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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Johnson care home comment row – Day 2
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Johnson care home comment row – Day 2
Piers Morgan – I can't even look at Boris Johnson anymore, especially after what he said about care homes… the blame game is now starting… & everyone but the government is going to end up being blamed for this.#GMB pic.twitter.com/8d5V3GV8gC
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Fairly soon I think this philosophy is going to result in him being buried alive..
The Irish Covid tracing app is released today. I've been staying with my in-laws in Cork since March, so I've downloaded the app.
The description of the app says that it uses the Apple/Google Bluetooth exposure notification service. However, it seems to turn on location services. If I try to turn off location services I receive a notification that the exposure notification service won't work without it.
Seems a bit weird.
I learned everything I needed to know about Johnson and his ilk working as a waiter when I was a teenager, in a town with a university popular with English public school Oxbridge rejects. The casual rudeness to those considered their social inferiors is entirely familiar. It's no surprise to see him blaming the working class and immigrant workforce, mostly women, who've been risking their own health and wellbeing in minimum wage jobs in the care sector, for the mistakes of his government.
Piers Moron and Andrew Cooper.
Not good.
Yes we went through this some time ago (care home finances/situation/owners/profits).
Interesting that at the time @eadric bemoaned that we were talking about fluff when the real story was C-19 itself. Interesting also that care homes are on their way to becoming perhaps the single most important element in the C-19 episode.
PB leading the pack again.
We got into some very interesting discussions here months ago on care and it is definitely a major issue worthy of more discussion. More enlightened discussion certainly.
Some owners may be shysters but that can happen in any industry, but that's far from universal or typical.
That a business pays rent (or if not has debt to pay for a property) is not either a disgrace or unusual.
The most expensive part of care, like the most expensive part of almost any business, is presumably the staffing. It takes FIVE full time equivalent staff per one person on the rota to provide 24/7 care - or another way of phrasing it is that even on minimum wage including National Insurance etc to have one person on costs the equivalent of nearly £60 per hour.
I think more research is needed.
https://twitter.com/susie_dent/status/1280415002801975296
The only reason energy is expensive is that the owners of energy companies are all shysters and troughers?
Should we nationalise everything and become a Communist utopia in your eyes?
Tackling the ownership structures and forcing them to rent from companies or individuals not linked to the directors or owners is an easy and uncontroversial change.
Harris has drifted to 2.3; Duckworth has been nibbled into 11.5.
If you won't let the app acmes your phone's location service, it can't know where you are or where you've been. How can it then tell you if you've potentially been exposed to someone subsequently tested as infected (which is what the app is supposed to do) ?
We don't want to personally care for our parents. We don't want the job of caring for someone else's parents. We don't want the bloody foreigners who end up caring for our parents. And we don't want to pay for it but end up doing so in a system where seemingly nobody can get by. No wonder "just dump them back in the care homes virus or not" because government policy. Nobody seems to care.
There are many thousands of Care providers. Some may do that, just as some in other sectors, but when there are thousands of providers there are going to be some bad apples. But they won't be able to stay around for long as they won't be able to meet their costs.
Have you got evidence that the cost of providing 24/7 care to people with dementia isn't the reason behind high costs and that dodgy rent is instead? Across many thousands of providers.
may interest.
Worker ownership will do just fine.
https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/care-homes-market-study#government-responses-to-the-findings
On this the Scottish Administration does appear to be ahead of its English & Welsh counterparts.
Plus the NHS doesn't want lots of old people filling up its hospitals so they get rid of them asap.
That some businesses like Four Seasons may be mismanaged and going broke as a result doesn't condemn over 5000 businesses within the sector as all being like that.
Caring for an elderly relative with dementia, or multiple other health problems is hard. It's not something you can do in your spare time while you hold down a full-time job to pay the mortgage on your small semi-detached (that doesn't have room for granny anyway).
I imagine most 24/7 care homes would have more staff than residents.
(a) those requiring care need greater support in choosing a care home and greater protections when they are resident. Current and prospective care home residents must be able to make the right choices, and must be protected if things do not work out as expected; and
(b) issues around state-funded care and the provision of sustainable capacity. The market must support the state’s intention to ensure that all those who have care needs have them met. This requires that the industry must be sustainable and incentivised to invest and modernise to meet future needs.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a1fdf54e5274a75088c4286/england-short-summary-care-homes-market-study.pdf
One is that state of the care home sector - which is, of course, a matter of government responsibility as much as it is of the private sector. That whole debate is necessarily a long term one; there are failings on both sides - of management and provision on the one hand, and of funding and regulation on the other. There is no quick fix.
The other (which is what the furore is about) is the responsibility for infection control during an epidemic. Of course individual homes bear some responsibility for admissions, but that largely rests with government and its institutions such as PHE.
Given the known variability of the quality of management in the sector, national policy and control is of paramount importance.
Johnson's line about uncertainties about transmission etc is the purest bullshit. The simple fundamentals of epidemic control - identification of sources of infection, isolation of infected patients, and protection of vulnerable populations are common to all outbreaks.
Those principles were massively breached to empty the hospitals early on in the pandemic.
One issue which the team to which I was seconded had was overwork. Low-paid agency staff would do two (or occasionally more) shifts per day in different homes. We tried to do something about it, but it wasn't always easy, and I was saddened to learn, during the Covid-19 crisis, that it was still going on.
1. Most care homes serve a mix of self-funded and state-funded residents. The sector has to some extent maintained provision by charging self-funded residents in homes higher fees, we estimate the average cost for care to a self-funder to be £44,000 a year, around 40% more than local authorities pay on average. We do not consider this to be sustainable; we have seen very few examples of investment in new care home capacity primarily focussed at the LA-funded sector. The upshot will be that in the future LAs will not be able to provide services to all those with eligible needs. Moreover, the number of elderly people who are likely to need support, and the acuity of their care needs, is likely to increase.
