Madam,

With the number of vacant places at Bodlondeb and the cost of renovating the building to meet potential new regulations on room sizes, keeping the care home open would just be “delaying the inevitable”.

According to your report on 26 October, that is what social services director Sue Darnbrook told a meeting of the healthier communities scrutiny committee.

Of course the council has been busily moving residents out of Bodlondeb in recent weeks, which certainly shores up that part of its argument.

That leaves the “new room-size regs” part. That room-size argument was the clincher. However you balanced the other factors, the idea that next year the National Assembly would be intervening to condemn half the residential rooms in Bodlondeb made the whole debate look pointless.

But hang on a minute, what’s this in the report of the Bodlondeb consultation (a document which recently became available online but has received very little publicity)? It says: “Welsh Government have consulted on the draft regulations relating to accommodation standards including room sizes… Although it’s expected that the new room requirements will not be applicable on ‘day one’ of the new Act coming into force, it’s anticipated that at some point all existing buildings will have to comply with the larger room sizes.”

So – actually – this building is being closed because (amongst other things) “at some point” in the indefinite future some of the rooms will, “it is anticipated”, be deemed too small. Now that doesn’t sound quite so cut and dried, does it?

If half the rooms in Bodlondeb are closed next year by the National Assembly it will also be shutting down similar rooms all over Wales. In this scenario the residential care sector across Wales is going to be decimated by the National Assembly in 2018.

So is that really going to happen? You bet it isn’t.

Yours etc,

Dave Bradney, Joppa, Llanrhystud.

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