What happened to the 11 Barnet Council Care Homes and day centres in 1999?
Barnet Council back in 1998 made a decision that it would outsource all of its Elderly Services residential and day care services.
They not only wanted to get rid of the workforce they handed over the property to the lucky contractor.
Imagine that 11 prime real estate locations and they only required to build four new settings (they only built three new homes, more on that in a later post).
Barnet UNISON commissioned a report to counter this proposal.
Here is what we recommended to Barnet Council back in 1999
Recommendations
We recommend that:
- Barnet maintains ownership of its residential homes and continues to
directly employ staff engaged in these homes. Any reorganisation and
redirection of resources in favour of specialist or domiciliary care should be in
the context of in-house provision and joint work with health organisations,
rather than transfers to the independent sector.
- The residential and domiciliary services, including home care, day care and
respite care, be subject to a comprehensive Best Value service review which
includes a detailed examination of quality and cost.
- The council works with the trade unions and staff to develop the in-house
service. As part of this a review of the operation and management of the
service should be conducted with the full involvement of the trade unions, users and the wider community in accordance with the Best Value requirements .
- Alternative funding options and the impact of phased improvement work on
the capital programme require further detailed investigation before any
decisions are made.
You can read the FULL report here Barnet Res Care 1999 report
Needless to say, our report was ignored, and the staff and Council properties handed over to contractors.
Next post will be on what happened next?
Did we get high quality care homes fit for the future?
What happened to the work force?
End.