Vultures are circling over our care homes

It is time for a serious debate about the organisations we have allowed to become involved in care homes

Four Seasons Health Care, which cares for thousands of residents, is facing a £500m-plus credit crunch after government spending cuts (Getty)

Where in the world could it be acceptable to have a vulture fund attempting to wrest control of a country’s biggest care home operator through gobbling up its debt?

It’s the sort of horror show you might expect to find in a John Grisham thriller. Lawyer Jake Brigance fights the money men on behalf of the forgotten residents who find themselves caught up in a care home scandal.

Except that this is no fictional construct. It’s happening here, now, in Britain to a company called Four Seasons.

Should this surprise us? After all, we live in a country where the company it replaced as the biggest care home provider was allowed to collapse. The former owner of Southern Cross, the Blackstone Group, had previously waltzed off with £1bn in its back pocket.

That led to accusations of asset stripping. But nobody did anything about it. Now it looks very much like we might be entering the same sort of territory with Four Seasons. Will history repeat itself? The company was weighed down by a burden of debt by its private equity owner Terra Firma, which it appears to be having difficulty paying. This is the likely motivation behind hedge fund H2 scooping up its debt. Four Seasons has a valuable portfolio of property, after all. Never mind the people who live there.

It’s occurring against the backdrop of a profound – and under-reported – crisis. Funding for care homes is being cut by local authorities grappling with Treasury-imposed cuts.

Their costs are also rising – partly because they are being asked to pay their staff a little more reasonably through the George Osborne-branded “national living wage”.

The whole sector is teetering on the brink as a result and Four Seasons will not be the last private sector operator to end up struggling after the owners borrowed heavily to buy in. They hoped to grow fat by taking councils’ money, and squeezing staff, and other costs, at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Now it’s time to pay the piper, but while the money men might endure (slightly) lighter wallets and bruised egos, it won’t be them who ultimately suffer.

The crisis will have to be addressed. If it is not, if Mr Osborne ignores it, or continues to palm off the burden on to local authorities whose numbers don’t add up, the NHS will end up taking the strain and the media will be once again peppered with stories about “bed blocking”.

However, even if he does, it is time for a serious debate about the organisations we have allowed to become involved in care homes.