Warning that North Wales is “hurtling towards” 1,600 care home bed deficit

North Wales is “hurtling towards” a 1,600 care home bed deficit over the next decade.

That is the view of specialist business property adviser Christie & Co which warns that the total deficit for Wales will be 10,000 beds at a time when demand is rapidly increasing.

According to Care Forum Wales (CFW) the “alarming figures” show the need for social care to be funded properly for existing homes to survive and encourage the development of new ones.

CFW warned that Wales was “sleepwalking into disaster” because the growing shortage of care home beds would pile pressure on the NHS when hospitals were already virtually at breaking point.

Christie & Co also revealed in the report that 40 elderly care homes in Wales closed and only four opened between 2020 and 2023 – with no new ones in North Wales.

Among the closures in North Wales were Trewythen Hall in Gresford, Bay Court in Kinmel Bay, Gwastad Hall in Cefn y Bedd and Morfa Newydd in Greenfield with the loss of more than 160 beds.

CFW Chair Mario Kreft MBE said the Christie & Co reports “paints a bleak picture and illustrates how the existing crisis is going to get even worse”.

He warned that this will create a “double whammy for overstretched hospitals” which already have ambulances queuing outside emergency departments and patients on trolleys in corridors.

Mario Kreft MBE

“Instead of being able to build more care homes to meet growing demand, we are seeing more and more care home closures,” said Mario Creft MBE.

“The cost of building new care homes and replacing the beds we are losing now is absolutely eye-watering.

“Our public finances in Wales are already under pressure so where is this money coming from?

“The way care homes are funded in Wales is a total postcode lottery with 29 variations on a theme, with most of social care being commissioned by the 22 local authorities and seven health boards.

“Within that there is a gaping North-South divide with five of the six county councils in North Wales paying the lowest fees, arrived at by a fee-fixing cartel known as the North Wales Regional Fees Group.”

According to Mario Kreft the main threat to care homes is the “unrealistically low fees that the vast majority of councils and health boards pay, fees that come nowhere near covering the true cost of providing care.”

“We’ve had a generation of injustice and it’s a generation where the institutional prejudice and discrimination against the private care sector in Wales has meant that those living and working in these fantastic community assets have not been valued,” he added.

“The problems we have in social care lead to the pressures in the NHS which lead of course then to extra costs being placed on the NHS which would largely be alleviated if local authorities had a more enlightened approach to social care.

“The families of those people, who will often be expected to make up the difference, need to ask why and quite frankly, it is a bridge too far.

“What this demonstrates is that there is an urgent need for us to look again at the way social care is funded.

“We need a national approach to eliminate this iniquitous postcode lottery so that the people for whom we provide care and our staff are treated fairly.

”This is too important to be left to local authorities and health boards alone – it has to be driven by the Welsh Government.”