Elderly people who are in receipt of a home help service for non personal care such as cleaning are being advised by Fife Council that they will no longer receive the service from December this year as part of the councils budget cuts agreed in February this year.
The news came as a shock for 92 year old Saline man Ronnie Sievewright who pays the council for home help and community alarm services. Mr Sievewright said; “I have worked all my days and have never asked for anything, but I needed some help in the house and was so pleased to be able to use this service from the council. I am very sad that they now say the council will not do this any more and I was handed a booklet with a lot of phone numbers of different companies that I can phone. I can’t believe that they are doing this”.
Fife Labour leader Alex Rowley described the move as ‘worrying for service users and their families’ and said it was the ‘wrong choice’. He said; “The SNP and Lib Dems tried to hide this cut at the time of the budget and we forced them to publish it and ever since we have had difficulty trying to establish how they were implementing it and what kind of support they would provide to replace it”.
He continued; “Removing a service from pensioners who need it and handing them a booklet as a replacement is simply not acceptable. What we are seeing is a fundamental shift away from public service delivery to a laissez faire approach of help yourself if you can with SNP and Liberal councillors hiding behind paid officials imposing the changes on pensioners.
Mr Rowley claims that the SNP and Lib Dems in Fife are working to an agenda of privatising council services ‘out of existence’. He said; “They are succeeding where Thatcher failed in privatising social service. What you end up with is poorly paid workers, poor training, skills and motivation, an all round drop in quality and a much poorer service to those who need it. We have seen from the experience of the public sector in England that this is what happens when such services are privatised and that is why down south they are bringing more services back under the control of the public sector”.
He concluded; “The SNP and Liberals in Fife are systematically destroying services that were built up over decades for our elderly and it is disgraceful. I hope when they get old there will be a caring council back in control of Fife and then they may realise the impact of their actions on people who have given all their lives to our communities. For now they should hang their heads in shame”
