Stop The Standstill

Ethan Shone writes:

Coalfield MPs will force a debate on the broken miners’ pension promise if it is not resolved within weeks, openDemocracy understands. Labour MPs in former mining heartlands have been “lobbying hard behind the scenes” since the government quietly dropped a promise to release more than £1bn from the Mineworkers Pension Scheme (MPS) from last week’s Budget.

Sources involved in government discussions told openDemocracy that a last-minute technical bungle within the Treasury was to blame for John Healey removing the measure, which would cost taxpayers nothing but provide more than 100,000 ex-miners with an extra £20 per week in their pensions. The government has now pledged to release the money “within weeks, not months” – meaning it could still reach miners before Christmas as planned – after more than 40 MPs wrote to the chancellor to complain.

Jon Trickett told openDemocracy that MPs have warned the Treasury they will table an amendment to the Finance Bill if ministers fail to meet this timeline. “After an apparent blunder the day before the Budget, it is clear that the Treasury didn’t understand the strength of feeling their decision would provoke,” Trickett said. “But I am hopeful that we will see justice for the miners in the coming weeks and I, along with my colleagues, will continue to fight hard for this. Speaking for myself, and, I am sure, for others, I will not rest until justice is done.”

When British Coal was privatised in 1994, John Major’s Tory government struck a much-maligned deal to guarantee the two primary miners’ pensions if they ever fell into deficit. In exchange, the Treasury demanded 50% of any investment surplus. The funds performed well enough that the government never had to pay a penny into them, but still got access to the reserves. Miners have lost out on more than £4.4bn as a result, according to the National Union of Mineworkers.

As chancellor, Rachel Reeves released one of the MPS’ funds in 2024, and the sole fund for the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme, whose members were generally better-paid, non-mining staff, last year. After months of discussions and assurances from ministers, campaigners and coalfield MPs expected Healey to release the final pot of money, the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, this week, freeing up £1.2bn according to MPs’ estimates. Instead, former miners were left furious when the Budget left them without a timetable to receive the money – and no explanation for the government’s last-minute U-turn.

openDemocracy understands there was a technical misunderstanding relating to the source of the cash. While the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme guarantor’s fund is not taxpayer money, but a share of an investment surplus generated and held by the pension fund, the government’s claim to it still needed to be accounted for in the fiscal headroom under certain accounting standards, according to Treasury sources. MPS trustees who have held meetings in coalfield areas in the week since the Budget report that many members feel “distraught” and “betrayed”. The government initially offered no timeline for resolving the issue, prompting significant concern about a prolonged process. openDemocracy understands the trustees have invited the chancellor to a meeting in his South Yorkshire constituency, home to around 2,200 MPS members, later this month. A trade union source said they worried the political damage had “already been done”, with miners feeling “angry they’d had something taken away that they’d been promised”.

Gary Saunders, chair of the trustees, said: “The trustees welcome the chancellor’s commitment to resolve the issue of the Guarantor’s Fund in weeks rather than months. But our members need action within days. Every week, 100 of our members pass away. For them, delay cannot be undone. The Trustees have worked with the government in good faith throughout this year, and an agreement is ready to sign today. Signing it would allow us to start making payments to our members by the end of this year. We ask the chancellor to come to the table now and resolve the issue in the coming days so that more members can receive these payments during their lifetimes.”

Opposition MPs have also pushed for the Treasury to release the funds. Reform said if it wins the next general election and the funds have still not been released, it would transfer them within the first 100 days in office. Chris Kitchen, the general secretary of the NUM, welcomed the chancellor’s commitment to release the funds within weeks, not months. “We are pleased that the government has recognised the injustice and committed to resolving this, and releasing the money. Weeks are better than months, but days would be better than weeks, as time is working against our members. At the budget, the chancellor rightly took the other steps to make right the historic injustice of the miners’ pensions, and we are confident he will put right this final issue.” Healey did use the Budget to end the 50:50 split of future surpluses between the government and members, telling MPs: “For ex-mineworkers, I’m guaranteeing that every penny of the pension fund surplus now goes to miners. I know the job’s not done, and I will go on to ensure the full transfer of the guarantors’ fund.” The chancellor also abolished the “standstill” rule, under which bonus pensions could be frozen if the scheme fell into deficit.

Dark Blue, Indeed?

Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Akua Reindorf KC tear to shreds the draft Conversion Practices Bill. Still, perhaps they are just more delicate flowers at Oxford, or perhaps it is because his students are scientists, but Matt Rattley would have been only moderately eccentric if he had been teaching an arts degree at Durham in better days.

I have never set foot in the City of Oxford, and although I visited the City of Cambridge a few times when an aunt and uncle lived nearby before retiring back to Saint Helena, they had no connection to the University. So I have no boat in the race. I merely observe that Nathan Cofnas, whose only field is not the study of race realism but the thing itself, is obviously trying to relaunch himself at Oxford, where he shows no sign of being rebuffed, specifically by the college from which Lola Salem was suspended. Her story was suppressed over the summer by the distraction of attention to Jason Arday, whose only serious error turns out to have been that he called the Police and Carter Ruck. That was hardly a reason to hound him to his death.

If Cofnas can get in at Oxford, then so can James Orr, sacked as Head of Policy for Reform UK and removed from anything very responsible at Cambridge. Although the restrictions that Orr’s compound is alleged to breach would have been laughed out or met with bemusement even at Durham back in the day. No such strictures existed when most undergraduates were not possessed of the age of majority. How do the Oxbridge authorities think that their colleges originated?

Not that the infantilisation is to stop there. Not only are parliamentary candidates to be “vetted”, bearing in mind that every member of the gigantic 2024 Labour intake had been vetted by Peter Mandelson, but elected MPs and their choices of staff are to be given Enhanced DBS checks, so every morsel of malicious gossip that the Police had ever heard and every anonymous allegation ever sent through the post, before being subjected to “anti-harassment training”. What would count as “harassment”? Stating the reality of biological sex? Insisting on the presumption of innocence in rape cases? What if you failed?

The more pressing need is for drug testing, since in December 2021 cocaine was found in 11 out of 12 powder rooms in the Palace of Westminster on the same randomly chosen evening, Mr Speaker Hoyle promised “full and effective action”, and then nothing happened. But they will not rest until they have a lanyard class HR Department that managed MPs, including by allocating their staff out of a central pool of the socially and politically monolithic. Resist.

Enough To Tell You How This Case Is Going To Go

Craig Murray writes:

I am in London at the UK Supreme Court for Huda Ammori’s appeal against the proscription of Palestine Action. Three Jewish groups have been granted intervention rights by the Court (two of them pro-genocide) but no Palestinian group. One of the strongest grounds to contest the proscription was that it entails discrimination against Palestinians. That ground was dismissed at the permission stage and appeal on that ground has been denied throughout.

So the Court will refuse to hear any argument on anti-Palestinian discrimination, a key part of the case, but will hear argument on alleged anti-semitism, which was never in the case and has been brought in by the Court. That, I think, is enough to tell you how this case is going to go. There is in any event almost no chance of a win in the Supreme Court as at present constituted under the right-wing Lord Reed. He has made no secret that he does not believe the courts should contradict the Executive and has excluded from the Court for the last eight years any judge who did not share this view. Forgive my immodesty if I say that my article on this is absolutely essential reading.

I am not sure I will get into the court to report. As the petitioner in the parallel Scottish case which is sisted pending this decision, I applied to the Court that I need to be there to hear the arguments, and asked them to reserve me a seat in the gallery. I received a very dusty reply telling me to stay at home and watch the livestream. I shall try to arrive early to queue for the public gallery, but have been told there may be no seats allocated to the public. If this appeal fails, the government will go ahead with its plans to process the 4,000 people facing terrorism charges for holding placards or wearing T shirts supporting Palestine Action, through juryless kangaroo courts in batches of five, with 36 minutes allotted to each individual, including process and the prosecution case. The UK is bringing more terrorist charges per head than any other country in the world, the majority against aged pacifists. This is absolutely a choice by the Labour Friends of Israel government. Burnham does not have to do this. They do not have to fight the Supreme Court case tomorrow. The interests of the people are utterly subordinate in the UK State to the interests of the State of Israel.

We are still short of money for the Scottish leg of the judicial review. I am sorry to have to keep asking, but I have no choice. The legal bills currently exceed the amount raised to date, largely due to the government succeeding in having our legal crowdfunder closed down. Other donation methods are currently still available even though the CrowdJustice route has been closed. Obviously we now need funds more than ever to carry on.

Beneath Contempt?

As Donald Trump ends aid to Israel while the Democrats get the vote out for Abdul El-Sayed, congratulations to the Labour Party on being far to the right of both main parties in the United States.

