Letters: Caring for the elderly

Whistleblowers needed to expose poor care homes

Thanks to Johann Hari (14 January) and to The Independent for headlining a shocking subject which merits much more front-page attention and constructive outrage than it usually gets. Every so often a burst of indignation pops up in the media but the indignation soon fizzles out.

We are not marching on the streets carrying "Save the old" placards, but we all have stories about elderly relatives or friends who have been subjected to the kind of treatment and attitudes suffered by Hari's grandmother. It's not a sexy subject yet we are all getting older.

Thousands of us, according to statistics, will reach 100 and beyond. So what are we going to do about the scandal of how the old are treated, and how we will be treated sooner or later, if there is no change in the situation?

How about a Wikileaks-type website where whistleblowers can anonymously submit information about what actually takes place in care homes? With ongoing evidence from within these establishments all over the country, it would no longer be possible to deny the importance of action to right the wrongs.

Natalie d'Arbeloff

London NW5

I am a social worker from Switzerland working in the UK in care for elderly people. The living conditions in care homes vary greatly, but the quality of social and intellectual interaction is, almost everywhere, close to zero.

In contrast to the rest of Europe, the professional standard in British care homes is incredibly low. There is no such thing as a professional identity or even a proper profession – anyone without a criminal conviction can become a professional carer from one day to the next.

Social and private care is a serious profession – years are spent studying it in other parts of Europe. Only if training standards are raised here in the UK will the quality of care for the elderly improve.

Michael Kirsch

Millom, Cumbria

Thank you, The Independent, for raising the scandal of our care homes. The experience of my friends mirrors the type of poor treatment you report, with under-staffed homes and under-qualified people.

The official reports from the Care Quality Commission are a waste of time – one home had one bad report after another but no action was taken. Even a coroner's investigation into one death raised concern, but it was decided there wasn't enough evidence for real action.

How many of these isolated cases need to be raised before something can be done?

David Brougham

Leicester

I sympathise greatly with the plight of the elderly in care, but why does Johann Hari blame it on cuts that have yet to take full effect? If 50,000 inspections failed to make a difference, surely we should be looking for the root cause, which has more to do with declining moral standards and a lack of accountability and responsibility across society. This is why the comparison with bankers' bonuses is so apt.

Steve Parker

Stroud, Gloucestershire

Johann Hari's article "My grandmother deserved a better ending than this" makes a purely one-dimensional observation. While Hari points out that some people have a negative experience while in a care home, he fails to acknowledge the exceptional work that is being carried out at many care homes across the country.

At Nightingale, our residents are cared for from the moment they arrive and for the rest of their lives. No matter how much their physical or mental health may deteriorate we ensure that they lead a stimulating lifestyle, offering a range of cultural and physical activities. Each member of staff has specialist dementia-care training and each is trained to ask themselves, "If this was me, how would I want to be cared for?"

Longevity is bringing with it many challenges for society, but why must we treat this as a negative? It is time to highlight the best practices that care homes uphold. Mr Hari needs to witness an excellent care home for himself.

Leon Smith

Chief Executive, Nightingale care home,

London SW12

When the 2,000-strong Pensioners Convention in Blackpool wasn't in the papers, I wasn't surprised. It was just one more example of age discrimination. At a workshop filled with horror stories about care, I pressed for legislation to protect vulnerable older people.

In private homes caring is done for profit. Social-service homes are expensive because workers have decent conditions of service, proper training, and time to do a good job.

I taught both social-service staff and private staff for many years and my students from the private sector frequently came back and told me "I was doing what you said and talking to the residents but the manager told me to get back to work".

The Children Act 1989 laid out definitions of abuse and neglect that are transferable to old people. I want to see legislation because the plight of those forced to live in care can only get worse as more councils homes are closed, and more people are thrown on to the private sector.

Judith Brown

Chair, Bristol Older People's Forum

Johann Hari suggests that improvements in the monitoring of care homes would improve the plight of old people. But the real problem here is a culture that deems it acceptable to place the care of our parents, in their vulnerable twilight years, in the hands of others.

I am married to an Eritrean woman and over her dead body would her parents be placed in the care of others if a time arose when they could no longer manage by themselves. As the eldest of three siblings it will fall to her, and our household, to take in either parent should this scenario ever arise.

