More cuts than a butcher's knife

Now the cutbacks proposed at two council-run care homes providing care for the most vulnerable could put lives at serious risk.

These cuts will fail to provide a duty of care and surely fail to comply with the residents’ health and well-being. Those cuts could breach articles 2, 3 and 8 of their Human rights. Will the one official who said they were feeding the residents too well and wants to cut the food budget crawl out of the woodwork and be named and shamed? This official should be sacked.

The health and wellbeing director denies that drastically cutting staff will be life-threatening and well within expectations set by the Care Quality Commission.

I ask relatives of the residents to fight back and question this, write to the H&W director with copies to the RMBC chief executive and the leader of the council, asking for a written submission that a duty of care will not have been breached and assure you that the residents will be safe after the cutbacks. Ask how the residents will be bathed and where the cheap food will be purchased. Write and complain to the CQC with your concerns of the staff cuts and ask for an inspection of the home to be made. If you are still unhappy, seek legal advice.

There’s no shortage of money within RMBC. We pay chief executive Martin Kimber more money than the Prime Minister and directors are on more than £100,000 a year. How do they save money in Rotherham? By cutting disabled bathing and laundry services for the incontinent, shutting day centres and respite homes.

Councillors provide themselves with banquets and first class rail travel, and Roger Stone gets an OBE. Mr Stone, what have you done since coming into office for the sick, elderly and disabled other than savagely cutting their services while ring-fencing your own? 

What you have done could be printed on a postage stamp. What you have taken off them could fill a sheet of A4.

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