To think we’re returning to a time of institutional welfare?

[Clawdya]

We can’t afford to pay poor pensioners to live alone in large council houses with a team of regular carers dropping in.

We can’t afford to pay two parents to care full-time for a disabled child, whilst also funding their entire household.

We can’t continue pushing children with complex needs who can’t function in mainstream schools into them, where they can’t learn and disrupt everyone else.

Surely the answer is large, state-run, state-funded institutions to meet these needs, with trained and skilled staff, regulated monitoring and the benefit of economies of scale?

State run institutions are more expensive generally.

The point at which at home care is more expensive than care home is over 4 visits a day. SS actively prefer to keep elderly pensioners in their home at a level of care below this.

But is that holistically including the cost of paying the council tax and all bills of the house, lack of revenue from renting it, plus the costs of a family on the waiting list being in temporary accommodation and paying those costs too? I’d be very surprised.

Wait you want to send my perfectly abled child to an institution because she’s disabled and needs home care and an ehcp instead of being at home with her loving family

Do you mean the workhouse?

That's what I thought

My first thought

I think you will get a hard time @Clawdya

however, I really am interested to hear what people’s ideas are as an alternative? We can’t afford as a country to keep funding what we are. Where should the money come from?

so what should be cut?

just taxing billionaires isn’t the answer, as they will just go elsewhere.

You are woefully ignorant. Only one parent can claim carers allowance at a cost of approximately £90 a week! The country is hardly on its knees because of this! What an insult

I’ve worked in care, and in my experience, pensioners living in large council or ex council houses are a minority. Many of those properties were already bought by the residents or their families, taking them out of the social housing stock. By the time someone is receiving four care visits a day, they are usually nearing the end of life, so uprooting them makes little sense. Ime most pensioners in social housing lived in small flats or sheltered accommodation. For the sake of just a few remaining months, there’s little to gain by forcing people out of homes they’ve likely lived in for most, if not all, of their lives.

Children with complex needs already have access to state run, state funded institutions. They are called special schools. Yes I think there should be more of them.

we don’t fund two parents to look after a disabled child. What about the current system makes you think the government does?

In theory I think it's required (eg for people with very complex needs) however I think, in practice, it'd be incredibly difficult to fill vacancies in such settings.

Ok - let’s do the sums.

A household where neither parent can work at all means a child with 2:1 needs.

Let’s assume that your model gets it down to 1:1 and 0.5:1 for 8 hours per day. (Looking very efficient here!)

16 * 7 = 112
8 7 0.5 = 28.

So total of 140 hours needed per week.

Minimum wage is about £12 an hour. Actual cost of hiring someone is about double that. (NI conys, pension conts, holidays, sickness, training, recruitment costs - it is a shock if you ever try and employ anyone!)

So 112 24 52 =139,776

Which is quite a lot more than how much we pay carer families.

Parent carers save the state a fortune.

We need:
more council houses
more specialist provision/alternative education settings
more healthcare options
overhauled public transport
Yes: all of these should be state funded and owned, run like private businesses not not outsourced TO third party private businesses on bullshit contracts.
Not sure where your proposal fits into that.

I also think similar buildings for young professionals would be good, like student halls but for those aged 21-30ish who are building their careers.

I would have a preferred to rent a room in a well-maintained, monitored block with rentable shared facilities like dining rooms and spare bedrooms than the HMO hovels I had to live in.

If someone needs 1:1 care in a medical setting, they’re on a ward.

Exactly this!
@ClawdyaThe institution you seem to be struggling to name is called a workhouse
Christ, I despair of some people.
Round up all the poor, old, weak, disabled and stick them in an institution ffs

"We can’t afford to pay two parents to care full-time for a disabled child, whilst also funding their entire household."

Only one parent can claim carers allowance. My son now has 3:1 adult care but when at home my husband had to give support whilst working full time and having treatment for cancer himself.

Yep definitely referring to the workhouse.

I think we will see a return to a kind of national service, everyone will have to do a mandatory stint in some sort of care home.

Wtf

Where to start with this? Ok, the pensioner will get state pension whether or not they are disabled and needing care. Do you want to take the pension away from all pensioners? Good luck with that

Paying 2 parents a benefit level income whilst they care for the hypothetical disabled kid is remarkably good value for the government. Do you have any idea how much residential care costs for a disabled child?

Economies of scale - meaning what exactly? Group showers?

btw, pensioners pay for their care costs out of income and savings over a certain amount. My partner’s DM for example is in a care home and her attendance allowance stopped when she started living there, and she pays over most of her pension as well.

This is already the case though.we have state funded elderly residential homes, residential special schools, assisted accomodation, long term mental health residency.
Are we saying we will enforce people to be sent to places rather than choice or severity of needs based. As ai think we do enforce in the most severe cases.
I think what we all decided was that it is more humane and better to keep people at home with family and in their communities where we can rather than send them away.
The answer to everything ai think is to raise wages in line with inflation. If a family as a whole can earn more then other family members will be more easily able to care for those that need it

Young adults with complex needs who don't live with their parents, live in shared settings. Those that don't it's because they wouldn't cope with it.

A family member works in a place that provides respite care to learning disabled young adults
They are an 8 bed unit

They have service users who have such complex additional needs that at times only 1 service user can be placed at a time, as they are a risk to themselves and others - yet full staffing (I think there are 23 staff members to run the unit on a weekly basis) is necessary.

At home, this young adult is being cared for by 1 family member for £90 a week carers allowance.

Of course your idea is more economical 🙄

No they are not.