How the ‘perfect storm of cuts’ is shrinking one woman’s life choices

Rose Fernandes’s council wants to reduce care for her autistic daughter and her mother with dementia, and a cap on housing benefit could force the family to live apart

 

Rose Fernandes with her daughter Crystal, who is autistic and faces having her time with a carer cut from nine hours a day to four hours a week. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

As politicians shrink the state, Rose Fernandes’s life choices dwindle. Her day is sandwiched between caring for her autistic 25-year-old daughter Crystal and her 83-year-old mother, Maria, who suffers from dementia. But since 2010, she has been caught in a whirlwind of cuts, reducing her life to a series of arguments – in and out of lawyers’ offices – to preserve her way of life.

It began two years ago when her local council in Brent, north-west London, said it wanted to reduce the number of hours it would pay a carer to look after her daughter from nine hours a day to just four hours a week. But Fernandes says the day-to-day care for Crystal is constant – she needs to be washed, dressed, fed, taken to the toilet and watched all the time because she is not aware of everyday dangers.

Then her local authority told her it wanted to review her “respite care” package, worth £5,000 a year and designed to give her a break. Last year the council made noises about her mother’s care. “She gets carers five times a day. It might sound a lot but my mum cannot eat solid food. She has to be fed with a syringe. She’s helpless.”

With a degree in care management, she is painfully aware that the cheeseparing that Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (Acevo), warns about in Thursday’s Guardian has only just begun. The respected thinkthank the Institute of Fiscal Studies warned in February that 75% of the austerity programme was still to come, including 88% of the benefit cuts.

This year, she says, her landlord will almost certainly put up the rent on the five-bed house that she, her mother, two daughters and son all live in above £500 a week, breaching the government benefit cap.

“Our house has been specially adapted for mum … we have spent thousands fitting rails and handles, and where are we to go? We work together as a unit to help look after everyone. It’s crazy to split us all up,” said Fernandes. “I don’t want my mother to go to a nursing home and I will never leave my daughter.”

The effects on the family will be dramatic. Next year Crystal could lose more than £100 a week in disability living allowance as the government says one fifth of this welfare payment needs to be cut. In 2015 the Independent Living Fund will be shut down. This pays for almost 40 hours a week of care so Crystal can live at home and not in a care home. “I really don’t know what we will do when that goes.”

It’s these complex cases where a delicate web of welfare is being furiously unravelled by the coalition but with no obvious safety net to replace it that worries the charity establishment. Heléna Herklots, chief executive of Carers UK, warns of “a perfect storm of cuts” with councils scaling back social care services, central government pruning back welfare and taxpayer cash for support groups vanishing.

“Many carers who have already been struggling silently for years now feel under attack … Families are being pushed to breaking point and they feel that no one cares,” said Herklots.

Given the speed and scale of the planned reductions, Acevo has been increasingly alarmed that the most vulnerable are bearing the brunt of the cuts. The housing charity Crisis warned last year that 107,000 people had approached their local councils as homeless, a 10% jump in a year – and the second 12 months of rising homelessness across the country.

Despite years of investment, many public services are still not up to scratch. Last year Mind, the mental health charity, found that mental health services for society’s most vulnerable people were “unfit for purpose”. Soundings taken by Acevo reveal the extent of the unease. The boss of one learning disability charity warned: “We are sitting on a time bomb and watching it tick.”

All this occurs against a backdrop of rising inequality. As the government’s adviser on social mobility, the former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn, warned this week that the number of children in absolute poverty would rise by 500,000 to 3 million in 2015 and that 3.3 million children – almost one in four – would be in relative poverty by 2020.

There’s little doubt that for all its rhetoric of relying on society rather than the state to rebuild Britain, it is austerity measures that are driving change in Britain. The result is a voluntary sector exhausted by the whirlwind of thrift.

Fiona Blacke, the chief executive of the National Youth Agency, said: “I have worked with young people all my adult life but what I am seeing now is young people at the margins of mainstream society being cast adrift as the things that used to hold them safe are dismantled. I feel angry and disheartened that we seem to be just letting this happen.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society