I have long thought that if you work out how much it costs to pay for adult social care and reduce it by the wages paid to those receiving it and the cost of the accommodation at a reasonable price a lot of excess cash seems to be evaporating! I begin to wonder whether there might not be an argument in favour of the nationalisation of an adult care service?? This article tells us:
Hundreds of millions of pounds of care home fees paid by residents and local authorities are never reaching frontline services, claims a report.
The Centre for Health and Public Interest has revealed £1.5bn a year "leaks out" through rental payments, interest on loans, and profits.
The figure is 10% of the total annual income of the UK care home industry.
The think tank says some of this money could be used for frontline care if the industry were restructured.
The centre's study - which is part funded by Unison - analysed the accounts of 830 adult care home companies across the UK.
The average cost for a residential care home place in the UK is £32,084 per year, not including nursing care.
The study found that among the 26 largest care home providers, £261m of the money they receive to provide care goes towards repaying debt.
Of this, £117m goes to related companies.
"Hundreds of millions of pounds a year leak out of the care home industry in the form of rental payments to offshore landlords, in the form of profit, in the form of management fees and in the form of rental payments again to offshore companies," CHPI director David Rowlands told Newsnight.
"Lots of debt has been loaded onto large care home companies by the companies that brought them and that means in some cases that 16% of all the money that is given over to care for a resident each week disappears out of the system to pay off those high cost loans."