Severely disabled families "left high and dry"
- the closure of Whitehall Street Respite and Residential Home for adults with severe learning disabilities
Ham and High 17.2.11
Imagine a local authority telling families who send their children to state schools that they were all being closed and that they would instead be paid an allowance to go privately? It would not take a crystal ball to see that families with the most difficulties and the least personal resources would soon be high and dry.
Yet this is equivalent to what Haringey Council are expecting families suffering disabilities to do. Two days before Christmas it announced that, as a result of the fall in its government aid, it would withdraw its provisions for severely disabled residents. It will no longer provide its own buildings and staff to care for them. Drop- ins and day centres for the elderly and the vulnerable will be closed, and in its own words “the council will not be re-providing or funding these services”. All four of its residential care homes will be shut, despite the fact that it cannot say where these residents are going to go, or how on earth they are going to afford the fees of the independent sector.
I went along to one of the “consultation” meetings last Thursday, to Whitehall Street Respite and Residential Home for adults with severe learning disabilities. This is a modest 15-bed home for people with learning disabilities and is the only in- house one of its kind run by Haringey Council. It offers residential places for 11 people, and 4 respite beds which support 35 families.
The frightened and mostly elderly parents filled the lounge area and sat with arms round their adult children some of whom rocked back and forth, some agitated, some perhaps luckily oblivious to the news that this pleasant house which has been home for many years, was to be cruelly shut for ever. As Councillor Dilek Dogus - Lead Member for Adult Social Care - introduced herself to the meeting, it occurred to me that she had probably never been here before.
The council claims it will save itself £240,000 by closing Whitehall Street, saying that it will give people personal allowances instead to purchase care on the open market. The parents at the consultation event knew they were being duped. “If you close our home we will have nothing else” cried one, “this is the only break I have.”
The personal allowances cannot meet the needs of many of these vulnerable people. Care on the open market is phenomenally expensive and these parents knew it. Many had tried to seek residential care in the past. And anyway many knew there was nothing out there. “We have been looking for over a year, there’s nothing”. “They just keep putting their prices up,” said another.
The Head of Learning Disabilities claimed that other families might be found in the borough to care for their loved ones - and Haringey Council could pay them an allowance. Well there may be a few saints out there, but surely the odds are that if their own families couldn’t cope with their adult childrens’ complex needs then it was unlikely that strangers would. Yes there may be some who need the money, but that might not be the right reason - and the supervision and vetting would surely have to be phenomenal.
One mother told me that, after a lifetime’s care, her child was now settled at Whitehall Street and she had thought she would die in peace. She was now distressed beyond belief.
Who decided that Whitehall Street and all these residential homes and drop in centres should be the first places it should close, not the last? Councillor Dilek Dogus must have felt like the Grim Reaper by the end of the day. If she didn’t realise at the start of the consultation meetings she will have realised by their end – that the lives of these people, the most vulnerable in the borough, are condemned by her Council. As someone said at an earlier consultation meeting, “why are you closing this? You wouldn’t do this to schoolchildren. Yet these frail people are just as vulnerable as children.”
It is the Big Question of any society. Where is our line, beyond which we will not go? On Thursday we could see that Haringey Council had already crossed an unacceptable one.
Sue Hessel
Haringey Federation of Residents’ Associations (Vulnerable Groups)
14.2.11
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