Tag: social care

March 18th – Empty for months now, the former Rushall Mews care home for the elderly was built and operated throughout most of it’s life by the local authority, Walsall Council. It was a well loved, modern facility built in the 1980s, and was a fine thing indeed. Sadly, it has been a victim of the cold wind blowing through local government, and it has been closed, like most such council provision.

Councillors and ‘change managers’ waffle on with weasel words and forked tongues about ‘increasing choice’ and other such worn-out cliches, but the closure of lifelines like this and other units like Narrow Lane in Pleck and Short Street in Brownhills, coupled with the loss of daycentres, is purely a money saving exercise. Like the rest, this good quality building – still more than fit for purpose – will be bulldozed for private housing.

The service users and the cost of their care didn’t create the problems, but most don’t vote, so they’re an easy target. Meanwhile, the politicians and money men who did cause the problem walk away unscathed.

It took decades to get facilities like this for our aged and vulnerable. It has taken but a few short years to wipe them out. The social care system is hard to assemble, but tragically easy to take apart.

I pass this empty place often, and the site of it fills me with sadness.

September 15th – On this site in Short Street, Brownhills, stood St. James old people’s home, a modern facility built in the 1970s to serve the town. Local authority owned, it was well loved. Since the huge cuts in social care, the desire to offload the expensive care of the vulnerable has led to outsourcing. All such residential homes were closed in Walsall, some care transferred to the private sector and some to a new building run by Housing 21 at Anchor Bridge, called Knaves Court. The creation of Knaves Court is a wonderful thing, but had St. James been kept, we would have been able to care for more vulnerable folk, not less as is now the case. All such homes that were closed were demolished very quickly, presumably to prevent a reversal of policy.

The land once busy, now lies derelict and unloved.

A little known scandal. 

August 20th – A late afternoon ride to keep the legs moving after a tiring morning at work. I spun around Chasewater, then headed down through Burntwood to get some stuff from Waitrose in Lichfield. On the way, I passed the former old people’s home Greenwood House, near Swan Island. Empty and decaying, this modern, well loved facility was closed by Lichfield Council as part of their hated ‘Changing Lives’ project, created solely to farm social responsibility onto the third sector and offload all those expensive vulnerable people into the community. This building has been empty for over two years now. An utter waste. Welcome to the social state in the UK in 2011. Utterly bankrupt, both financially and morally.