12. We estimate that local authority-fees are currently, on average, around 5-10% below total cost for these homes, equivalent to around a £200-300 million shortfall in funding (UK-wide) for the care homes most exposed to local authority-funded residents. If local authorities were to pay the full cost of care for all the care home places they fund across the UK, this would cost them around £1 billion a year more.
What Ireland appears to have done is taken their solution, and stuffed a tracking app on top of it.
And as you say not where BoJo was.
These companies have taken years of dividends, when the time came for them to pay up, they claimed poverty. No. It's time for private companies to decide whether they want to be in private ownership or not. I'm more than happy for the state to take ownership of bailed out companies and wipe out shareholders and bondholders but the consequence free bail out these companies asked for was not fair on the taxpayer or private clients who have been finding years worth of profits.
Unless 40+ Conservative MPs defect to the opposition, or 183 vote against him in an internal vote of confidence, there's no reason for him to go anywhere. And having purged the most obvious traitors in 2019, those are both huge hurdles.
There's no actual process to get Boris or his favourites out before 2024. So until then, we plebs should just jog on. I think some of them enjoy the impotent rage.
So you ventured to Durham, Exeter, St. Andrews, the Sloaney Pony, Boujis, the Phene, the 151 (or Raffles) and Ham Polo Club.
All for research purposes.
And now you are in the financial services industry or one related to it.
Stockholm Syndrome anyone?
The dining clubs were still smashing up restaurants into the 2000s - I recall this well as I had dinner in a nice country gastropub a year or two after it was trashed, as it happens (a friend of mine lives nearby). The problem was that the clubs had to go further and further out and the natives tended to be less simpatico and to call the police without further ado.
Those show a kind of upbringing and mentality as young adults which I find utterly disturbing, above all the irresponsibility and sense that others would clean up after then.
And I understand that arrogance get's you places
I remember the first reports coming through - “Power outage at Aldgate” was how it started....
But according to this report, of the 26 largest care home providers: 18 had separated operating and property companies, (they think this is so that if they get sued, there are no assets to go after), 12/26 had significant purchases from related companies, most of those backed by private equity (4/5) have offshore owners in a tax haven.
https://chpi.org.uk/papers/reports/plugging-the-leaks-in-the-uk-care-home-industry/
So you opposed the furlough scheme and everything else the government has done during the pandemic? If so you're being consistent. If not, why should frontline sectors during a pandemic be abandoned while other sectors get support?
If we socialise self-inflicted losses then absolutely that is a problem. But a once in a century pandemic is a different matter.
By contrast, I got on OK with a few of the more working class liibertarians who crept round the edges of the StAs Tory society. Even if their ideas were often bat crazy, they were OK people.
No of deaths is below average by 3.4%
Cost of the Job Retention Scheme? £123 billion
Watching Piers Morgan rant and wail because Boris dared to demure from his sacred view of Who Is To Blame?
Priceless
A very dark day.
Wish you were here.
I'm just noting that I have had plenty of opportunities for observing our ruling class close up, and frequently it has been revealing to see how they interact with people that they barely acknowledge they are even interacting with.
Of course Johnson has a long history of kicking down and kissing up throughout his hack career, so dumping on minimum wage care workers is entirely in character.
When selecting a care home for a relative due diligence is a must. I visited places I wouldn't kennel a dog. There were homes that I wanted to leave within moments of my arrival. The aroma of stale urine and cabbage was unbearable in one.
Unbelievably all were expensive, but the price differential between the best and the worst was not as much as expected.
1) Do you not consider yourself a member of the ruling class, had you so chosen; and
2) How did you bear it. Or was it to further your own position?
A further 3 universities have fewer private school students as a percentage than Oxford but more private school students as a percentage than Cambridge, St Andrews, Durham and Imperial
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thetab.com/uk/2019/09/19/uk-private-school-universities-125931/amp
Separating assets in Limited Companies is standard practice in many industries for the largest providers as you you said to limit liability. Looking at only the largest providers will distort things.
12 out of 'top 26' is fewer than half purchasing from related companies - 12 from over 5000 is a different matter entirely.
Come the revolution, my mother's family fell under suspicion as they were basically not very political types, but probably menshevik (social democrat) insofar as they were anything. But the doorman turned out to be the chairman of the Moscow Communist Party and the local Soviet. He forcefully vouched for my grandfather as a decent bloke who ought to be left in peace. In those chaotic, pre-Stalinist days, that sort of recommendation was sufficient life insurance, and they stayed on for 5 years before finally emigrating as things started to get dicier.
The difference between doing so with well motivated staff who keep busy cleaning and those who can't be arsed is going to be a difference more of attitude, training, discipline and standards than a difference of cost.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending26june2020
You can find previous whole bulletins at the bottom, if the graphical summary isn't enough detail.
However, that doesn't mean that care homes should be operated like Starbucks or Amazon, and it's legitimate to enquire as to whether there's abuse and profiteering occurring from companies with government contracts to care for people.
Like any industry, there will be good and bad people running them. Let's make sure that good practices are incentivised as much as possible.
And I'm curious how market value is determined for the smallest providers. Easier to determine market value for listed stock than for wholly owned limited family businesses.
But nobody rational would suggest all coffee shops or cafes are the same as those operated by Starbucks and simply ignore the great proportion of coffee shops or cafes that are family operated.
One of them had been owned by Guy Hands. And then Spencer Haber! Both ex-Lehman Bros. Surely anyone who has likewise worked at Lehman should hang their head in shame.