Who is behind that? The spooks? MI5 is to be investigated by the Police for misconduct in public office. Still, if lying to three courts was not contempt, then Rajiv Menon KC has certainly not committed it, either.

Picking At The Scab

The stocks are sold, the Press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state, back in the Customs Union and in Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area. There will of course be no referendum. We are ruled by people to whom the vote is a nice thing to have, but who got their way by other means every day, so they did not really need it. If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. We on the Left have been telling you this forever, as Paul Knaggs still is:

Andy Burnham did a great job picking at the scab, and social media is the new frontline where the Brexit wound refuses to close. A decade on from the referendum, the die-hard Rejoiners are still weeping into their timelines, crying “Bregret” and sneering about “Brexshit” as if their surface-level understanding of the European Union were an intellectual badge of honour. Their historical amnesia is almost comedic. It was Ted Heath and the Tory establishment that dragged Britain into this neoliberal architecture in the first place, yet a certain brand of comfortable liberal still treats a corporate, right-wing trading bloc as if it were an international peace commune. Their contempt is not really for a treaty. It is for the people who dared to vote the wrong way.

There is a peculiarly British arrogance that only surfaces when the establishment loses an argument to the public. It retreats immediately into the small print. The loudest voices no longer sit in Whitehall committee rooms; they lurk on social media, clutching the word “advisory” with the smug satisfaction of a clerk who has found an expired parking voucher. You know the profile: the constellation of yellow stars, the “Still European” bio, the reflex reply insisting the 2016 vote was merely a glorified opinion poll. Leaving a treaty organisation no more makes you un-European than resigning from a Pall Mall club removes you from London. But this was never about geography. It was about belonging to a professional class that wears its virtue as a badge and its defeat as a personal insult.

Ask yourself a straight question: suppose Remain had scraped over the line by a single postal vote in Oxfordshire. Would these same voices have spent ten years demanding that Parliament rip up the result? Would they have dismissed their own victory as an “advisory” suggestion? Not on your life. A Remain victory would have been declared the settled will of the nation, carved into granite and placed permanently beyond appeal. The crime of 2016 was that the working class broke the script. The former pit villages and steel towns, written off by polite society for forty years, walked into polling stations and voted the wrong way. From that moment on, the asterisk became more sacred to the establishment than the ballot paper.

THE PROMISE IN THE SMALL PRINT 

Since the Rejoiners are so fond of facts, let us deal with theirs. Yes, the referendum was legally advisory. The European Union Referendum Act 2015 contained no clause compelling the Government to act on the result. Nobody serious disputes it. But before a single vote was cast, David Cameron’s government spent £9.3 million of public money sending a leaflet to households across the country. It said, in plain English: “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.” It did not say “we will take your views into account”, nor “subject to approval by people who know better”. It said implement.

Parliament then did exactly what the constitution requires. After the Supreme Court ruled in the Miller case that ministers needed Parliament’s authority to trigger Article 50, MPs passed the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017, by 498 votes to 114 at second reading. Theresa May invoked Article 50 on 29 March 2017. Weeks later, both main parties fought a general election on manifestos pledging to respect the result. That is not a mob trampling the constitution. That is the constitution working. A vote can have no automatic legal force and still carry full democratic legitimacy. The Remoaners have spent a decade pretending not to know the difference.

THE BUS, THE MARGIN AND RUSSIA 

Push a Remainer past the advisory argument and the arithmetic, and you get three more excuses: the bus, the margin and, when all else fails, Russia.

The Arithmetic

The arithmetic of the sore loser, endlessly recycled online: “only 37 per cent of the electorate voted Leave.” Correct, 37.4 per cent. And 34.7 per cent voted Remain, a figure that never makes it into the thread. The 27.8 per cent who stayed at home voted for nothing, yet we are invited to file their silence under Remain. Of those who did vote, 51.9 per cent chose Leave, a margin of almost 1.27 million votes, on a turnout of 72.2 per cent. That turnout was higher than at any general election since 1992. Apply the Rejoiners’ test consistently and no modern British government survives it.

The Margin 

Then the margin. Fifty-two to forty-eight, we are told, is far too narrow for constitutional upheaval. The European Union itself was built on less. In September 1992, France ratified the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty that created the EU, by 51.05 per cent to 48.95, a thinner margin than Brexit. Three months earlier, Denmark had rejected it outright, by fewer than 47,000 votes. Brussels did not treat that as the sacred will of the Danish people. Denmark was handed a package of opt-outs and asked to vote again, and in May 1993 it gave the right answer. A narrow vote, it seems, is a solid foundation when it builds the European Union and a constitutional outrage when it leaves it. Labour’s 2024 landslide rested on roughly one registered voter in five. Strangely, nobody called his government advisory.