I believe that this is pretty much a universal attitude in African nations, where elders are respected, revered and cared for.

To people from such cultures the British way of packing off their parents to homes is unfathomably cold and uncaring.

Richard Lyon

Liverpool

The case of the 'Chinese mother'

Dominic Lawson's article on Chinese mothers (11 January) highlights a simple fact that I, a secondary-school teacher for almost 40 years in a wide range of areas, deprived and affluent, had long since recognised: the achievement of children does not depend, as so many politicians claim, on the family income but on the quality of the parenting.

It is an insult to the many excellent, but poor, parents who have the right priorities and give children the time, affection, support and sensible boundaries that they need in order to flourish, to talk continually about the low attainment of children from poor families.

It is not lack of money that leads to low attainment but poor parenting and that, sadly, is found too in families where money is not in short supply.

Patricia A. Baxter

Royston, Hertfordshire

Stephen Chang (letters, 13 January) throws light on Dominic Lawson's article on the high levels of educational attainment found in members of the UK's Chinese community and why this varies so little with socio-economic disadvantage. Similar patterns of attainment can be found among other East Asian ethnic groups in the UK, and among those still living in the region. As he writes, social mobility in such societies was, for many centuries, based on success in passing civil-service examinations. But even this does not fully explain the powerful cultural attachment to education that such groups still display.

My wife is a highly educated Korean (a Cambridge PhD) and I am a regular visitor to the country. I have been shocked by the extreme stress placed on children's educational performance by parents and have long tried to understand why this is so. For centuries Korea used Chinese for both public administration and scholarship. Written Chinese is a difficult language to master and to do so required many years of intense study. In a poor society, this meant social mobility was limited to a small number of highly able children backed by intense support from their families.

But the problems for Korea of widespread illiteracy were recognised by King Sejong in the 15th century and, to solve it, he oversaw the creation of Hangul, a simplified alphabet. The elite class of scholar-administrators – the yanbang – perceived this as a threat and resisted its introduction for centuries: Hangul only came into widespread use after the Second World War. But this delay created a strong emphasis on education that persists to this day.

In Britain education remains key to social mobility and gaining access to the best of it, via selective and independent schooling, remains a perennial dinner-party concern for the middle classes – our very own yangbang. But if British society genuinely wishes to promote social mobility, this stranglehold must be broken.

Dr Andrew Meads

Reigate, Surrey

I would like to thank Stephen Chang for his letter explaining the Chinese people's unremitting devotion to education and hard work and to ensuring that their children have a better life. This used to be the British way in the Victorian era but now education has been debased by successive governments.

David Lewis

Alicante, Spain

Fun-loving, dynamic – and 70

It comes as welcome news that the Default Retirement Age (DRA) is to be phased out this year. For too long, older people have been consigned to the scrapheap when they reach retirement age. I hope the announcement will bring a shift in perceptions of how and what we consider "old age". As the head of a housing and care provider, I see first-hand the energy and dynamism present in people in their 60s, 70s, 80s and older.

The timing of the move is crucial, given the ever-more strained public spending on older people's services.

I'm struck by how people's perceptions of older age bear little parallel to the realities of a noisy, fun and ever-growing demographic. These people can offer a huge amount to society. The death of the DRA provides an opportunity for them to do just that.

Jane Ashcroft

Chief Executive, Anchor,

London WC2

Paul Miller (letter, 14 January) is protesting too much. My two boys, aged two and three, very much enjoy Come Outside which is regularly shown on CBeebies. It stars Lynda Baron (perhaps better known to readers as Nurse Gladys from Open All Hours). Ms Baron was born in 1942 so is very much the age of the grandparents of the current CBeebies viewers (even taking into account that Come Outside was filmed a few years ago). So the BBC is ticking the "granny" box after all.

Simon Robinson

Haywards Heath, West Sussex

How 'free' music destroys jobs

Rustam Majainah (letter, 6 January) in saying the Green Party is the only party in favour of legalising peer-to-peer file-sharing, demonstrates why they remain an unelectable haven of Trotskyites. His letter is, ironically, carried in the same issue that reports HMV's decision to close 60 stores.

Implementing the Greens' proposals would require us to leave the EU and to accept a position where no other country would allow its products (books, TV, films, software etc) into Britain because of the legalised piracy which would then ensue. We would be a rogue state.

