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Health and Social Care Bill

I want to make it clear at the outset that I am not referring to the home, which is a BUPA home, where my mother has been placed by me. I want to make it absolutely clear that my comments have no relevance whatever to the circumstances in which my mother now finds herself. I am sure that noble Lords will understand why I am saying that. My comments are based on conversations that I have had with others. I shall concentrate my remarks on the reference made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, to self-funders. The financial bottom line in London is that you will get nothing for under £1,000 a week, which is £50,000 a year. If you want something reasonable, it will cost you £1,200 a week, which is £60,000 a year, or £100,000 a year of taxable income to fund it. We are talking about a very expensive service, and people who pay that kind of money for their care—that includes my mother, to whom I refer only because there are others like her in other institutions—demand certain standards. At the moment, self-funders are in an impossible position in nursing homes. They can say and do nothing, and have to put up with it, unless they or a relative are prepared to place themselves on the line and take a risk that there will be no retribution inside the home. As I say, this has nothing to do with my mother’s situation. I must keep emphasising that because I do not want my comments to be misrepresented in any way. I thought long and hard about the solution. I shall quote selectively from the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, because the following words are the nub of the amendment so far as I am concerned. They are: "““the extent to which complaints … are adequately dealt with by the bodies which it regulates””." Those are the key words. There is a way of dealing with this. As I say, I am an engineer and a trader by background and not a professional in this area, so I look at this more as part of the client group. Many of the complaints are not hugely important to us, but they are to the people who are in these institutions. They can be very small. They can be about the variety of the diet; the arrangements for cleaning people; the people, such as the nurses, who have been allocated to them; at what time they are required to get out of bed in the morning and be put to bed in the evening; at what time the television is turned off; and whether they are allowed to circulate within the home. There are all kinds of minor things that cannot necessarily be dealt with in a conversation with the home manager, because the information can somehow feed its way down the line and the client—that is to say, the resident—may well feel that they will somehow suffer as a result. There is a need for someone between the client, the home management and the nursing staff who is utterly independent and can be relied on to receive information and deal with complaints effectively by raising them directly with the home management without identifying the person who has made the complaint or the relatives who represent that person. I do not know what the position is in homes that are in essence funded by local authorities and where the entire intake might well consist of people who are funded publicly; I am talking about self-funders. We can find these people, and one function of the commission should be to establish a structure that can identify people in communities who are in a position to act in this independent role. They do not deal with major complaints; they deal with the minor things that people as residents find impossible to raise in the home. Many such issues arise. I talked to a resident of a home in the north of England that is very near my former constituency. That person had a catalogue of complaints that were not hugely important, but it was quite clear that they were causing them immense frustration and concern. Even I felt it difficult to raise the issue with the management in the home for fear that they might communicate what I had said to the nursing staff. It might be fed back to a member of the nursing staff and to a particular resident to whom I had been seen talking. So you are in an utterly impossible position. Therefore, all I am asking for is a structure which allows for an independent person. Perhaps it could be linked to the LINks, to which my noble friend referred when speaking to his amendment. I do not know whether that is the answer, but I simply would ask that it is considered. At present, the position is utterly impossible for people who are paying out annually a very large amount of money.