The Bus 

Every campaign has its slogans, and the £350 million on the side of a bus was one of them. It was hardly a secret weapon. The UK Statistics Authority publicly called the figure misleading weeks before polling day, and the bus was picked apart on the news night after night. To claim that 17.4 million adults heard all that and still voted on the strength of a bus is not analysis. It is contempt with a footnote. And if campaign exaggeration voids a result, the Remain side should look at its own record. The Government spent £9.3 million of public money pushing its case through letterboxes. George Osborne stood in a DIY warehouse and declared that “a vote to leave will push our economy into a recession”, with half a million jobs lost and a punishment budget of tax rises and spending cuts to follow. The recession never came. Philip Hammond scrapped the punishment budget within weeks of taking over at the Treasury.

The Russians

Which brings us to Russia, the Remainers’ last resort. Very well, let us talk about Russian money and the British press in 2016. Two newspapers told their readers to vote Remain: the Independent and the Evening Standard. Both had been bought by Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB officer once posted to the Soviet embassy in London, and both were run by his Moscow-born son, Evgeny. Nobody sensible thinks that made Remain voters Kremlin stooges. But apply the Remoaners’ own rule, under which any Russian connection anywhere near a campaign is proof of a plot, and they have some explaining to do. Strangely, the rule only ever seems to point one way.

As for the material case for our departure, one could fill volumes citing the socialist giants who warned for decades that the European project was an engine of corporate power, from Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan to Tony Benn, Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Dennis Skinner. They understood that you cannot build a democratic socialist commonwealth if your economic policy is permanently policed by an unelected commission in Brussels. But strip away the constitutional theory, and the core of the matter remains what it has always been: it is the economy, stupid. The working class did not vote to defend abstract statutes; they voted against forty years of managed decline, wage stagnation and the deliberate sacrifice of domestic industry to global capital.

Dislike the result if you must. Campaign to reverse it, and win the argument if you can. That is your democratic right. What you are not entitled to do is pretend that one word in a statute cancels a government’s promise, an Act of Parliament and the votes of 17.4 million people. In the Remoaners’ democracy, the people are sovereign when they vote correctly and merely advisory when they don’t. The ballot was never their problem. The voters were.

Uncivil Partnerships

Carla Lockhart resigned from the DUP 40 years to the day after Ruairí Ó Brádaigh had led his supporters out of the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis to constitute the Republican Sinn Féin that has one council seat in Galway and no other elected representation anywhere. There is a message in that somewhere. And such walkouts seem to be in season. Never mind whether Haley Stevens now agreed with Mike Rogers. What do he and the Republican Party find so welcome about any endorsement by her?

Similarly, since Labour is prepared to collapse the local government of 11 council areas, including the tenth largest city in the country, out of loyalty to a foreign state, then many people might reasonably ask why it had previously found the Green Party an acceptable coalition partner. But at least as good a question is why the Greens had been prepared to do so such deals with Labour. And the answer is that, again rather like Sinn Féin, as soon as they are in office rather than in opposition, then they vote giddily for cuts and austerity. Their conduct of successive bin strikes was so union-busting that anyone would have thought that Brighton and Hove was a Labour council at the time.

The state without whose approval the governing party of the United Kingdom refuses to enter into municipal cooperation still supports the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War. On 1 April 2024, it killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, whom it bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident.

Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist, Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza, an ideology that gave rise to genocide must by definition be racist, and an ideology that forbade coalition with parties for which the wrong ethnic group had voted is racist no matter how many people adhered to it.

In any case, Jews are half of one per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, and a third or more of that tiny minority does not identify with Zionism. There are no more than 200,000 Zionist British Jews, less than a fifth of the 943,598 votes for the BNP at the 2009 European Elections. Yet the Labour Party did not allow that to dictate its arrangements for the administration of any local authority. Think on.

And The Bill Comes Home To Us

Reform UK shows that it knows that its supporters are not the strivers of the petit bourgeoisie and the skilled working class. As with the 2024 summer rioters, look at the Blackshorts of Daniel Thomas and you just know that neither you nor anyone else would employ them, as no one did, since they had nowhere else to be.

