Tory leadership candidates have clashed bitterly but many pressing matters have been overlooked
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have clashed vehemently over tax and spending, immigration and the UK’s stance on China in their acrimonious battle to become prime minister – but have had little to say about many other pressing issues. Here are some largely overlooked key issues of the contest so far.
Continue reading...Exclusive: shadow health secretary says service in England would be brought in over several parliaments
Labour will aim to bring in a national care service in England with just as much ambition as the 1945 government that brought in the NHS, the shadow health secretary has said, launching a review of how it would work.
In an interview with the Guardian, Wes Streeting said he had asked the Fabian Society to look at how the service would be funded and structured, with a view to bringing it in over the course of several parliaments.
Continue reading...Report singles out failings by police and council and suggests senior officials may have misled MPs
Vulnerable children were left exposed to sexual exploitation in Oldham because of “serious failings” by the police and council, a damning independent review has found.
The report found there were multiple missed opportunities to prevent abuse stretching back to 2005, including offences committed by a council welfare officer who was later convicted of 30 rapes.
Continue reading...Exclusive: new visa scheme to attract staff to ease the chronic shortages in the sector has left many open to exploitation
Read full story: Migrant workers trapped in debt bondage
Care workers recruited from overseas to look after elderly and disabled people in Britain are being charged thousands of pounds in illegal fees and forced to work in exploitative conditions to pay off their debts.
An Observer investigation has uncovered a network of agencies supplying workers to care homes and homecare agencies that charge recruitment fees to candidates.
Continue reading...Investigation: Britain called out to workers around the world to ease a staff crisis. But many have to pay thousands in illegal fees to recruitment agencies
Read exclusive story: Migrant care workers charged thousands in illegal fees
Meera Stephen came to Britain with a big suitcase and even bigger dreams. The 27-year-old had left Kerala in south India to work at a care home in Manchester, one of thousands of migrant workers to come after a government recruitment drive to fill more than 100,000 vacancies in social care.
The job would pay £10 an hour – just above minimum wage. But it came at a price. In exchange for securing her employment, she would pay a recruitment agent 1.3m rupees – about £13,700.
Continue reading...Peak rights group for older Australians demands urgent change after 530 incidents of sexual abuse reported in last quarter of 2021
More than 500 cases of sexual abuse against aged care residents were reported in the last three months of 2021, a rate largely unchanged since the royal commission dubbed the prevalence of sexual crimes in residential care a “source of national shame”.
Experts say victims, many of whom live with dementia, are still being failed by systems not equipped to recognise or respond to crimes against those with serious cognitive impairment.
Continue reading...International nurses working for NHS trusts are being trapped in their jobs by clauses in their contracts that require them to pay thousands of pounds if they try to leave. Shanti Das reports
Nurses are the backbone of the NHS. For the past two years as Covid-19 gripped the country, people lauded NHS staff as heroes. Many nurses join the NHS from abroad, attracted by the stability of the work, the ethos and a chance for a new life in the UK. But joining the NHS from abroad comes with strings attached.
The Observer’s Shanti Das tells Nosheen Iqbal that some nurses working for NHS trusts and private care homes are being trapped in their jobs by clauses in their contracts that require them to pay thousands of pounds if they try to leave. In extreme cases, nurses are tied to their roles for up to five years and face fees as steep as £14,000 if they want to change jobs or need to return home early.
Senior social worker calls for action in the only country of the UK that has not had a recent review
A root and branch review of children’s social care in Wales is needed after the case of five-year-old Logan Mwangi, who was killed by his mother and stepfather after being removed from the child protection register, a leading social work expert has said.
Prof Donald Forrester said the case highlighted critical issues affecting many children’s social services in Wales, ranging from social worker capacity and staffing shortages to high and increasing numbers of children being taken into care.
Continue reading...Private providers accused of making ‘obscene’ profits out of some of society’s most vulnerable children
Councils in England are paying more than £1m a year for a single place in privately run children’s homes, with operators citing the cost of living crisis as a reason for raising their prices, the Guardian has learned.
Private providers have been accused of making “obscene” profits out of some of society’s most vulnerable children, as local authorities reveal they are being quoted as much as £50,000 a week (£2.6m a year) for one child.
Continue reading...A worker in the sector claims local authorities cost taxpayers money by going for the cheap option first
Council bosses in England are sometimes having to pay seven-figure sums annually in order to house a child with complex needs. Many local authorities currently have at least one child whose care costs £10,000 a week or more, with providers increasing their prices further in recent weeks and blaming the cost of living crisis. Here, a care home manager* explains how care can cost £1m a year:
“When we meet with local authorities, they ask us to give a breakdown of costs. When they realise how we have to cost our services, they start to understand. The high costs are almost always for placements that are made in an emergency after a child has gone through 10+ other placements which have been bought on the cheap and haven’t been able to meet their needs. The biggest scandal is that local authorities always try and use the cheapest placement first. When children’s needs aren’t met, that’s what ends up costing the taxpayer a fortune.
Continue reading...Full-time income of a single parent worker not enough for essential expenses, Australian Aged Care Collaboration report reveals
Aged care workers are being priced out of their communities, with low wages and rising living costs leaving a worker in a typical two-parent household with $34 of disposable income each week, and a single parent full-time worker unable to cover basic expenses.
