John Belcher - Anchor Trust

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Can you tell us a bit about Anchor Trust?

John Belcher: We're the largest not-for-profit provider of care, support, and housing for older people in England. We started life as Help the Aged Oxford Housing Association in 1968, but we have gradually evolved and developed over the years. We now provide a full spectrum of services providing care in residential homes and in people's own homes, as well as with sheltered housing both for rent and for sale.

Within the concept of our housing, we also offer what we call 'extra care housing' which provides a 24-hour on-call care team.

We have approximately 11,000 thousand staff and we work in 1,500 locations across England. A lot of our services are funded via third party commissioners, such as local authorities and health authorities, but increasingly, we are seeing more and more people paying for services themselves.

In March 2006, we received Investors in People status for the whole organisation, which we are extremely proud of.

Anchor is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year – what do you feel are its key achievements?

John Belcher: There are four or five points to make.

First and foremost, I think it is the quality and care of support which we have given to older people over the years, based on our philosophy of improving their lives. Fundamentally, that has been our key achievement over the past 40 years.

Of course, we couldn’t have done it without our staff as they are our most valuable assets. They constantly demonstrate passion, pride, and professionalism, honouring Anchor's commitment to improving older people's lives.

In return, Anchor helps its staff to develop their skills in all areas. We have really good training programmes for our workforce. For example, we have a specialist dementia team, which engages in training and reorganisation.

In addition, we have a catering team which works in our Anchor Homes Directorate and they have won national awards for what they have done in terms of providing nutritious food for our residents. Everything in an Anchor Home is prepared onsite, nothing is pre-prepared or comes out of a packet and we are very pleased about that.

Finally comes that spirit of innovation and Anchor has always been an innovative organisation. In the 1980s we pioneered the concept of home improvement agencies targeted at older home owners, whose properties were falling into disrepair and needed minor adaptations to enable them to carry on living there.

Today, we are continually looking for new products and services to meet the expectations and needs of an ageing population.

What are your key areas of work this year?

John Belcher: We are concerned that by 2020, the UK will have three million more people above the age of 65, which will have a huge impact on society as a whole.

Therefore, older people will increasingly become a force to be reckoned with, whether politically, socially or economically. They will be less willing to accept the traditional kind of models of housing and care that have been provided historically.

They will want much greater choice of freedom, where they live and how their needs and demands are met and they will want to be in control of that.

Anchor's early thinking on these issues is set out in a discussion paper that we are launching at this year's Chartered Institute of Housing conference in Harrogate.

It’s called 'Anchor 2020: Meeting the challenges of older people's housing and care'.

It is partly a response to the government's recent National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society, but also presents Anchor's early thinking on the future of housing for older people.

Anchor 2020 is an ambitious document. It takes stock of where we are today in terms of existing housing provision for older people. Then it looks critically at the social, political and economic impact of our rapidly ageing society on that provision.

It then closes with a consideration of how the sector will need to change to match older people's expectations and aspirations.

Consequently, we call for partners such as government, local authorities, planners, developers and other providers to be more ambitious in their vision for older people's housing.

We have put a considerable amount of investment into our housing stock to bring it up to a standards talked about as part of the government's strategy.

We are investing about £155m over the next three years to ensure the sheltered housing stock we have is fit for purpose for the future. We are doing the same with our Anchor Homes, and we are also investing in our domiciliary care service, our lease hold properties, and our home improvement agency services.

By next spring, a new 62-apartment development near Leeds, called the Laureates, will have been completed. It is the first development in our new Housing and Lifestyles model, which aims to build the retirement housing of the future.

As well as spacious apartments built to a high specification, there will also be a number of 'lifestyle' services including a spa treatment room, private dining rooms and a personal assistant who can organise social activities, such as trips to the theatre.

We will also be launching the third of our pilots for our At Home Services business, this time in north London.

At Home Services enables an older people to continue living at home by providing services that help them be independent. This can cover a whole range of activities, such as doing the gardening to organising a holiday to having live-in care seven days a week.

So we are carrying on with our innovation agenda, which we have always believed in passionately, addressing and developing our current services but looking to the future to see how we can grow and evolve.

As the population ages, and the expectations of older people rise, how will their housing needs change?

John Belcher: I think housing needs will change quiet dramatically. We already know from our current research that a lot of the sheltered accommodation that exists in this country is out-of-date. A lot of it is studio accommodation, which is the polite phrase for bed sits, and obviously, people's expectations are going to change.

These days, older people want at least two bedrooms, dedicated off-road parking for themselves and their families, and lots of storage space so that they can bring their treasured possessions with them.