Labour also knows its base. During the pandemic, £1.7 billion was spent on PPE from VIP lane suppliers. One billion pounds’ worth of it was found to be unfit for use. Remember that most Conservative of VIP lanes as we watch the traffic along the most Labour of them, the much shorter period to qualify for indefinite leave to remain if you were paid an oddly precise £50,271 per year or more, at least for now. On what those VIPs will bring, Paul Knaggs writes:

A bed in a British care home now costs a family about £1,300 a week. The woman who washes, feeds and turns the person in it earns £12.71 an hour. Somewhere between those two numbers sits the owner. The last time anyone forced the books open, the biggest private equity chains were paying £102 a week on every bed just to service their debts, much of it owed to their own related companies offshore. That is not a care system. It is a toll booth on the last years of our parents’ lives.

On Monday the Home Secretary told the Commons that overseas care workers who have met their visa conditions will keep their five-year route to settlement. She praised those who “worked hard and answered our call when we needed them.” In March, Shabana Mahmood told the Institute for Public Policy Research that unless she rewrote the settlement rules, Britain would “see a £10 billion drain on our public finances”. On Monday, in the Commons, she rewrote them the other way. The Tories called it a surrender.

What the £10 billion actually measures 

The figure comes from a Home Office research note published on 5 March. It takes the Migration Advisory Committee’s estimates of the lifetime fiscal impact of care workers who arrived in 2022/23. That works out at roughly £36,000 net cost per worker and £67,000 per adult dependant. The note then multiplies those figures by the number expected to settle between 2026 and 2030: about 117,000 care workers and 79,000 adult dependants. The result is £9.5 billion, spread across the rest of their lives.

That is not the price of Monday’s decision. The Liberal Democrat MP Max Wilkinson asked the UK Statistics Authority to examine the claim. The Authority confirmed with the Home Office that it is the lifetime cost of this group under the existing rules. It added that a clearer statement would have shown the figure is not an estimate of the fiscal savings associated with delaying settlement. To be fair to the Home Secretary, the Authority also concluded that her speech met its standards. 

In plain terms, the £9.5 billion compares these people settling with these people not being here at all. A 15-year wait would never have saved that sum. At most it would have postponed some entitlements, and only for workers still in the country after a decade and a half of insecurity. The Commons needed one number: the cost difference between the five-year route and the 15-year one. Nobody has published it.

The estimate is also lopsided over time. According to the Migration Observatory, health and care workers become a net fiscal cost only after about 30 years. The bill arrives in old age, as pensions and NHS treatment, as it does for anyone. When the IPPR applied the Home Office’s own method to all skilled workers due to settle in the same period, it found they will put £115 billion more into the public finances than they take out.

For a day Westminster argued about the carers. Nobody mentioned the Care Home owners. That silence is the story. Britain didn’t stumble into dependence on overseas care workers. It sold its care homes, starved the people working in them, imported a cheaper and more compliant workforce to fill the gap, and has now sent the public the bill. Every step was a political choice, and both main parties made them.

Care Home Privatisation: How the State Walked Out 

In 1979 councils and the NHS provided nearly two-thirds of Britain’s residential and nursing home beds. By 2012, according to research drawn together by SOAS, the state’s share had fallen to around 6 per cent. The turning point was Margaret Thatcher’s NHS and Community Care Act 1990, which made councils buyers of care rather than providers. Labour and the coalition both kept the model running.

Once care became a market, finance followed. Southern Cross grew by selling its homes and leasing them back. In 2011 it collapsed with 752 homes, 44,000 staff and 31,000 residents, whose fate passed to its landlords. Nobody went to prison, and the model didn’t die. It grew.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest examined the accounts of more than 830 care home companies. It found that the five largest chains backed by private equity had borrowed £35,072 for every bed they owned, often from related companies in Jersey, Guernsey and Luxembourg, at interest rates that turned public fees into tax-deductible payments to their owners. Across the whole independent sector, the CHPI estimated that £1.5 billion a year leaked out as rent, interest, profit and directors’ pay. Now the buyers are bigger still. In October 2025 the American property trust Welltower bought Barchester’s care home portfolio for £5.2 billion, the largest care home deal in history, alongside the whole of HC-One for £1.2 billion. The Barchester homes are rented back to their operator on a lease with rent rising 3.5 per cent every year. A British investment minister welcomed it.

