my concerns re the implementing of this system is just that it is open to abuse, if you give them money many of them desperatly want to put something aside to leave for their family and will go without no matter how hard you try to persuade them. If a voucher system were put in place then that too is open to abuse cos unscrupulous relatives could just say oh nan you dont need that ill take it for the kiddies. the only true way you can implement it and know the right people are benefiting is to actually cook the meal and watch em eat it. as i said previously i agree with the idea just see some serious difficulties we put the food right in front of them on my ward encourage and help them where necessary but there are quite a large majourity you just cannot make eat it.
I entirely agree with this. We cooked one healthy meal a day for my mother for the last 15 years of her life. There was absolutely no point in taking her salad or fruit, and even less point in providing vegetables which needed cooking. When we visited the next week, they'd still be there rotting away. So instead we did frozen microwaveable meals. Plenty of variety, several months freezer life, and if we weren't there to supervise, someone else could since they were so easy to reheat.
But on a rough calculation to provide such a service, including supervision, would cost around £20 per day, based on local delivery and assuming a ready availability of part-time low-paid workers willing to take on such a job.
At the last count there were 9.7 million people in this country aged over 65, with approx half of those over 75. I'm going to assume a modest takeup of this initiative of 1.5 million people.
So the costs would be 1.5 million people times £20 a day times 360 days a year. That's £10.8 billion a year. :o
Now let's look at the voucher scheme. My best stab at this would be to issue vouchers for food and a further allowance for fuel to cook it. The food vouchers would be redeemable only through registered retailers, including those that offered home delivery. I'm going to guess at £50 a year fuel allowance, plus £10 a week food voucher, issued to everyone over 65. Each £10 voucher might have a handling charge for the retailer of £2. So direct costs would be just over £6.5 billion a year. Using a SWAG, I'm simply going to double that to take account of administrative costs. It certainly wouldn't be less. So that's £13 billion a year.
You could "target" the vouchers to limit them to the more deserving cases, but your admin costs would skyrocket.
These are ludicrous numbers. Wouldn't you rather simply put more money into the state pension? £13 billion would pay for over £25 a week increase. That's what we should really be lobbying for.
