Summer Adjournment

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) makes the House a better place with his story about Ben. I am delighted to follow him on that basis.

I, too, want to talk about care homes, particularly in relation to Southern Cross. The House will know that not so long ago Southern Cross announced its intention to go into liquidation—to cease trading. That means that the 750 Southern Cross homes in this country now face a varied and uncertain future. Some 250 of those homes will pass automatically to landlords who intend to continue to offer care, but that means that the majority of homes, and therefore the majority of residents, are still in a kind of limbo as to what their future is. In my own city of Manchester, where the local authority has already made contact with one of the care home owners who intends to carry on the process of caring for the residents, things are proceeding in a sensible way. However, my local authority has found it difficult to have any dialogue with some of the offshore companies, which are merely rentiers, that own the property in the Southern Cross homes system but seemingly have no interest in pursuing the care packages involved.

Everyone on both sides of the House would agree that the care of the 31,000 elderly people affected should be the paramount consideration. It should not be a question of the profits of these companies. The care element must come first and foremost. A secondary issue, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for South West Devon, is the important employment base involved. These homes do not exist to create employment, but they do have employees who are entitled not only to reasonable working conditions but to some certainty about continuity of employment. However, the primary need must be to give reassurance to the 31,000 care home residents that their future is secure.

In previous exchanges in the House, the Minister has rightly said that the regime that allowed Southern Cross to operate as it did was not the right one, and that people need to look back and accept responsibility for that. I absolutely agree with him.

I would ask the Minister to do two things. First, up and down this land there are people who are genuinely concerned. They want to know that the offshore landlords will not simply take the roofs from over their heads, and that there will be continuity of care. We need an absolute statement that that will be the case. I know that things have progressed with NHP, one of the property owners, and that it made a statement yesterday. We need a much more positive approach that tells people home by home, or residence by residence, that their future is secure, who their landlord will be, and how their care will work.

Looking to the future—the Minister has hinted that he is sympathetic to this—we need a system that locks in a process whereby in all circumstances the needs of the residents, not the needs of the private operator, are the paramount driving force. We must not have the kind of unseemly operation that applied with Southern Cross, where profit was filtered from the homes and some people made an awful lot of money. Those people are long gone, and the people facing uncertainty are the elderly people and their carers. I hope that they are not facing too much uncertainty, and that the Minister can put the uncertainty to rest today. We have to move on, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give some clarification.