SUPPORTERS of Bodlondeb care home have questioned Ceredigion County Council’s claim that rooms at the home will no longer meet standards on the size of the room.

The council’s social services director, Sue Darnbrook, has said the introduction of regulations by the Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales on the size of rooms in care homes is one of the reasons the authority wants to close Bodlondeb, along with decreasing demand for residential care and the cost of renovating the home.

But members of the Save Bodlondeb campaign have questioned whether the room size regulations would apply to Bodlondeb, ahead of the National Assembly making a decision on the regulations later this year.

A statement from the campaign group said: “One of the main arguments for the closure of Bodlondeb may well prove invalid.

“Ceredigion County Council’s insistence that many of Bodlondeb’s rooms just fail to meet the minimum size prescribed by regulations and that new legislation to be enacted in April 2018 will confirm this, now seems to be open to debate.

“The Regulated Services (Service Providers and Responsible Individuals) Regulations 2017 final draft is due to go before the National Assembly before the end of the year.

“The Achub Save Bodlondeb steering group’s understanding of the transitional arrangements relating to these regulations is that, if unchanged from their present form, the regulations on minimum room size will apply to new establishments only.

“Although these new regulations are currently in draft, if passed in their current form, they remove one of the major threats to keeping this valuable community resource open.”

Ms Darnbrook has said that the current size of rooms in Bodlondeb would not meet the proposed CSSIW regulations and that major renovation work to reconfigure the rooms would be expensive and mean the number of rooms in the home would mean it was no longer cost effective.

Claims that fewer people are looking to go into residential care have also been questioned by campaigners who have queried whether people who may wish to go into Bodlondeb are being refused by the authority.

No response was received from Ceredigion council by the time of publication.