Skye’s Covid scandal: Get the profiteers out of care homes

Public ownership and workers’ control now!

By Socialist Party Scotland Highland branch members

“‪It is time to stop capitalism within the care sector‬.” That’s how Skye councillor John Gordon summed up the crisis engulfing the private care home sector in Scotland. The councillor’s own father succumbed to the virus.

Skye has been rocked by an epidemic at a private care home, Home Farm nursing home, on the island. 30 residents and 29 staff have tested positive for the virus and many residents have died.

The number of deaths has been disputed by the owners. The community have said eleven residents have lost their lives, while HC-One have said the number is now nine. This outbreak is having a devastating impact on such a small, close-knit community.

The situation has become so desperate that following an unannounced inspection on 12 May, the Care Inspectorate has resorted to legal action to attempt to cancel the registration of the care home. The Inspectorate say there are ‘serious and significant’ concerns about the quality of care offered at the facility.

NHS Highland is effectively now running the care home, having provided additional management, nursing and direct care resources. If the Care Inspectorate’s legal action is successful it is likely that the NHS will take over the home completely to prevent the home’s closure.

HC-One, who own the care home, has said it is “doing everything” it can to keep residents and staff safe. Yet it has emerged that in January a report found that Home Farm failed to meet expected cleanliness standards. Furthermore, it has been reported that during the crisis workers have not been given access to PPE, with some items being locked away from staff.

Outside workers have been brought in to the care home as reinforcements for the crisis without the proper period of isolation, potentially risking more unnecessary deaths. The company, which is regarded as a bad boss on the island, shows a complete disregard for the safety of staff and residents.

With about half of the staff testing positive for Covid, many of these workers are not receiving any sick pay as they are agency workers or on zero hours contracts. This can lead to workers being forced to keep working when the are sick, as they cannot afford not to.

But it has also emerged that HC-one has had ten deaths at another of its care homes, Mugdock House in Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire, and has coronavirus at two thirds of its 57 Scottish care home facilities. There have been three unnecessary staff fatalities.

There have been 3,171 reported Covid-19 infections and 637 reported Covid-19 deaths in their homes, with the current death rate three times higher than the previous year and the highest on record.

HC-One is the largest operator of private care homes in the UK. As a private business, their first priority is profit, not the care of residents. While complaining about having to pay carers a decent wage to compete with other sectors, they are not slow to pay the directors well, a single director has scooped £2.5 million from the business in the last ten years. HC-One’s highest paid director earns £808,000 per year.

Yet despite this apparent generosity to directors, the company has the audacity to ask for a bailout because of the additional costs it faces because of the COVID crisis. In essence, it is asking authorities to make up the shortfall in income caused by too many deaths during the crisis leading to reduced occupancy and therefore reduced income stream.

But the deaths were at least partially attributable to poor management of their facilities, as evidenced by the lack of cleanliness, PPE, staffing levels and inadequate preparation, despite fair warning of the threat of a pandemic from exercises such as CYGNUS. 

HC-One are not alone in profiteering from the care sector, however. Operators in the sector collectively bagged more than £1.5bn in profit in the UK last year.

Democratic public ownership of the care sector

Socialists have the remedy to this: Remove the need for maximisation of shareholders profits completely from the care sector, and run all care homes in the  public sector on the basis of social need. 

Workers in the sector agree. Speaking to Socialist Party Scotland, one care worker from another Scottish care home said: “The privatisation pandemic that has lifted elderly care from being a direct responsibility of the public sector means that for profit services are expected at this time of crisis to deliver the kind of comprehensive response to an emergency they are ill prepared to meet.

“While staff are at pains to try their very best, there’s not enough of us to meet the crushing demands of Covid-19. Enormous questions need to be addressed as this emergency unfolds.

“There must be serious consideration about the future of elderly care, with nationalisation of the nursing home sector at the centre of plans after the crisis. For too long care has been given to some very vulnerable people on the cheap. Nursing home companies have profited from the privatisation of services and the deregulation of the labour market means some staff are so poorly paid they need working family tax credits to get by.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The care sector should be publicly owned under local authority control. To stop this crisis being repeated in the future, social care must be fully funded. All cuts to public services must be reversed.

A care service run by the workers and community would ensure that full and sufficient PPE and testing are available for all care staff.  Workers know what is needed to ensure workplace safety and the safety of their patients. To ensure they are listened to there should be supervision of and control over workplace safety by trade unions and workplace safety committees.

Many care homes, including those run by HC-One, rely on agency staff on zero hours contracts, yet the crisis has highlighted that carers are not ‘unskilled’ or ‘casual’ labour. They are key workers. First class care cannot be provided with third rate pay. Care workers should receive an immediate £12 an hour minimum wage as a step to £15 an hour.

Socialists demand full trade union rights for care workers, including full wages if they have to be off sick. No one should be forced to work to live when doing so endangers the lives of those they are supposed to be caring for.

As the local paper the West Highland Free Press editorial commented: “Nursing homes and palliative care have been at the forefront of the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service. They should be brought back into public hands. Nobody should be allowed to benefit materially from what is the civic duty of a decent society. It should not take the system going horribly wrong, as it has in Skye, to bring those points home, even if your home is at Number 10, Downing Street.”