Nearly half of council’s telecare service users could “ditch” the service due to weekly charges

Lancashire County Council has decided to start charging for its telecare service, as of next year, after concluding that it could no longer afford to cover the annual costs, which are rising at a rate of about £1 million a year.

Recently, the council proposed introducing a charge of £4 to £9 a week for its telecare service customers, so it could afford to pay the increasing costs of running the service.

Progress Lifeline currently provides over 16,000 people with an alarm unit, pendant, sensors and 24-hour monitoring on behalf of the council. If a user falls or becomes unwell, they simply press their pendant, which alerts the monitoring centre. This ensures that the user receive the assistance they need from a family member or the mobile response team.

Lancashire County Council is the only local authority in the North West of England that currently offers a telecare service free of charge, which will change from January 2023 when the council will introduce charges for telecare.

The Lancaster Guardian stated that cabinet members who were involved in the decision had been told that some people had signed up to the service simply because it was free, and that it did not serve a “genuinely preventative function” for them.

While the service is available to anyone over 18 who is eligible, the majority of the users in Lancashire are over 65.

Councillor Graham Gooch said that the system had developed two “fatal flaws”, claiming that the service is no longer affordable and due to the upcoming digitalisation of the nation’s telecoms infrastructure; the service needs a complete overhaul of the equipment that it relies on, he believes.

County Councillor Lorraine Beavers, Deputy Leader of the Labour group, suggested that a means test should be applied to all telecare users in order to calculate whether they should have to pay anything at all.

Graham argued that basing payments by users’ needs would require assessments to be carried out on 11,000 users who have not had a needs assessment for other purposes, adding that there were “not enough staff” to carry out such a task.

A public consultation carried out among existing service users into the proposed changes found that 46 percent, of 1,650 respondents, were unlikely to continue with it if charges were introduced.

Labour Opposition Group lLader Azhar Ali said that, based on that result, around 8,000 people would ditch telecare if they had to pay.

Users that decide to continue using the telecare service will need to pay a weekly fee. Those who drop the service will receive advice of alternative free monitoring systems that are available via other providers. People leaving hospital will still be offered the free telecare service for up to six weeks.