Row over proposed 15pc hike for Bristol meals on wheels

Councillors clashed over plans for a 15 per cent hike in charges for meals on wheels for some of Bristol’s most vulnerable residents. Labour criticised the proposals and said it may mean many people could no longer afford the vital service, while the Greens, the largest group in the chamber, defended the idea, insisting that “no one is going to be left starving”.

The plans are just one of dozens of options for Bristol City Council to make savings to plug a £52million shortfall, which were discussed by the finance sub-committee on Thursday, January 16. The authority subsidises meals on wheels by £300,000 a year, and a 15 per cent rise in fees would reduce this by £100,000.

Adult social care committee vice-chairman Cllr Kelvin Blake (Labour, Hillfields) told the meeting that it was right for the council to pay for part of the service. He said: “Certainly if we landed all the costs on the individuals, it would be uneconomic for them to cover the costs of it, so we’re accepting it’s a subsidised service.

“But for £100,000, a 15 per cent increase is way above inflation, way above what people would expect to see as an increase, and my worry is that this is more than just a meal, it’s a visit. Has there been any assessment done to understand how many of those individuals could fall back to us in a statutory way because their health declines or because that visit’s not there and they can’t afford the meal?

“They could come to us when we have to provide additional care in their own home or they could come to us in a residential placement – this £100,000 would be wiped out immediately if that were to happen.” Adult social care committee chair Cllr Lorraine Francis (Green, Eastville) replied: “I want to take issue with the premise that somehow if somebody wasn’t given meals on wheels that somehow that would then impact their housing, impact all the other issues around them, and that’s not the case.

“The commissioning service has worked on this and they have come up with a reasonable solution. We will still continue to subsidise this group – it’s not the case that 15 per cent going up means that the council will stop subsidising these meals.

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“No person who’s eligible for care will go without adequate support, whether it’s meals or domestic care. That is not going to happen and I don’t want us to present to the public that we are somehow neglecting our duties to review services that we were not reviewing and looking at alternative ways to provide meals or for our service users to access meals.

“No one is going to be left starving, so I just want to emphasise that.” Bristol City Council adult social care director Mette Le Jakobsen said: “We do have extensive analysis of this and last year we had an external consultancy help us with a commercial review of this service because the service has been encouraged to think commercially about how it operates.

“It currently serves about 300 people, about 50 per cent of whom are having their meals provided privately and about half are provided with their community meal as part of the Care Act service. The community meals fees have not been uplifted on an annual basis in any strategic way or without reference to the actual cost of delivering the service and it has effectively fallen behind, and the gap between the cost of the service and the income that it collects has become greater over the years,

“It therefore has not taken account of the rise of fuel costs, the materials that go to making the meals, buying the frozen meals, so what we’re trying to do here is make some in-roads into bridging the gap in the service which is subsidised for private customers. We thought long and hard about the value of the uplift – 15 per cent sounds like a big number, it’s less than £1 a meal.

“This is not just a meal, this is a meal that’s prepared, packed into a van, delivered to somebody’s house, plated up, heated and served, and the price point of that does not take into account the comprehensive nature of what’s actually being provided. In the analysis we’ve done, we did not find evidence that people would struggle if the meals service was not able to provide for them.”