Private houses,
public morality
Kenneth Roy
on the Blawarthill contract
Also on this page:
The Cafe
Readers’ views
Will they cut too deep?
Alf Young
George Osborne didn’t learn from Ireland before. Will he learn now?
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Bob’s People
Those awful chefs
The all-too-
accurate logo
Alison Prince
How Creative Scotland is hostile
to the essential nature of art
Also on this page:
The Midgie
A full and unqualified correction
Where is this lavatory?
Islay McLeod
launches an SR competition
Also on this page:
Rear Window
James Shaw Grant on second sight
23.09.10
No. 307
The Cafe
Maggie Craig
Can I just applaud Brian Fitzpatrick’s piece (SR 306)? As a lapsed Presbyterian who followed the Pope’s visit with great interest, took pleasure in the spectacle, felt uplifted by the masses and other services, took pleasure in the efficient, courteous and colourful way Scotland handled the visit and, above all, took pleasure in the joy of ordinary Catholics, my fellow countrymen and women, I too was embarrassed by the way Catholic ritual was explained to us as though it were some strange and alien creed.
I have a feeling too that the secularists are rather miffed that so many young people were clearly moved by and involved in the papal visit and that Christianity has come out fighting. What did they expect?
And Cardinal O’Brien’s a card, loved the draping of the tartan scarf.
Michael Elcock
I can tell Kenneth Roy (SR 306) what Beirut was like in the late 1950s. I’ve never been to Denny though, so I can’t draw the comparison.
In 1959 Beirut was still the main outpost of French culture in the eastern Mediterranean. It was – to me anyway, a schoolboy from Edinburgh – an exotic place, full of strange sounds and scents, and people. My father was based there with Middle East Airlines and he had a flat right at the point of West Beirut. The sea was a short walk away; warm and a beautiful blue-green colour, it was nothing like the sea around Edinburgh.
Beirut sits on a broad peninsula that juts out into the Mediterranean. The littoral – the land that runs up and down the coast – is quite fertile and well-tended. At least it was then, and it wasn’t hard to see why it had been given its biblical name ‘the land of milk and honey’. The slopes held orange and lemon groves, olive trees and much tilled arable land – and further up, grazing.
The mountains rise up behind Beirut and that’s where you could find the remnants of the famous cedars, the trees that King Solomon had supposedly used to build his temple. Beyond the mountains, the land fell steep down to the Beka’a valley, which ran north and south like the bed of an ancient, dried-up lake to towns like the ancient Heliopolis, better known today as Baalbeck. And beyond the Beka’a lay Syria.
All of these places were to become notorious in the 1970s and 80s of course. Baalbeck became a centre for what we called terrorists. Beirut became famous for the often indiscriminate nature of the carnage that was wreaked there, for the viciousness of its cynical and opportunistic political and religious factions, and – not very far from where we lived – for the horrors visited upon the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.
But that was all in the future when I was there. I found Lebanon to be an extraordinarily beautiful country; the most beautiful country I have ever seen – with the possible exception of Scotland.
Ian Brown
Further to Kenneth Roy’s reference (SR 306), I remember well Dunipace Juniors (played in black and white if my memory
serves me well) and I spent many happy years in the boot room for the juniors in Bonnybridge when they played at Duncan Stewart Park. Sadly they are no
longer in existence.
At this place, old people will end their lives, while next door the Scottish government stands to make a profit from speculative housing development
Kenneth Roy reports
There are two documents on my desk as I write this. One – a contract – is an indictment of public morality. The other – a report – is an account of human goodness. Together they tell us a lot about the values of modern Scotland. I will start with the report.
The Care Commission (the Scottish Commission for the Regulation of Care as it is formally known) recently inspected St Margaret of Scotland Hospice in Clydebank. The commission regulates around 15,000 services a year – from child-minders to private hospitals – and grades them from 1 (‘Unsatisfactory’) to 6 (‘Excellent’). Its visit to St Margaret’s was unannounced.
For ‘quality of care and support’, the commission gave the hospice the top mark. For ‘quality of staffing’ too, the hospice earned a score of 6. ‘The hospice provides extremely high-quality care and support for people who have advanced life-limiting conditions,’ the commission concluded.
There was nothing unusual about this outstanding assessment. St Margaret’s is accustomed to receiving the highest endorsement. But, for a more human perspective, it is worth looking at the views of the patients who were interviewed by the commission.
‘I feel safe here. The staff really know what they are doing. People think that hospices are miserable places, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.’
