A council has decided to build its own care home in an attempt to provide cost effective care to those within its care.
The plans are to build the home and contract out the management of the home which would specialise in nursing and dementia care. It will be built on the site of a care home which closed several years ago. The build is scheduled to take three years and hopes to provide for 80 service users.
This does seem to be a novel approach to meeting the difficulty councils find in looking for care providers who are willing to meet the reduced rates which they demand. Private care providers have been moving away from publicly funded care as the rates that are generally paid by councils are far lower than what is paid privately and this can cause difficulties in conducting a viable business.
This is unlikely to be a model which is adopted more widely owing to the cost of the build and the long term commitment to a particular location. Private care providers would welcome councils into the market as it can help gauge the actual cost of care and help raise further awareness about this within councils. In this scenario the council will be unable to separate itself as much from the potential burden of funding the full cost of care for its service users.
