Care home owners across Wales are urging the Welsh Government to abandon plans to reintroduce registration fees.
Care Forum Wales believes the measure would be counterproductive, putting some independent providers at risk and potentially reducing the standards of care.
According to Chair Mario Kreft MBE, the idea of imposing fees was a matter of great concern to members across Wales.
The Welsh Government have launched a consultation process to seek views about the proposals contained in the White Paper on the future of regulation and inspection of care and support in Wales.
Mr Kreft said: “We welcome the broad thrust of the White Paper. We’re very pleased that we’re moving to an outcomes-based approach and listening to the people who are receiving social care services.
“Importantly, the legislation will close a loophole which enables firms based in England who provide care services in Wales to go unregulated. From 2015 they will be subject to the same regulation as everybody else.
“Recent high profile cases have shown that you can’t have enough transparency and Care Forum Wales welcomes the introduction of an annual reporting mechanism. We would qualify this by saying that the detail has yet to worked through.
“Nine out of 10 people in Wales receiving care do so via the public purse and we need to know these services are well provided so that outcome-based measures can be interpreted in a way that means something to people.
“We all understand the principle that regulation has to be paid for but we are going to be faced with the perfect storm if registration fees are reintroduced.
“If we see inspection fees return at the levels they are in England we’re looking fees of £100 per bed per year which would be another burden just at a time when things are already tough. It would also affect domiciliary care.
“The vast majority of social care is being provided by the independent sector through the public purse either from local government or local health boards whose budgets are going to be squeezed many years to come.
“At the same time, everybody knows the independent sector is being significantly under-funded so if millions of pounds of extra cost – on a service that’s vital to the community – has to be picked up by someone the provider. If that someone is the provider there are bound to be casualties.
“Registration fees were scrapped by the Welsh Government 13 years ago when we all agreed the inspection regime was generating a bureaucracy that was putting even more pressure on the providers and the public purse.
“I would argue that we’re now in a worse place than we were when that decision was taken – when there was money being pumped into social care and the economy was thriving. So why don’t we learn from the past?
“Registration fees will not make registration better. However, the link between the regulator and the contract monitor is vital to ensure there is no over-regulation and duplication by regulators and commissioners.
“You can only build quality into a system, you can’t simply regulate quality into a system.
“The main concern Care Forum Wales has is that even with the White Paper we are a long way from a really joined up process where independent sector care providers are fully integrated into policy, planning and delivery at a local level.It’s better at national level in a policy sense but local government and local health boards could do much more to work in partnership.
“We have double the number of beds in the independent sector in Wales than we have in the NHS, while the independent sector has nearly as many beds registered to provide nursing care as there are in the NHS.
“We have to be very careful this legislation doesn’t put more pressure on the very services we’re going to need at least in the short to medium term.
“The population of over 85 year olds is going to double in Wales in the next 12 to 15 years so it stands to reason we’re going to need to protect these vital community services at a time when new projects are few and far between.
“Much of the future regulation is bound to target the buildings that might be seen as being out-dated but the key is how we move from where we are now to where we need to be in the next 10 to 20 years. How that transition is managed will be the acid test.
“We have to ensure that the independent sector has the confidence to invest in creating new services to meet our future needs. It is far from clear that the proposals in the White Paper will of themselves create this environment.
“Another concern is that we haven’t got the mechanisms at a local and a regional level to really understand the independent sector and make sure everything is properly integrated.
“If we lose these vital community services, we simply have not got enough money in the system to replace them in the forseeable future. To replace the existing assets in Wales it would cost over £4 billion and that’s just for the people we have currently and does not take into account the doubling of the over 85s population.
“All of this is against a backdrop of hospital closures and bed reduction – everyone is talking about care in the community but this is also under-resourced. Anyone waiting for the next 15 minute call might beg to differ.”
For more information about the Welsh Government’s Consultation on the future of registration and inspection of Care and Support in Wales go to: http://wales.gov.uk/consultations/healthsocialcare/support/?lang=en
