Fife Council is persisting with an expensive way of providing care homes, “despite a financial black hole”, according to Fife Tories.
However, social work spokeswoman Judy Hamilton hit back, saying that plans would reduce overall revenue costs.
Conservative group leader Dave Dempsey said an original report asked for £5 million to be spent on a replacement for two of the council’s care homes as part of the Kirkcaldy care village and explained that building a new, more efficient home would reduce costs across all the council’s homes by 1.36% or £11 per week.
“It’s reasonable to conclude that a place in the new home will cost around £750 per week compared with the over £800 cost in the older council homes,” Mr Dempsey said.
“That’s good news but it palls when you look at a second report which gives the rates that the council will pay for places it funds in homes it doesn’t own and run.
“Those figures range from £454 to £580 per week depending on exactly what’s being provided and where, but that still makes even the most expensive place over 20% cheaper than the best the council can provide.”
He added: “It can fund fewer care home places, say by delaying provision for those who need it, or it can do less elsewhere, say by repairing fewer miles of road.
“That it does so begs the question ‘why?’ The answer I’m given is that ‘we don’t want all the care home provision in Fife in one sector’.”
Mr Dempsey said that would make sense if the private/third sector was a single, monolithic supplier but that wasn’t the case.
“Behind the smokescreen, the reality is that Labour, like the SNP before them, are in thrall to those who believe that who provides the service is more important than what the service is or what it costs,” he said.
Mrs Hamilton said: “When Labour took power in Fife last year we gave a clear commitment that, despite there being no capital budget for care home replacements, we would ensure the continuation of a mixed economy of provision in the care home sector by replacing the council-run care homes.
“We have begun that process with our proposals for Kirkcaldy, which go well beyond any existing care home and create a care village with over £7m of investment in provision for residential care, day care, drop-in facilities and older people’s housing.
“The new care village in Kirkcaldy will reduce the overall revenue costs of the council care home provision and we will continue to reduce those costs as we roll out our programme to deliver a new £27m care home replacement programme linking this to the £85m housing investment in order that we build facilities for older people for today and the generations to come.
“I think it is also important to say that we are working to strengthen the relationship with the private and third sectors in the provision of social care, and indeed we explored all options for the replacement of the care homes but concluded that the funding mechanism we have developed was the best way to achieve our objective of building new facilities for older people to meet current needs and to be innovative for future provision.”