* Bethan Mascarenhas, who owns and runs Old Vicarage care home in Llangollen with brother Richard
A small family-run care home in Llangollen is being clobbered by a £20,000 double whammy as a result of controversial Budget measures.
That’s the additional annual cost the Old Vicarage Care Home says it will face because of the increase in employers’ National Insurance payments and wage hikes announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
According to Bethan Mascarenhas, who owns and runs the 16-bed home with brother Richard, the extra costs “added more pressure” to the social care sector which was already facing huge funding challenges.
She challenged government leaders to visit a care home to see for themselves the impact the chronic lack of funding realistically had on people working on the frontline.
Bethan is backing a campaign, launched by Care Forum Wales (CFW), calling for social care to receive an NHS-style exemption from National Insurance increases or emergency financial support to stop care homes and domiciliary care companies going bust.
In launching their Save Social Care, Save the NHS campaign, care leaders say it’s vital care homes are protected from closure, otherwise patients who are fit to leave hospital but need social care will have nowhere to go and will add to the NHS bed-blocking crisis.
Backing the campaign, Bethan said finding the extra funding needed to cover the increase in pay and National Insurance is an additional headache to everyone involved in the care sector.
She said: “You’ve got to remember we’re a small home, and from these Budget decisions, it’s an extra £20,000 we’ve got to find all of a sudden.
“We’re family-run, so we will look to absorb some of these costs by doing a lot of the work ourselves in terms of managing, in terms of covering care shifts.
“The additional £20,000 we’ve got to find might seem relatively small, but we’re a small home and we will have to look at increasing our fees to cover that.
“That could mean the fees will go up by £24 a week, which families or individuals will have to find.
“The extra costs will have to be included in the fees, that’s the only way you can do it, unless you are going to completely review and cut your costs.
“We are already constantly in this battle about whether we increase our fees or do we cut costs to make care more accessible.
“We all work to such a high standard of care that it’s almost pretty much impossible to cut costs.
“Our wages bill , which accounts for 70 per cent of our total income, is predicted to go up by 10.3 per cent whereas Denbighshire County Council is only increasing our fees by 3.9 per cent.
“If you are reaching the benchmark that the Care Inspectorate and the governing body want you to reach, then you’re following the legislation, you’re offering very individual person-centred care to a very high standard, you’re keeping the environment up, providing really great activities.
“That also means your standards are very high and therefore that means your staffing needs to be very high – and your costs go up as a result.
“You can’t cut corners, so what do you do? Do you decide not to provide activities?
So, then you’ve got people in your care home bored.
“Do you cut corners in then saying ‘well, the environment can suffer’ and then the home doesn’t look as nice as a result?
“This is the kind of tug-of-war that you have with yourself when you are looking at reviewing things, especially when it comes to financial decisions.
“These additional costs from the Budget will put extra pressure on the care sector.
“And the pressures just keep building and building.
“So many homes have already closed because of the pressures and this is just another pressure.
“It doesn’t feel right to be putting more pressure on an already struggling industry. We are so vulnerable within the care sector because we don’t have huge margins to work within.
“Social care is run by people who genuinely want to make a difference and provide a really good service for people in later life or people who are not able to look after themselves.
“My message to the Government would be ‘come in, work with us, see the boots on the ground and come and look at the struggles that we have, come and see it on the frontline’.
“Our staffing costs tend to be about 70 per cent of our turnover.
“We need people, we completely run on people and if you don’t have people, you don’t have a business.
“It’s a 24/7 service, you have people with very complex needs and your team are the backbone of the business.
“They set the standard and the level of care so you need a good level of staffing and you need well-trained competent staff to be able to run a good service.
“And that is why staffing costs are so much.”
Care Forum Wales bosses say the inevitable result of the closure of any care home as a result of the Budget measures would be vulnerable people left high and dry, piling even more pressure on beleaguered hospitals already struggling to cope and create even longer waiting lists.
With a 1.2 per cent rise in Employer National Insurance contributions and a cut to the Secondary Threshold to £5,000 alongside the five per cent increase in the Real Living Wage to £12.60, bosses at CFW have calculated the sector in Wales faces a £150 million funding hole to plug.
CFW chair Mario Kreft MBE is leading the group’s new campaign. He said: “The former First Minister, Mark Drakeford, described social care as the ‘scaffold that holds up the NHS’ and losing care settings would be a disaster, not just for the vulnerable individuals for whom we care and our dedicated workforce, but also for hospitals across Wales.
“The changes, which amount to a tax on care, threaten to become a national emergency which is why our campaign, Save Social Care, Save the NHS.”
“During the Covid pandemic the Welsh Government provided better emergency financial support than any other part of the UK and we need to see a similar level of support to overcome this potential national emergency.
“Local authorities and health boards need to be directed to play their part in ensuring this financial support reaches the frontline to ensure this tax on care does not cause a collapse of social care and create a hammer blow for the NHS.”
Bethan added: “With the Budget measures, it just feels like we’ve been lumbered and after a very difficult time through Covid and all the other challenges the sector is vulnerable so we need help urgently.”
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