New Petitions

Than you for allowing me to come along and speak on behalf of Angela Smillie. I presume that members have copies of her letter, which is typical of the letters that I have received since I came into the Parliament. Anyone who saw her on television three weeks ago will know that she broke down when she was walking through her parents' empty house, which is being taken over by North Lanarkshire Council to pay for her parents' care. The legislation is well meaning, but it is flawed in that aspect.One of Angela Smillie's parents has dementia and the other has Alzheimer's disease, which is a terminal illness. She makes the case that if they were younger, they would go into care, but because they are elderly and have a home, that home will be sold to pay for their residential care. I have a copy of the letter that she received from the council stating that her parents' home would be placed in its keeping. There is the option of deferred payment, but that is a flawed option. Under that system, a council will not sell a person's home to pay for their residential care but will get them to sign a document that provides that, on their death, their home will become the council's property. However, the person could live for five or 10 years, and no one has evaluated what it would cost to maintain the property, to keep it heated and to keep the garden in a respectable condition. All that will add to the overall bill. There are also the legal costs attached to the sale of the house, and the costs incurred by the social work department in establishing whether someone has any property when it is means testing them. Professor Arthur Midwinter came up with a figure that staggered me: the average cost to a council would be between £617 and £669 per annum—a minimal amount. However, that sum does not take into account the fact that the council will have to pay legal costs and, if a deferred payment scheme is entered into, the maintenance costs. The Community Care and Health (Scotland) Act 2002 is a forward-thinking, worthy piece of legislation, which people would kill to have on the statute book south of the border. It looks after the care and home care of the elderly, but why should an older person who is suffering from dementia be treated any differently from a younger person who is suffering from dementia? That is discriminatory and it should not be allowed to happen. That is the basis of Angela Smillie's case. Eighteen years ago, Angela Smillie's parents willed the house to their family. She says in her letter that her parents have worked hard all their days. They are not bad people—they are not drug dealers and have never committed a crime in their lives. It is not acceptable that they should have worked hard to buy their home only to have it taken away to pay for their care at the end of their lives. It is discriminatory: they are ill and elderly, but if they were ill and not elderly they would be treated differently. A person with Alzheimer's who is 50 is treated differently from a person with Alzheimer's who is 65-plus. The Parliament must urgently consider that aspect alone, as well as the moral aspect of stealing a person's home to pay for their care. Do members have any questions? I saw a couple of eyebrows being raised when I mentioned the sum of £669. I raised my eyebrows too, because I thought that the sum would be far higher than that.

That is one of the major flaws in the 2002 act. Eighteen years ago, Angela Smillie's parents made a will in which they left their home to their family. At that time, they did not think that they would end up with dementia or Alzheimer's, but that is what has happened. Only 4 per cent of the senior citizen population find themselves in that situation. I could not calculate the odds of both parents finishing up in that situation—it is beyond my mental capacity to work that out. The other 96 per cent of my generation worry intensely about ending up in such a situation. John Farquhar Munro made a good point. Although it was the wish of Angela Smillie's parents that their home be left to their children, the state is denying them that wish. The council has the power to move in and take over their home.

Thank goodness for the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. The situation might be easier now, but for the past two and a half years, getting such information from councils has been like trying to draw an eye-tooth. The blank answer that we got from all but 18 of the councils was that the information was not held centrally. Eighteen out of the 32 councils responded—in that regard, councils up north seemed to be better than those in the central belt—and gave us chapter and verse on the relevant numbers. However, quite frankly, I could not deal with two and a half years' accumulation of information.I am aware that people can rent out their homes, but we must remember that we are talking about people who are ill, alone and at the lowest ebb in their life. The council can sell someone's house only if they live alone. If two people live in a house and one of them needs to go into a home, the council cannot touch the house. That amounts to another discriminatory act. Let us imagine a terrace in which three elderly ladies live in three different houses. The first lady lives in a rented house, the second lady lives with her husband in the house that they own and the third lady owns her house, but lives by herself. If the three ladies end up in care, the lady who rents and the lady who has a husband will have 100 per cent of their care paid for, but the single lady will have her home sold to pay for her care.