Two bedrooms are important for lots of reasons. If you're a married couple in your mid-80s you may need separate rooms because your partner suffers from dementia; you may want to have a live-in carer, or you may want your family to come and stay.

This is what the expectations of an ageing population will be and Anchor is trying to respond to that.

The number of people with dementia is set to rise to a million by 2025. How does Anchor meet the challenge of dementia care?

John Belcher: We have a set up Specialist Dementia Care Team to concentrate on providing training and support to our staff, particularly those who work in Anchor Homes. They recently won a Community Care Excellence Network award for their training and development work.

We have trained over 4,000 of our staff in specialist dementia care principles and practice, and we have 150 staff that is registered as Dignity Champions with the Department of Health. Dignity Champions are trailblazers providing excellent advice and training in the field of dementia care.

Anchor, I think, is very committed to ensuring that we provide high quality services to those who do have dementia. We recognise that as the numbers are set to increase significantly, this is something that we as an organisation need to address.

The government has also acknowledged the issue of dementia. We are about to have the first national strategy for dementia, which will include polices to improve the care, diagnosis, and training of organisations and particularly, with the staff working in those agencies.

I think dementia is high on the agenda once again and the department has recognised a lot of work to be done in this area.

The government strategy sets out an ambitious vision for the future of older people's housing. Was it welcomed by Anchor and what do you think are the priorities for its delivery?

John Belcher: Yes, we broadly welcome the strategy, and wholly support elements such as the increase of funding to expand handyman services. Anchor contributed to the writing of the strategy and we had a significant input to the sections concerning home improvement agencies

However, we now want to see the government deliver on the strategy, and in particular, to give more detail on how existing retirement housing stock is to be re-modelled to bring it up to Lifetime Homes Standards.

What is the future of funding to support carers and domiciliary care workers in order to help people to continue living in their own homes for longer?

I think the government has acknowledged there is a real problem with funding social care. I think the political agenda has been raised around the problems within the social care sector. We have had the announcement from the prime minister and we are expecting a green paper later in the year on the issue.

Clearly, the whole debate around how social care is funded and paid for is something that really needs to be addressed seriously.

We have had all kinds of reviews and commissions looking at the social care sector and it is about time we actually got on and did something about it.

With regards to the social care workforce, there are huge issues about where the people are going to come from to sustain and help older people to continue to live where they want to live.

At the moment, for every person within the retirement age there are five people in the workforce to support them. In the next 30 years, there will only be two people in the workforce to provide support.

That raises a whole lot of issues about retirement age, immigration, where the workforce comes from and how services get paid for.

I think as a society we really need to address that and we haven't done so yet.

Is this the government's responsibility, or should older people themselves expect to contribute to the cost of their care?

John Belcher: I don't think it is the sole responsibility of the government.

I think more people are willing to pay for services themselves. We are, in fact, experiencing a dwindling of public funding and local authority commissioning for Anchor services.

For example, when I joined Anchor about 95 per cent of the tenants in our rented retirement housing scheme received full or part housing subsidies through the housing benefit system.

Now it is about 65 per cent, so 35 per cent of the people living in our sheltered housing scheme for rent have been former homeowners who have taken the decision to sell their property and move into rented accommodation.

Part of this move is about wanting to free up capital so they can enjoy their retirement years and increase their annual income.

Equally, it is about not having all the hassles that comes with home ownership.

In our care homes, about 30 per cent of all the people pay the full cost themselves. And if you take into account family contributions, it is probably closer to 50 per cent.

So we are already seeing older people taking the decision to pay for care themselves because they want a better quality level of provisions than the state can provide.

The Health and Social Care Bill contains proposals to restructure the social care regulatory bodies and for the Care Quality Commission. How will this affect the social care workforce? What will be the impact on service users?

John Belcher: I think it is going to be interesting in the sense that it brings together three areas; mental health, social care, and health. The key challenge is to make sure the new commission it is not health-dominated. Social care and mental health services must be seen as equal partners in this regulatory framework.

In my experiences of the social welfare sector, health has always been of paramount importance. Social care has always been the Cinderella service and mental health services don't even get Cinderella status.

The challenge will be to have a real working regulatory framework that benefits everybody.

In terms of social care workforce, we've got the Independent Safeguarding Authority which has responsibilities for vetting people who work with vulnerable children and adults. That has a direct role to play in the commission.

Do you have any final comments for ePolitix.com readers?

John Belcher: I think we are at a cross roads in our society. Much of the focus for the last 25 to 30 years has been on young families and the child care system, and older people have always been left out of social policy.
But now the time is right to debate the issues of housing care and support needs of older people as a society.

We really should be a society where we can create a future where old age really does matter.

I would encourage you to read our Anchor 2020 report, which is now available on our website at http://www.anchor.org.uk.