Mr Majainah is also quite wrong to say that bands make music from live performances. It works if you are an existing star with a back catalogue. An emerging, signed, band will probably have to pay tens of thousands of pounds to buy a supporting role on somebody else's tour. Unsigned bands are, as often as not, playing for free in pubs (closing at the rate of 50 a week partly thanks to the Licensing Act). How does he think these bands will ever make a professional album, when record labels have no funds left for advances? EMI is close to bankruptcy, despite massive restructuring and thousands of redundancies.

Until February 2010 I ran one of the few remaining commercial recording-studios in Britain. It is now being converted to housing. Every time you download "free" music, there is a price tag – namely, somebody else's job.

Steve Hill

Barford St Michael, Oxfordshire

By-election blues

There's always a tendency for the spin doctors to claim a degree of success in any by-election. Also so many jobs are dependent on the whole farrago – psephologists, pundits, bookies, politicians, journalists, paper suppliers, rosette makers...

One factor that seems to have escaped analysis is the uninspiring turnout, 48 per cent as opposed to 61 per cent in the General Election. This in a seat where all three main parties were in contention.

Perhaps people are finally adopting that old anarchist slogan: "Don't vote – it only encourages them!"

Richard Knights

Liverpool

Paradise lost

The murder of Michaela McAreavey is appallingly sad, but I cannot agree with Tony Smart that the "dark side" to Mauritius (15 January) is to be found in its crime statistics; they, sadly could be replicated in any developing country or any city in the world.

From my own experience of living and working in the country, I would identify its dark side as having more to do with a history of slavery and indentured labour whose impact is still to be felt, with the continued exploitation and insecurity of its people as a cheap source of labour in foreign-owned factories and in tourism, and with the continued quasi-colonial arrogance of too many of those who go to the island as visitors or as expats.

Roger Moss

Brighton

Perspectives on climate change

The warming seas

The headline on Steve Connor's report on the multiple flooding events occurring around the world, "This isn't about climate change – but it may be the face of the future" (15 January), is entirely unjustified.

It is of course correct to point out that such flooding events in Australia are driven by La Nina conditions, but why is there no mention of the warming trend in sea-surface temperatures around Australia, which currently stand at record levels? While the La Nina conditions may be necessary for these events, their intensity may well be increased by the current warming. It is surely not difficult to understand, and explain, that an extreme weather event can have more than one contributory cause?

Oliver Quantrill

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Protesters on trial

Plenty of attention is now focused on the undercover policing of the plot to shut down Ratcliffe Power Station ("Protest case collapses as undercover policeman turns 'agent provocateur'" 11 January). But there were some important lessons from the trial that did go ahead, of the 20 activists who used a "lawful excuse" defence of preventing greater harm. A series of eminent climate scientists showed how climate change necessitates the rapid reduction of our fossil-fuel usage. It took two days of deliberation for the jury to reach a "guilty" verdict. The judge praised the defendants' "veracity and motivation" before giving lenient sentences. A similar defence led to a "not guilty" verdict for Greenpeace activists two years ago.

We are approaching the point where the law will recognise that closing down a major piece of our energy infrastructure is justified by the climate emergency. Our politicians must take this on board and take much more concerted action than has hitherto been seen.

Chris Broome

Chair, Sheffield Campaign Against Climate Change

Undercover spies

Comment on the role of self-confessed police spy Mark Kennedy has missed the important historical context of such activities. Recent history is littered with the activities of shadowy but now at least semi-exposed police infilitrators and agents, into CND, and into the NUM during the miners' strike. But the history of such people, where it can be traced in official papers, dates back to the 1790s.

E P Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class detailed at length what was known about the activities of Oliver the Spy in the years before Peterloo in 1819. Oliver reported to Sidmouth, the home secretary, about the activities of radicals, reformers and revolutionaries, some at least of which he himself provoked.

As William Cobbett noted in The Political Register in 1818: "The employers of Oliver might, in an hour, have put a total stop to those preparations... they wished not to prevent but to produce those acts."

The same appears to have been true of Mr Kennedy, almost two centuries later.

Keith Flett

London N17

Familiar plot?

The BBC news recently led with: "Undercover cop goes native with environmental group". Isn't that the plot of Avatar?

Simon G Gosden

Rayleigh, Essex