As the country’s biggest independent provider of care homes for the elderly sinks deeper into a financial collapse, the 31,000 residents of its homes, their families and carers face a hugely uncertain future. Southern Cross plans to sell off or hand back to landlord control of some 35 of its homes immediately, and another 85 in the coming months. What will happen to the staff and residents remains unclear, despite reassurances by the government and Southern Cross that they will be cared for.
All this because of a mixture of bad management and market speculation. But unlike the banks, which received billions in aid and low cost loans to bail them out in 2008/9, there is no prospect of such a bailout for Southern Cross. It seems our banks, wherein lie our savings and pensions, are too big to fail. But a company that provides accommodation and care to tens of thousands of our elders is not significant enough to be considered for such support.
The comparison may be invidious and a category confusion, but this story inevitably raises the question of where our priorities lie as a society? Jesus once said that where our treasure is, there also will be our heart. It looks from a first glance that the government does not invest its treasure in our elder generations, but in our banks and financial institutions. Maybe that is not just true of government, but of all of us as a society?
Actually, the links between banks and care homes are closer than they at first seem, because the major lenders to Southern Cross are the two banks nationalised in the great bailout – Lloyds TSB and RBS. So if Southern Cross goes bankrupt, it will have a wider impact on the economy and in particular the publicly owned banks. Stories of property speculation and wild lending abound in this story, with once again the British public and in particular a significant population of its most vulnerable members being most affected.
To be sure, no-one will be turfed out on the streets, and there will be care home places found or maintained for all those affected, but the uncertainty must be a cause of great distress for people who had expected to spend their last years in one place where they were secure and well cared for (and by all accounts the care standards in Southern Cross homes have been good). I wonder if this constitutes a form of abuse – may be not in the way that the recent Winterbourne View case brought to light, but no less real for those at the epicentre.
At the same time, we have also seen the Care Quality Commission produce a report castigating 12 NHS trusts for poor care of the elderly. It seems that private and public institutions, shaped by either by the free market or public service ethos are equally fallible.
Care and compassion are not mainstays of the financial system, and it leaves one to wonder if they are the best arbiters of how care is delivered? Which, despite all the best intentions of governments and companies involved, is exactly what has happened – it has been the actions of financial speculators that have determined the fate if thousands of residents in Southern Cross’s homes.
And as finances become more strained, and as we care for a growing elderly population with a dwindling tax base, one wonders whether the pressure to find less compassionate alternatives to caring for the elderly long term will grow, fuelling the current obsession amongst the media literati for assisted suicide? Do we not, instead, need to rediscover an ethic of care and compassion at the heart of our culture, and remember that we will be tomorrow’s frail elderly, disabled or dying? What we sow today, we will reap tomorrow.