This article via Dr Alf starts from the false premise that the UK ever was a “caring society”.

I am old enough to remember countless elderly people being bullied into signing over their homes by their children and then being put into homes where they typically died within 3 years. My former neighbour’s elderly mother, an Irishwoman, was put into the old Fairfield Hospital in Arlesey, Bedfordshire, when I was a boy of 10. That hospital was originally a lunatic asylum built in Victorian Times. The old woman deteriorated, became depressed and then went mad and within 2 years was dead. My late mother and father were her only visitors before the body was taken by the local funeral director.

Today local authorities, with less than 32% worker productivity and wasteful working practices, continue to mismanage Adult Social Care and are now creating Ebay style auctions to lower care costs, which give rise to 15 minute and now 5 minute care visits.

People wishing to improve care quality really ought to do it themselves, as my sister and I did for my late father whilst working wherever possible and local authorities need to reduce in number to 15 for the whole of the UK with no districts, boroughs, City Councils, mid county councils and unitary authorities. Until I see this level of reform and cost cutting in local authorities, the Government should challenge this bogus narrative of “savage cuts”and take local authorities and the trades unions to task and impose meaningful reform on them.

John Gelmini