Norfolk council owned care home is fourth to close in a year
A publicly-owned care company is due to close its fourth residential home in the space of about a year.Services will cease at Linden Court in Watton, Norfolk, in April.Two other homes run by Norse Care, which is owned by the county council, closed in September and December, and a third closed in Bungay, Suffolk, in January 2024.Norse Care said changes to fire regulations, rising social care costs and the need for "substantial investment" meant Linden Court could no longer provide suitable care.
According to a Care Quality Commission report published in 2019, Linden Court cares for up to 50 people aged 65 and over.Senior director of care at the company, Jo Huxtable, said it aimed to relocate and settle all the residents in the next few months, and was "committed" to providing staff with "support and opportunities"."Closing the home is a deeply difficult decision, but the well-being and safety of our residents remain our highest priority," she added."We are working closely with residents and their families to ensure everyone finds a new home that meets their needs."
'Minimise disruption'
The company runs 32 homes in Norfolk and is the largest care provider in the county.Ms Thomas said the local authority would assess future uses for the site once the handover had been completed, with the potential for Linden Court to become independent living accommodation.Alison Thomas, the Conservative cabinet member for adult social services, said: "We understand Norse Care's decision to close Linden Court, based on a wide range of factors, and will work closely with them and everyone involved to minimise any disruption for those involved."
Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Western Telegraph
12 minutes ago
- Western Telegraph
Government to ‘take forward our ambitions' for Northern Powerhouse Rail
Rachel Reeves said plans will be published shortly. NPR is a scheme to improve rail services between Liverpool and Leeds, which often suffer delays and cancellations. £445m Funding boost for railways in Wales Chancellor Rachel Reeves The previous Conservative government's Integrated Rail Plan sparked outrage among northern leaders in November 2021, when it said that a new line would only be built on one section, and the rest of the route would get enhancements to existing lines. Ms Reeves said: 'In the coming weeks I will set out this Government's plan to take forward our ambitions for Northern Powerhouse Rail.' The Chancellor announced £3.5 billion more funding to support the TransPennine Route Upgrade, a project to improve the railway between York and Manchester. She said the Government would provide £2.5 billion of additional funding to enable the 'continued delivery' of East West Rail, a new line between Oxford and Cambridge. In her spending review she also said railways in Wales would get £445 million investment over 10 years. Improvements at Cardiff West Junction and Padeswood sidings will be among those to be funded. Ms Reeves told the Commons: 'For 14 years, the Conservatives failed the people of Wales. 'Those days are over.'
Powys County Times
13 minutes ago
- Powys County Times
Reeves sets out spending review as Labour government ‘moves to new phase'
Rachel Reeves said 'we are renewing Britain' as she set out how she plans to spend hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money. The Chancellor said total departmental budgets would grow by 2.3% a year in real terms and promised a 'record cash investment' in the NHS, amounting to an extra £29 billion a year. Setting out the spending review in the House of Commons, Ms Reeves said the tax hikes and looser borrowing rules allowed her to spend £190 billion more on the day-to-day running of public services and £113 billion on investment. The review marks a watershed moment for the Government, almost a year after Labour's election landslide. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told the Cabinet that the spending review 'marks the end of the first phase of this Government, as we move to a new phase that delivers on the promise of change for working people all around the country and invests in Britain's renewal'. In a sign of the difficulties which face Sir Keir and the Chancellor, migrants continued to cross the English Channel in small boats on Wednesday. Ms Reeves promised funding of up to £280 million more per year by the end of the spending review period in 2028/29 for the new Border Security Command and committed to end spending on hotels for asylum seekers by the next election. In an attack on the Conservative legacy, she said: 'The party opposite left behind a broken system: billions of pounds of taxpayers' money spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels, leaving people in limbo and shunting the cost of failure onto local communities. 'We won't let that stand.' She said 'we will be ending the costly use of hotels to house asylum seekers, in this Parliament' with funding to cut the asylum backlog, hear more appeal cases and return those with no right to be in the UK. The plan would save taxpayers' £1 billion a year, Ms Reeves said. The Chancellor said her 'driving purpose' was 'to make working people, in all parts of our country, better off' as she promised cash to rebuild schools and hospitals, confirmed funding for nuclear power schemes and major transport projects across the country. She said the Government would set out plans for 'Northern Powerhouse Rail' in the coming weeks and an additional £3.5 billion to upgrade the TransPennine route. 'We are renewing Britain,' she said. 'But I know that too many people in too many parts of our country are yet to feel it.' As well as changing Treasury rules to support investment in England's regions, Ms Reeves said the spending review period would provide £52 billion for Scotland, £20 billion for Northern Ireland and £23 billion for Wales. She said research and development funding would rise to more than £22 billion a year and promised £2 billion for the artificial intelligence action plan 'because home-grown AI has the potential to solve diverse and daunting challenges as well as the opportunity for good jobs and investment in Britain'. The Chancellor promised a cash increase of £4.5 billion a year for the core schools budget by the end of the spending review period, but also pledged up to £2.3 billion a year to repair 'crumbling classrooms' and £2.4 billion for a programme to rebuild schools. Police 'spending power' – implying extra cash raised from council tax – will rise by 2.3% a year in real terms over the review period, providing more than £2 billion for forces. Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, said: 'Workers and communities need to see action now, promises of jobs can't always be promised for tomorrow and never actually be delivered. 'This must include a comprehensive and tangible jobs agenda that deals with the wave of job losses on the horizon, for example in the oil and gas industry. 'We need a joined up industrial strategy that sees investment in Grangemouth and much-needed procurement decisions on buying British in defence. 'Growth and profits need to convert to jobs and wages. 'Today was a missed opportunity to lay out the funding to tackle key issues, including the energy costs crippling British industry and the local authority debt which is straight-jacketing services in our communities. 'Spending cuts will be seen as austerity, those are the facts. Labour needs to pick up the pace on change otherwise it will be stuck in the political slow lane while other voices get louder.'