Migrant Care Workers: How the Sector Came to Depend on Them 

Something had to give, and it was the wages. Councils pay providers below cost, and families paying their own way cover the gap: the competition watchdog found self-funders paid 41 per cent more than councils for the same bed. Owners collect their rent and interest whatever happens. The squeeze falls on the payroll. A care worker with five years’ experience now earns, on average, 10p an hour more than someone who started last week. British workers did the sensible thing and left. Last year there were 140,000 new British starters in the sector, down from 255,000 five years earlier, while 175,000 people walked out.

The government’s answer wasn’t to raise pay. In 2022 Boris Johnson’s government opened the health and care visa to care workers. Between March 2022 and March 2024, around 185,000 people started direct care jobs after arriving from abroad, and another 50,000 followed in 2024/25. Each visa was tied to a sponsoring employer. A worker who complained could lose the right to stay. The Home Secretary says about 1,800 employers have since lost their licences for exploiting the people they recruited. Cheap labour and compliant labour went together. In 2025 the door was closed to new recruits. The workers already here were left as a political problem, and on Monday Mahmood decided what to do with them.

How They Sent Us The Bill 

She made the right call on the people. These workers kept their side of a bargain the British state offered them. Moving the goalposts years after they arrived would have been shameful, and this paper says so plainly. But the decision deals with the workers and leaves the business model untouched. That’s why the public is paying again, and in more ways than one.

We pay at the front door. Families sell homes to meet fees that rise faster than pensions, and in doing so subsidise the council-funded residents next door. Councils pay from council tax and grants. In just three English regions, the North East, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, private care providers took £256 million in profit between 2021 and 2024, including £45 million in dividends and £33.6 million in interest. Up to 60 per cent of that interest went to private equity and tax-haven owners.

We pay for the clean-up. Under Monday’s plan, the state will help workers abandoned by rogue sponsors find “a legitimate provider”, and run the extra visas and checks needed to do it. The private failure is tidied up at public expense.

And we pay at the end. The Home Office’s own £9.5 billion figure, which the Tories are waving about, is not the cost of Monday’s decision. The UK Statistics Authority has confirmed it is the lifetime cost of this group settling under the existing rules. Most of it is the pension and NHS care of people who spent their working lives on the legal minimum wage. It isn’t the price of migration. It’s the price of poverty pay, collected decades after the owners banked the savings.

Against all that, the government has promised a Fair Pay Agreement backed by £500 million in 2028/29. Spread across the workforce, analysts estimate it comes to roughly 20p an hour. One American property trust spent ten times that on a single British care chain. Look at who is asked to give something up. The workers wait for their settlement. Families pay their fees. Councils make cuts. The owners give up nothing: no clawback from failed sponsors, no levy on extraction, no duty even to say where the money goes.

This is the model, and care homes are only the end of it. The post-war settlement promised the working class security from the cradle to the grave. The market has kept the phrase and changed its meaning. Nine of the ten largest childcare providers are now backed by private equity. The competition watchdog has warned that the companies running children’s homes are carrying heavy debts while charging councils high fees. At the other end of life, the same financial engineering runs through the care home. From the nursery to the deathbed, every stage at which a human being needs looking after has been turned into a revenue stream, and every vulnerable person into a yield. 

Somehow we must find a way of taking the care of people back out of the market, and of saying that some things are not for sale: the raising of a child, the comfort of the dying, and the dignity of the people who do that work. That isn’t sentiment. It’s a choice about who owns the places where we begin and end our lives, and it can be made again.

Public Ownership Is Cheaper: The Case Stated 

The defenders of the market will say private capital built the beds when councils couldn’t, and that many small family-run homes operate honestly on thin margins. Both points are true, and neither answers the charge. Private capital came because the state was forbidden to build. Private equity borrows at interest rates far above what the state pays on its own debt, then charges the public for the difference. Public ownership isn’t nostalgia. It’s cheaper. 

So start where the case is strongest. When an operator fails or is caught extracting, its homes should pass to councils or to not-for-profit ownership, not to the next fund in line. Councils should be given back the capital to build and run homes of their own. Any provider taking public money should open its books, and related-party loans charged against care beds should be outlawed. And caring should be paid as the profession it is, with a national pay scale that rewards experience and training paid for by the state. If we call it a vocation, we should pay it like one.

We built council homes and a national health service when this country was poorer than it is now. Looking after the generation whose shoulders we stand on is not too hard for us. We simply sold it. We let the market take our care homes and then imported the people to work them. Now the carers stay, the owners walk away, and the bill comes home to us.