Hospitals are clogged with patients fit for discharge with nowhere to go; care workers are quitting for better pay; almost one in five people aged 70 and over are lonely. Amid reports of dismal care standards, the government’s plan to “fix social care” has been postponed. Growing old in England feels increasingly precarious.
But in the Lake District, a village of 1,500 people has decided to fight back. What the citizens of Staveley have planned may create a template to be repeated nationwide.
Along with places such as north Norfolk and Dorset, Staveley has one of the most aged populations in England. With a third of the villagers over 60 and with twice as many pensioners as children, it is a glimpse into the future of an ageing country where more than 1.3 million people are expected to be living with dementia by 2040. These villagers want to approach that future with hope and love.
In the centre of this mill settlement, through which William and Dorothy Wordsworth once walked, stands the Abbey, a Victorian villa that for decades served as a care home where villagers knew they could spend their twilight years.
Its imposing presence opposite the old working men’s club and next to the chip shop gave comfort and allowed people to stay close to their loved ones rather than being isolated in an anonymous care facility miles away. People even liked moving in; it was a natural progression.
“It used to be that people would knock on the door and say ‘I want to come into the Abbey’,” said Deborah Michel, 69, one of the villagers.
But in 2020, Cumbria county council closed it down, a move in common with dozens of cash-strapped local authorities across England that have closed or sold hundreds of care homes in recent years. A “for sale” sign hangs outside and a future as housing or offices looms – yet more unwelcome change for a village already wrestling with the impact of second homes and Airbnb holiday lets owing to Staveley’s spectacular location between Kendal and Windermere in the Lake District national park.
Michel is part of a group spearheading the village’s resistance to that fate. They have established a community benefit society and over endless rounds of Zoom calls during the pandemic thrashed out a vision to care better for themselves in old age.
Their plan is to fashion the Abbey into a new care facility tailored to their needs. It would have 16 “independent living” apartments with basic care backup, four rooms to be rented cheaply to domiciliary care workers to serve people in their homes, four step-down beds to assist with hospital discharge, and a kitchen and dining room for the whole community.
It is a local scheme that addresses national-level social problems, from care workers who cannot afford to live near people who need care, to cutting NHS backlogs and boosting intergenerational mixing.
The villagers have committed £179,000 of their own money to the community trust, secured a promise of £250,000 from the district council to hire experts, and won the backing of the local MP Tim Farron, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats. “We should trust them to get on with it,” he said.
But when the community pitched their plan for a community asset transfer, the county council baulked and put the Abbey up for sale. It “did not believe that the proposed plans demonstrated a viable future use for this building”. It said two years of dialogue with the group had failed to overcome its reservations. It argues that the social care crisis is caused mostly by a shortage of staff, not beds.
But to reject them was “appalling”, said Wendi Lethbridge, 70, a trust member who before Christmas positioned her wheelchair across an entrance to the building when potential buyers were trying to look around. The police were called.
Feeling is running high because the need for the care hub is urgent. When Pauline Treadwell, 91, was recently stuck deteriorating in the Royal Lancaster Infirmary for weeks, when she could have been discharged if social care had been available, she told her daughter Karen: “I have just been left here for dead. Please will you break me out of here.”
Karen Treadwell said the council’s attitude to the community plan was “dismissive and derogatory”. “They said it was only going to be run by volunteers, as if ‘volunteers’ was a dirty word,” she said. “We are willing to get this done for the people of Staveley and the wider area, and keep people here, not shoved miles away.”
Jenny Bottomley, 37, said her father had to move an hour away to find care for Alzheimer’s disease. “I don’t want the same thing to happen for us,” she said.
Dennis Riggs, 79, who has been looking after his wife, Margaret, with dementia for seven years, said the Abbey would be “ideal” if she needs more care soon, as sadly seems inevitable. “She would feel comfortable that I was right there,” he said. “The village was such that you could be looked after from the cradle to the grave, but that last bit is being eroded.”
There is hope yet for the village plan. The community trust has applied for a judicial review of the decision to block their community asset transfer application. Meanwhile, the county council will split into two new authorities in April, meaning different political leadership.
The project is a sign that communities are trying to fill the void left by the social care crisis, in which there are more than 165,000 staff vacancies and the national care budget for England is less than half what many experts say is needed. However, it is a far more complex service to offer than a food bank or a warm hub, and without collaboration with the public authorities success appears to be against the odds.
“The social care crisis has got to such a stage that you have local charities setting up in order to deal with it,” Farron said. “It tells you a lot about the government letting it get into this state. This project could well be a real answer for Staveley, but it shouldn’t let the government off the hook.”
