paying the actual cost of looking after care home residents. "Fair Price for Care" is the care home cost model developed by independent healthcare experts LaingBuisson, and the latest edition shows increases in the fees paid by local authorities lag behind cost rises experienced by care providers. Although the current differential is modest – 0.2 percent on average – this comes on top of an accumulated 5.2 percent real terms cut over the past four years. It is largely managed by keeping tight control on staff pay levels, something that will undoubtedly cause more problems in the future, as care home operators try to retain staff and maintain the quality of their workforce. The deficit amounts to between £31 and £130 per week. Anyone paying care home fees independently will know exactly where that shortfall is being made up. """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 3. Nutrition & Cognition – Volunteers Wanted Nutrition is a subject of perennial interest to us here at Independent Living. We are fortunate enough to have our very own expert writing regularly on the subject: Mary Farmer, retired NHS dietitian, who is as entertaining as she is knowledgeable. You can visit her blogspot here - always worth a browse through the archive, as well as reading her latest article. The next one, coming shortly, focuses on the national breakfast of Scotland - porridge! What you eat and when you eat it could be having more of an impact than you perhaps realise. A final year student at Westminster University is looking for healthy, older volunteers, to help with research into the effect of nutrition on cognitive abilities. What you would need to do is keep a food and physical activity diary for a week, then do some computer-based memory tests. There is more information on the IL website, here. The project is under way now, so your diary week would need to happen some time during this month, or February at the latest. And volunteers for this particular project should be based in London, or able to travel there conveniently, in order to take part in the memory tests. """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 4. Bedroom Tax & Discretionary Housing Payments? The Christmas period brought a number of stories about the Bedroom Tax, which you may have missed, so I'm bringing them together here. First was a modest piece of good news for those who have been receiving Housing Benefit continuously since before the 1st of January 1996. If you are in this situation, your "eligible rent" is determined by an earlier set of regulations, which means that you should not be subject to the Bedroom Tax. So if your local authority has reduced the amount of housing benefit you receive, because you have more rooms than they think you need, you should ask them to reconsider their decision. Although this revelation was greeted with understandable enthusiasm when it was shared on social media, there is a catch, which is that the onus is on you to prove that you have been receiving HB continuously for the last 18 years. I suspect there aren't many of us sufficiently cautious and tidy-minded to keep records for such a long period. Who knows, you might even require an extra bedroom to store them in... Still with the Bedroom Tax, which disproportionately affects households with a disabled member. Some two thirds of the 600,000-odd social housing tenants caught up in this have a disability, and the government has always argued that Discretionary Housing Payments (DHP) are there to cushion the financial blow for vulnerable people. Unfortunately, as a recent Freedom of Information request made by the National Housing Federation reveals, many disabled people who need this help aren't getting it. There is a postcode lottery at work, so that while nearly a third of disabled people throughout England have been unsuccessful in their application for DHP, in some areas it is as little as one in 10 applications that succeed. Even if you are one of the lucky ones, DHP is, as the name suggests, not something you can count on. It is a transitionary support, and one that needs to be reapplied for, with all the attendant stress and uncertainty. Not to mention the fact that local councils are being inundated with applications, when their time could be much better spent on more productive activities. I wonder whether this has been taken into account amongst the unintended costs of enforcing a benefit cut that was, presumably, supposed to save some money? """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 5. Care Bill Latest Tomorrow (9th January) sees the latest step on the road towards enactment of the new Care Bill, when the committee stage commences with the Commons Public Bill Committee scrutinising the draft legislation line by line; a job which they are expected to have wrapped up by 4th February. If you have direct experience, and are planning to submit any evidence or opinions that could influence the legislation, make sure you do so as soon as possible, by email to scrutiny@parliament.uk. Once the committee stage is complete, it will be too late; and the earlier you make your submission, the more time you are giving them to consider your input. This is a piece of legislation that will affect pretty well all of us, one way or another, including as it does arrangements for paying the costs of any domiciliary or residential care we may need during our lifetime, with a cap on the amount we would be expected to pay out of our own resources, for the first time. It also includes provision for carers to receive services (or funds to pay for them themselves) to support them in their caring responsibilities. This is another first: carers have had a right to an assessment of their needs in the past, but no right to services. At the same time, the Bill doesn't provide any more money for local authorities, and with yet more cuts on the way, apparently, it is hard to see how they will go about meeting all their new commitments – including a duty to "promote individual well-being" and "prevent future needs for care and support". If you would like to hear some expert analysis, do please listen to the interview I recorded with Belinda Schwehr of Care and Health Law last year: she explains it so much more comprehensively than is possible here! """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" 6. News Updates Increasingly, medics are recognising the value of diet in treating illnesses. The latest evidence, which is particularly dramatic, is the ability to reverse type 2 diabetes through diet alone. Generally associated with obesity, the disease interferes with the body's production of insulin, and the recent study has shown that a short-term diet, with calorie intake severely limited, reverses the disease and restores normal insulin production, within a few weeks. If you are unfortunate enough to find yourself in prison, at least the quality of the food you receive is subject to national minimum standards. Not so for hospital patients. Inexplicably, no government has taken the step of applying compulsory quality standards to hospital food, despite overwhelming evidence of the importance of nutrition to health. Ninety eight organisations supporting the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, including the Royal College of Physicians, British Heart Foundation and the Patients Association, are calling on the government to support the Health and Social Care (Amendment) (Food Standards) Bill which has been introduced to Parliament by Baroness Cumberlege, and would improve all patient meals by requiring them to meet mandatory quality, nutritional and environmental standards. You can read more here. And that's it for this week! Don't forget you can access all the news as soon as it is uploaded in our News Centre. And, just as importantly, our new look Forum is always open, and waiting for you to post about any topics that interest you. If you haven't visited recently, take a look! Previous newsletters are archived here. Our Facebook page is regularly updated with the latest developments on the site, and is also somewhere that you can share your opinions with us. Or if you want to make it pithy, send us a tweet! @IndLiving Until next time, with all good wishes, Frances -- Frances Leckie Editor E: editor@independentliving.co.uk t: +44 (0) 208 133 0628 Skype: francesleckie w: http://www.independentliving.co.uk This newsletter was sent to thomaschambers@eircom.net. If you prefer not to receive future copies, just reply asking to be removed from the list, and it will be done! |
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Fw: IL Newsletter, 8th January
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