What a shambolic way to run essential services in Salisbury

IF you might be about to lose your job, and the first you heard about it was via your local newspaper’s Facebook page, how would you feel?

That’s the unpleasant situation that people caring for the disabled residents of Salisbury's Douglas Arter Centre found themselves in this week.

The charity Scope announced a proposal to close it, apparently without first informing all of those most closely involved.

Staff were quick to express their dismay online, as were relatives of the residents, who have no idea what will become of their loved ones.

“My sister lives there,” said one. “What next for her?”

The charity asserts that such homes are outdated and that disabled people would rather have help to live independently.

Yet its website is currently lambasting the government for failing to provide any support for 69,000 disabled people who need it to live independent lives. So how’s that going to work, then?

The care of individual residents there is funded by Wiltshire Council and the NHS. 

Two months ago Wiltshire declared its intention of shutting down Hillcote, the city’s only respite home for the families of children with severe disabilities.

The council claimed the number of people using the centre was falling. The families said that was because the council had stopped telling people it was available.

This, of course, is the council that last week rejected requests for an independent investigation into staff morale after nodding through huge pay rises for its top brass while their subordinates face a freeze.

The same council that has for years ignored requests to plan for a transport interchange in the city and is now reduced to hurriedly digging up our streets to create new bus stops, for which it admits there is “no public support”, before the bus station closes.

Now we learn that Balfour Beatty Living Places has lost more than £1million in the first three months of its contract to carry out highway maintenance, grass cutting and litter picking for Wiltshire.

So some of the firm’s staff will be made redundant while others will be moved from roadworks to lower-paid duties.

That’ll sort out those potholes, won’t it? 

Just as well Wiltshire don’t run a brewery. Because we all know what they couldn’t organise there.