Social care

Before 9/11 11 September will always be remembered for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon 25 years ago. What else has happened on 9/11 through the ages? AD 9 Barbarians defeat the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. 1297 William Wallace defeats the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. 1609 English explorer Henry Hudson arrives on Manhattan Island. 1852 Buenos Aires declares independence from the Argentine Confederation. 1857 The Mountain Meadows Massacre, when Mormons attacked a convoy of wagons driven by settlers travelling from Arkansas to California, killing 120. 1954 Hurricane Edna makes landfall in New England, killing 29. 1976 TWA flight 355, hijacked after taking off from LaGuardia airport, arrives in Paris.

Condemned leaders Former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, for using lethal force against student protests last year. But on past records, she might yet live to an advanced age. The last national leader to be executed was Saddam Hussein in 2006, during the Allied occupation of Iraq. Other leaders sentenced to death in their country’s courts have fared better: — Emile Derlin Zinsou, installed as president of Dahomey (now Benin) after a coup in 1968, was sentenced to death in 1975. That was rescinded and he returned to Benin in 1990. He died aged 98 in 2016. — Chun Doo-hwan, who led a coup in South Korea in 1979, was sentenced to death in 1996, later commuted to life imprisonment. He died in 2021 aged 90.

The foster care system in this country is collapsing. There are roughly 80,000 children who’ve been removed from violent or neglectful parents and need homes, but there’s a catastrophic lack of people prepared to care for them – a shortfall of around 6,500 foster carers. The rate of decline is terrifying. Every year the small pool of available foster households shrinks and those who do apply to be carers are increasingly elderly. Perhaps you assumed that a generation with ‘Be kind’ tattooed on their wrists would leap to look after the worst off? Not a chance. ‘Be kind’ is an instruction to others, not a memo to self. Neither my generation (X) nor the millennials are interested in stepping up. We rubberneck the tabloid stories of poor abused children online.

I manage a small, not-for-profit care home in Norfolk. We have tea rounds, hymn singing, hand-holding and staff who know every resident by name and often even their grandchildren’s names. But we also have empty offices: those once occupied by our deputy manager, care manager (the job I now do) and general manager, all of whom chose early retirement within the past two years. They are not alone. According to the charity Skills for Care, the adult social care sector has 131,000 vacancies – the highest on record. Turnover for care-home staff hovers around 25 per cent, and growing numbers of managers are leaving due to burnout. This is the logical outcome of how the care system is built.

I know straight away, from the look on my friend Alice’s face, whether it’s a ‘bad carer’ day. Five years ago Alice had a fall and she can’t now do stairs, so she lives just on the second floor of her maisonette in north London. When I drop round, the carer is usually in the kitchen and Alice in her bedroom/sitting room next door. If it’s a bad carer day, she’ll look towards the kitchen, do a thumbs-down sign, purse her lips and shake her head, then she’ll wriggle her shoulders – hoity toity – to indicate that she feels bossed about. Alice is entirely dependent on the care company the council employs, and appeasement is all she has I suppose infirm 88-year-olds often need to be bossed about in a way.

Before the pandemic hit, NHS England waiting lists were at a record high of 4.4 million. Three lockdowns later, they’ve risen to six million: an unacceptable figure for a Tory government which has spent years trying to rebrand itself as the ‘party of the NHS’. Boris Johnson’s decision to break his manifesto pledge and raise taxes was directly linked to the idea that the money would first be funnelled into the health service to fix the backlog. So can he now deliver for patients? When Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced his ‘elective recovery plan’ in the House of Commons on Tuesday, he said that the waiting list would start shrinking by March 2024, though he stressed that the numbers will rise before then. By how much?

Take care Sir: Your editorial (‘Counting the costs’, 8 January) makes valid points regarding the funding of social care. The good people of the north in the red-wall seats will be rightly appalled. A couple who have worked hard and made their own way onto the property ladder must wonder what they have voted for. They sit on a property worth £100,000 to £200,000. If they need a care home, they will see their children’s legacy disappear into the hole of care costs while knowing that they are subsidising the same care costs of millionaires. This is deeply unfair and, I daresay, anti-Conservative. There should be no care costs on a modest legacy of, say, less than £250,000.