The findings come from a report published on Wednesday by the Australian Aged Care Collaboration (AACC), a group of six aged care peak bodies. The report compared average wages for workers in the residential and home care sectors against key cost of living indicators including average rents, childcare expenses, grocery costs, and petrol.
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Continue reading...Religious orders called on to pay compensation for physical, sexual and psychological abuse carried out for more than 70 years
Victims of sexual, psychological and physical abuse of children in care in Northern Ireland have rejected a formal apology by religious orders and called on them to pay compensation.
Ministers and representatives of six institutions at the centre of the scandal on Friday issued a long-awaited statement saying sorry for what was described as “vile” and “unimaginable” abuse carried out for more than 70 years.
Continue reading...CMA finds local authorities are being forced to pay excessive fees for substandard privately run services
The UK has “sleepwalked” into a dysfunctional market for children’s social care with local authorities forced to pay excessive fees for privately run services that often fail to meet the needs of vulnerable children, an official report has concluded.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) called for an overhaul of the £6.5bn UK market for children’s residential and foster care, saying it had found “significant problems” with the provision of the privately dominated services.
Continue reading...Research shows as many as 50% of ethnic minority carers say responsibilities hold them back from finding new positions
Three out of five women say their caring responsibilities for children and other vulnerable or elderly relatives are preventing them from applying for a new job or promotion, while only one in five men say the same, according to new research.
The poll of 5,444 people by Ipsos Mori and the charity Business in the Community (BITC) found that nearly half the workforce are combining paid work and care. Almost three in 10 adults have left or considered leaving a job because of difficulties in balancing work and care. The latter was particularly true of women.
Continue reading...Call for ‘seismic change’ in social care system after Robert McGuinness’s use of funds
The owner of a children’s home in Bolton shut down for “serious and widespread failures” spent thousands intended for educating marginalised children on drinking, foreign trips and his pub business, the Guardian can reveal.
Between 2015 and 2021, £1.5m was paid by two local authorities to a “community interest company” (CIC) run by Robert McGuinness, the main director of the children’s home. The CIC was set up to provide vocational training to children from years 9 to 11 (ages 14-16) excluded from mainstream schools.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak said to have agreed to decision not to follow public health advice on testing in vulnerable settings
Public health advice is no longer being followed under Boris Johnson’s “living with Covid” strategy to end mass testing, senior civil servants have acknowledged in a leaked account of a cross-Whitehall briefing.
The briefing by a senior member of the Covid taskforce was delivered to civil service leaders across Whitehall on Thursday afternoon, making clear that following public health advice was no longer the sole priority.
Continue reading...Easing of restrictions comes as legal requirements for masks and NHS passes are dropped
Care home residents in England will be able to receive unlimited visitors from Monday as the restrictions to tackle the Omicron variant are eased, the Department of Health has said.
Self-isolation periods will be reduced from 14 days to 10 days for those residents who test positive, with further reductions if they test negative on days five and six.
Continue reading...Amateur boxer punched 16-month-old to death in Keighley, West Yorkshire, while mother found guilty of allowing the death
A “cunning and clever” woman has been found guilty of murdering her girlfriend’s toddler after being caught on CCTV “terrorising” the child when she was left to babysit.
Savannah Brockhill, 28, an amateur boxer and security guard who called herself the “number one psycho”, punched 16-month Star Hobson to death in Keighley, West Yorkshire, on 22 September 2020.
Continue reading...Exclusive: at least 16 notices issued to prevent future deaths after inquests highlight care failures
Coroners in England have said lessons must be learned from failings made by overstretched services that struggled to adapt during the Covid pandemic, as details of inquests into deaths only now emerge.
At the height of the pandemic, everything from mental health and coastguard services to care homes had to quickly change how they operated, and coroners across England are highlighting failures made during this time through reports that identify avoidable deaths.
Azra Hussain, 41, who died in secure accommodation in Birmingham on 6 May 2020. Two months before her death, she had been due to begin electroconvulsive therapy, but because of an administrative error the treatment was cancelled and was then no longer possible because of Covid restrictions. The inquest jury concluded that had she been given this treatment, she would probably have lived.
Ruth Jones, a frail older woman thought to have caught Covid, who died in a care home after a fall in self-isolation. A coroner said the care home was not equipped to watch Jones during her isolation but she needed to be monitored because of her risk of injury if left alone.
Anthony Williamson, an experienced sea kayaker who died on his 54th birthday after getting into difficulty. The coroner said he was concerned there was a reduced level of coastguard cover around the Cornish coastline owing to the pandemic.
Continue reading...Exclusive: failure to prevent children seeing online porn puts them at risk of abuse and lifelong trauma, say children’s safety group
The UK data watchdog must introduce age verification for commercial pornography sites or face a high court challenge over any failure to act, children’s safety groups have warned.
The demand in a letter to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) states that the government’s failure to stop children seeing porn is causing lifelong trauma and putting children at risk of abuse and exploitation. It urges the ICO to use the powers under the recently introduced age appropriate design code (AADC) to introduce rigorous age-checking procedures for publicly accessible porn sites.
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