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Nick Smith Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), who made a good contribution about the importance of community cohesion. I want to address the need for legislative changes to safeguard elderly people in the place they call home, and comment on a scandal in south Wales.

Whether they are looked after by a public or private provider, the law should ensure that elderly people’s care is excellent, and respect their dignity, individuality and choice. Care should be delivered with professionalism and compassion. Where care standards fall short, the elderly and their families should have confidence that there will be effective sanctions and redress.

This House has rightly scrutinised the shocking scandals in Stafford hospital and the Winterbourne View care home for adults with learning disabilities. I want to highlight the disgraceful treatment in care homes for the elderly in south Wales, the full details of which have yet to reach the public domain.

Gwent has recently seen a failure to secure justice for care home residents following the collapse of serious criminal charges, which has left the families of an alleged 103 victims feeling aggrieved and abandoned. An £11.6 million investigation known as Operation Jasmine began in 2005. It produced 10,500 pieces of evidence and led police to brand the negligence discovered as “death by indifference”. However, just two convictions have been secured for wilful negligence since the start of the inquiry in 2005. It took so long to bring charges against the director of the residential care homes who was investigated that, by the time his court case was scheduled in March, Dr Das had suffered an assault, leaving him unfit for trial.

I have been speaking to the families affected by the stymied Operation Jasmine, who are still grieving over this shameful crime—a crime without punishment. The neglect and indifference in these care homes continues to appal. There are little things, such as losing a mother’s false teeth for days on end or dressing her in a neighbour’s damp or dirty clothes, and big things—the stories that chill the blood—such as the dad who challenged his family on his return to a care home, “Why have you put me here?” The same father was left curled up like a dog for hour upon hour, slowly developing pressure sores that exposed the bone underneath.

How can we use that sorry experience to inform the reform of the law of wilful neglect, to extend corporate responsibility or to reform our social care legislation? First, I want a public inquiry so that we can understand how Dr Das was able to continue running care homes despite damning reports by the inspectorate, and so that lessons can be learned.

According to a former employee, Dr Das

“would pull up in his Rolls Royce and complain they were spending too much on incontinence pads”

at his care home in Ebbw Vale in my constituency. He failed to pay care home registration fees, and paid the outstanding tax and national insurance for his staff only on the eve of a hearing on HMRC’s petition to wind up his company. He settled his gas and electricity bills only when the energy companies threatened to cut off the gas to his care homes. He failed to ensure that all staff had proper Criminal Records Bureau checks and that sufficient numbers of trained staff were available for cover. Dr Das gave false evidence to the Care Standards Tribunal, both orally and in writing, with the intention to deceive. The tribunal found that:

“Dr Das has developed an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion”.

Given the weight of the evidence compiled by Operation Jasmine, I hope that the Welsh Government or the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales will agree to an inquiry.

Secondly, we must look at the law on wilful neglect. If a patient does not die from poor care and does not have a loss of capacity under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, the guidance of the Crown Prosecution Service says that a criminal offence is difficult to identify. The Prime Minister was therefore wrong when he told me on 1 May that the criminal law was already there to deal with care home abuse. It is not.

The deputy chief constable of Gwent police, Jeff Farrar, told me today:

“The depth and quality of evidence obtained in this inquiry and the engagement throughout with expert witnesses and the CPS was substantial. And it is not only frustrating, but difficult to see how if such cases occurred in the future (where the death of an elderly person in a care home was attributed to omissions as opposed to deliberate acts) the police could ever produce sufficient evidence to reach the threshold test for charging these offences.”

Others agree with that view. The Joint Committee that scrutinised the draft Care and Support Bill recommended that organisations—not just employees—that are found to have contributed to abuse or neglect in a care setting should be liable to criminal prosecution for breach of corporate responsibility. Age UK believes that neglect should be classified as abuse, whether wilful or not, because of the difficulty of proving intention. Therefore, if someone is abused or neglected as a result of incompetence or indifference, it should still be seen as abuse.

I hope that the Government will engage with voluntary organisations and MPs of all parties to improve the legislation. Prevention is the best option and inspection procedures must be robust and transparent, but when neglect occurs, those who are responsible must be brought to justice so that everyone knows that callous and degrading care will be punished. Finally, high standards of patient care must not be sacrificed to boost personal profit, as when Dr Das enjoyed his Rolls-Royce while penny pinching and cutting the supply of incontinence pads to the residents in his homes.