They did not answer that question. The door to going down that road remains open to anyone who gets proper legal advice, but we are talking about people who are frail, vulnerable and elderly, whose memory might be waning a little. I do not mean that they have dementia or a similar condition, but that they are not quite as sharp as they were when they were younger. When an official comes and asks such a person to sign a document, they will probably sign it, even though they might worry about doing so. Signing that document will mean that they will not get the opportunity to pass on the results of their hard work to their family, which is all that they want to do. It would cost very little to allow such people to do that.

That is correct.

In fact, 31 per cent of the people who are in residential care have mental problems such as dementia.

Yes, but that figure related to the number of senior citizens who own their own home—4 per cent of the 67 per cent of senior citizens who own their own home find themselves in that position. When the broader picture is taken into account, the number involved is small.

Yes.

That is an argument that many people have put forward strongly to justify what is happening. I wish that they would apply it to criminals. There are a lot of rich people in jail and yet it costs £33,000 per annum to keep them incarcerated. They have all the mod cons and all the rest of it—I do not need to run through all the benefits; members know what they get.

I am told that prisoners have free televisions—

I will not go along that line in that case. As I said, it takes £33,000 per annum to pay for a prisoner's care, and prisoners are not means tested. Some prisoners submit claims when they leave prison because they have to slop out and get up to £8,000 in compensation. That should go towards the £33,000—prisoners should be means tested a little bit. That does not happen, yet—unfortunately—elderly people are means tested in the situation that I described. Arthur Midwinter analysed the situation and put forward the information in a way that separates out the care costs—some people get only standard care whereas others get nursing care plus personal care. He took the average weekly income of £206 for a single pensioner household as the basis for his calculations. On pages 18 and 19 of my consultation document, which has been e-mailed to members, you will see that the calculations leave a balance of £11.88 per week.

Yes. There are various roads that we can go down. The situation also applies to people with a mental illness.

If those costs were to be taken into account, and if councils were to do their book-keeping in the way that Arthur Midwinter did his, the costs to councils of selling a person's home would be made clear. People cannot sell their homes without costs—a council makes only just over £669 top whack as a result of selling the home of a pensioner who is on the average income of £206 per week. If the legal costs of selling the house and the social work costs were taken away from that figure, there would be no profit at all for councils.Of the large block of money—£500 million or so—that was laid aside for the deferred payment agreement scheme, it is strange that only £104 million was taken up by councils to offset the financial disadvantage of deferring the sale of a house. The Executive has made the money available in the deferred payment scheme, yet councils are not taking it up in the way in which the Executive expected them to do.

I have a fundamentalist attitude to the issue. When I started paying my national insurance in 1948, when Lord Beveridge's welfare state recommendations were implemented, I believed that the national health service would look after us from the cradle to the grave because we had paid into the scheme all our lives.Now, the state discriminates against sick elderly people and takes their homes from them to pay for their care when everyone else gets care throughout their lifetime—that is, from the cradle until they are on the point of going into residential care. In between those times, the way in which our health service operates is a tremendous credit to this country.You ask how the care should be paid for. The Conservatives might not like this, but I think that we will simply have to dig a little deeper into our pockets. The statistical evidence that is presented by Arthur Midwinter shows that there is little profit to be made from all the angst and hardship that we are imposing on elderly people. My proposal would not cost a great deal more than is already being spent on the majority of people. The 4 per cent of elderly people who are being treated in the way that I have outlined should be treated in the same way as the majority.

The situation that you have described and which Angela Smillie has written about is fundamentally wrong. You have been asked how you might fund the additional cost of caring for the elderly people about whom you are talking. However, you know as well as I do that politics is all about priorities and that if, for example, we did not spend billions of pounds on nuclear missiles or write blank cheques to wage war on Iraq, we could perhaps look after our senior citizens and meet the cost of their care.Jackie Baillie made a point about whether elderly people in care should be expected to pay for their food and board. If someone is in hospital with a long-term illness, are they expected to pay for their bed and food while they are there?