Glasgow Times
15 minutes ago
- Glasgow Times
Company linked to Baroness Mone must pay back £121m for ‘faulty' PPE, court told
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is suing PPE Medpro for allegedly breaching a deal for the gowns, with lawyers for the Government telling the court they were 'faulty' because they were not sterile. The company, a consortium led by Baroness Mone's husband, businessman Doug Barrowman, was awarded Government contracts by the former Conservative administration to supply PPE during the pandemic, after she recommended it to ministers. Both have denied wrongdoing. The Government is seeking to recover the costs of the contract, as well as the costs of transporting and storing the items, which amount to an additional £8,648,691. PPE Medpro said it 'categorically denies' breaching the contract, and its lawyers claimed the company has been 'singled out for unfair treatment'. Opening the trial on Wednesday, Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, said: 'This case is simply about whether 25 million surgical gowns provided by PPE Medpro were faulty. 'It is, in short, a technical case about detailed legal and industry standards that apply to sterile gowns.' The gowns were purchased at the height of the pandemic but have never been used (PA) Mr Stanley said in written submissions the 'initial contact with Medpro came through Baroness Mone', with discussions about the contract then going through one of the company's directors, Anthony Page. Baroness Mone remained 'active throughout' the negotiations, Mr Stanley said, with the peer stating Mr Barrowman had 'years of experience in manufacturing, procurement and management of supply chains'. But he told the court Baroness Mone's communications were 'not part of this case', which was 'simply about compliance'. He said: 'The department does not allege anything improper happened, and we are not concerned with any profits made by anybody.' In court documents from May this year, the DHSC said the gowns were delivered to the UK in 72 lots between August and October 2020, with £121,999,219.20 paid to PPE Medpro between July and August that year. The department rejected the gowns in December 2020 and told the company it would have to repay the money, but this has not happened and the gowns remain in storage, unable to be used. In written submissions for trial, Mr Stanley said 99.9999% of the gowns should have been sterile under the terms of the contract, equating to one in a million being unusable. The DHSC claims the contract also specified PPE Medpro had to sterilise the gowns using a 'validated process', attested by CE marking, which indicates a product has met certain medical standards. He said 'none of those things happened', with no validated sterilisation process being followed, and the gowns supplied with invalid CE marking. He continued that 140 gowns were later tested for sterility, with 103 failing. He said: 'Whatever was done to sterilise the gowns had not achieved its purpose, because more than one in a million of them was contaminated when delivered. 'On that basis, DHSC was entitled to reject the gowns, or is entitled to damages, which amount to the full price and storage costs.' In his written submissions, Charles Samek KC, for PPE Medpro, said the 'only plausible reason' for the gowns becoming contaminated was due to 'the transport and storage conditions or events to which the gowns were subject', after they had been delivered to the DHSC. He added the testing did not happen until several months after the gowns were rejected, and the samples selected were not 'representative of the whole population', meaning 'no proper conclusions may be drawn'. He said the DHSC's claim was 'contrived and opportunistic' and PPE Medpro had been 'made the 'fall guy' for a catalogue of failures and errors' by the department. He said: 'It has perhaps been singled out because of the high profiles of those said to be associated with PPE Medpro, and/or because it is perceived to be a supplier with financial resources behind it. 'In reality, an archetypal case of 'buyer's remorse', where DHSC simply seeks to get out of a bargain it wished it never entered into, left, as it is, with over £8 billion of purchased and unused PPE as a result of an untrammelled and uncontrolled buying spree with taxpayers' money.' He also said there was a 'delicious irony' that Baroness Mone was mentioned in the DHSC's written submissions, when she had 'zero relevance to the contractual issues in this case'. Neither Baroness Mone nor Mr Barrowman is due to give evidence in the trial, and did not attend the first day of the hearing on Wednesday. A PPE Medpro spokesperson said the company 'categorically denies breaching its obligations' and will 'robustly defend' the claim. The trial before Mrs Justice Cockerill is due to last five weeks, with a judgment expected in writing at a later date.