‘The staff are fantastic. I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else.’
‘This is a special place. It’s hard to explain and you wouldn’t understand unless you were a patient yourself.’
‘I have thought about it, but there really isn’t anything that could be done to make St Margaret’s Hospice any better.’
The commission also took the views of carers into account:
‘They don’t just look after my relative. They look after me.’
‘Nothing is a bother. The staff go out of their way to ensure everyone gets what they want.’
‘St Margaret’s is a very special place.’
The commission described these opinions as ‘extraordinarily positive’. Its own impressions were equally positive. It noted ‘the very high staffing ratios within the hospice’ – on the day of its inspection there were five trained nurses, a clinical nurse specialist and 11 nursing auxiliaries caring for 50 patients. It noted further that patients were being cared for ‘in a way that was genuinely respectful of individuality and preference’.
Under the standard heading ‘Areas for improvement’, the commission said only:
To continue
To continue. How simple the Care Commission makes it sound. And it should be simple. The phrase ‘world-class’ is used too carelessly, but Scotland really does have a world-class hospice, open to people of all religious denominations and none.
Why, then, does the public body on whom it relies for much of its income – Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board – wish to jeopardise its future? Why does it not echo the injunction of the Care Commission and tell the hospice to continue doing what it does so well?
Instead it has decided to withdraw funding for St Margaret’s continuing care beds for frail elderly people nearing the end of their lives, and to enter into a partnership with a private company, Walker of Leith, to build a new continuing care facility on the site of Blawarthill Hospital nearby. The health board wishes to convert these beds at St Margaret’s into a conventional care home, destroying the ethos of the hospice at a stroke. The hospice has consistently rejected this ‘option’ as the health board erroneously calls it – erroneous because it is the only offer on the table.
It is perverse. It is inexplicable.
In effect, the Scottish government has entered the speculative housing market on a site where terminally ill people are being cared for. Why would anyone in power think this was an acceptable thing to do?
The second document, obtained with some difficulty as a result of a freedom of information request, is the contract for the new development at Blawarthill. When SR began investigating this ‘land transaction’ last January, its terms were unknown. Now that they have reluctantly been made public, the deal looks even more extraordinary than we suspected.
A five-acre site – a public asset – has been sold by the health board to Walker of Leith for £2.8 million. By the time the developers make all the deductions to which they are entitled, the actual price will be as low as £1.1 million. Is that really all a five-acre site in the west of Glasgow is worth?
The next perplexing question is how, having done all they have to do, building a care home for Glasgow City Council as well as the continuing care facility for the health board, the developers will be able to recoup their investment. There appears to be no easy answer.
Except this. As part of the deal, they are entitled to build a ‘mainstream’ private housing development on the site. The number of houses is not stipulated in the contract, but there is an assumption that the sale of these houses will yield at least £8.5 million.
For every house sold above that figure, ‘the Scottish Ministers’ – the paymasters of Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board – will take 23% of the proceeds. In effect, the Scottish government has entered the speculative housing market on a site where terminally ill people are being cared for. Why would anyone in power think this was an acceptable thing to do?
There is, then, the question of how the patients are to be cared for. Not, it seems, by Walker of Leith, which claims no expertise in nursing and clinical services. The care will be provided by another commercial outfit, Southern Cross Healthcare, at a rate of £163.90 per bed per week based on 2007 prices. (Why not 2010 prices? That is one of the many mysteries of this document.)
The average cost of a place in a nursing home is around £30,000 a year. The deal at Blawarthill is worth only £8,522.80, plus any revision from 2007 prices. Southern Cross are not fools, so where is the rest of the money coming from – to pay for food, nursing, heating and lighting, medication, consultant and medical cover, laundry and linen, repairs and renewals? What standard of care will slightly more than £163.90 a week provide? And where is the profit for Southern Cross?
No doubt there is a rational explanation. I hope that Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board will provide it as soon as possible.
Even when the baffling economics are sorted out, however, there will remain a question of public morality. The Scottish government or the health board – it amounts to the same thing – stands to profit from the sale of private houses at Blawarthill, next door to the sickbeds of dying people, while the hospice which is being urged ‘to continue’ by another branch of that government wonders whether it has a future.
Where is the logic in all this? Where is the justice? Where is the humanity?
One day, perhaps, the cabinet secretary for health will seriously address these questions and not simply allow one of her civil servants to peddle the health board’s official line. Until she or her successor does so, we will go on asking them.
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