Madam,

So if you have become elderly and frail or infirm and in need of residential care, you in most cases have to sell your own home to pay for this residential care whether the provision of care be local authority run or privately-owned - being allowed to retain just sufficient of your life savings to cover your funeral and other necessary expenses.

Local authorities are having to sell off their residential care homes as they are underfunded by the government and can no longer afford to run them. There was the recent closure of Bodlondeb Residential Home, Penparcau, Aberystwyth and now, to name another, Rhondda Cynon Taf Council is in the process of closing five of their residential homes against great local opposition, which I fear from local experience as secretary to the North Ceredigion Forum For Elderly Care will in all probability also end in their closure.

Residents on closure are mostly being sent to care homes many miles away from their families, and often right out of the county. We are in fact inflicting on our most vulnerable ‘’homelessness’’ in their own family vicinity.

It is therefore not just our vulnerable young that are homeless but our most elderly and infirm, unless they are prepared to be ‘shipped off’ to goodness knows where. What does this say about our today’s society?

All of our Members of Parliament should be insisting on the making of adequate funding available to local authorities as a priority and matter of urgency. It is shameful in the year 2019 how we treat our elderly in this country.

Yours etc, Patricia Bates, Maes-Maelor, Penparcau, Aberystwyth.

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