When they go into hospital, an elderly person immediately surrenders their pension, which pays for their care.No one worries about what it costs to keep a prisoner in jail. The money that is spent on them does not come out of their ill-gotten gains. I am talking about honourable people who should be treated honourably and decently.An elderly person does not eat much, anyway. Having gone round many care homes, I can say that a person in this room probably eats two or three times the amount of food that the average resident in a care home eats. For all that they eat, it is a sin that we neglect them in this manner.

While they are in hospital, they surrender their pension to help pay the cost of their care. They also do that when they are taken into residential care.

In a care home, an elderly person surrenders their pension and their secondary pension, if they have one. I am not complaining about that. They still get means tested and many of them have good pensions from their work; those pensions allow them to go into a care home without having to sell their home because they are sufficient to cover the costs. People who are in that situation would be automatically expected to pay for their care. I am not worried about that.In America, the value of a person's home is not used in the assessment of someone's ability to pay. I do not see why we should act any differently in this country. Too many people who have worked hard and who did what they thought was the right thing to do when they bought their homes under the right-to-buy scheme find that their decision is coming back to haunt them. However, in 96 per cent of cases, that does not happen and the people in that 96 per cent should not have to worry that they might have to go through what the people in the 4 per cent are going through. People can see what is happening all around them—every MSP has dealt with cases involving the situation that I am talking about—and it is unacceptable that, in the 21st century, we are treating our elderly in this despicable manner. It is shameful.

So the answer is that politicians should get their priorities right and stop stealing pensioners' homes.

You have got it in one. The situation is not good enough.

When the Sutherland report was published, it was hailed as the panacea for all ills and was praised across the board. The Lib Dems went for it 100 per cent. The Labour Party went for it nearly 100 per cent—it considered the financial implications and produced a slightly flawed solution to the problem. That has left a little glitch in the system, whereby some people must sell their homes.

I see no alternative to that.

Charlie—if I can call you that—I assure you that the last thing that people of my generation want is to go to see a doctor and find out that we are ill. The best thing that could happen to people of my generation would be full implementation of the Kerr report, which would vastly reduce the number who require to leave their own homes, where they want to stay. They do not want to leave their little house—their wee castle—for which they have paid.

I deny that situation completely.

There are bound to be instances that would bear out your argument but, by and large, people do not want to go into a residential home or care home. They want to stay in their own home. If Andy Kerr succeeds in implementing Professor Kerr's recommendations and providing more ancillary staff in the community, people will be happy to stay in their own homes. There is no doubt that the percentage who are a danger to themselves will have to go into care homes, but an awful lot of people who are care home residents could easily be looked after in their own homes at one quarter of the cost to the community.

The only problem is that Professor Kerr's comprehensive answer, which I hope that Andy Kerr will implement, will not provide an immediate solution. My proposal could be introduced much more quickly and would remove the anomaly once and for all. You have only to consider the situation. If you were to go to a care home and look deeply into the eyes of someone who has been placed in that situation, you would see the hurt there. One cannot put a monetary value on that. Those people feel that the state has kicked them, and kicked them, and kicked them again.I will not rest until this piece of legislation has been put right. The only way of putting it right is to do what is done in the United States of America—take the person's home out of the financial equation. People would still have to pay for their care if they could afford to do so. We will have to stump up for an infinitesimally small percentage. It is annoying to know that a solution would be achievable at no great cost. I cannot see people taking advantage of such an arrangement. The other day, I heard a chap from the pharmaceutical industry argue that if free prescriptions were introduced, people would be queuing up for them. The idea that one would take a day off work to see a doctor for a prescription that is worth £6 is not realistic. People do not want to have to get medical care; they do not want to see doctors; they do not want to have to go into a care home. However, unfortunately some of them have to do those things. To take away someone's home to allow them to go into a care home is, quite frankly, criminal.

Thank you for a very fair hearing.