Sheltered housing stupidity

Over the past week, I've been working with sheltered housing residents in Roehampton over crazy plans by the Conservatives to play musical chairs with the wardens who look after the schemes and their residents.

Sheltered housing offers independent living for senior citizens, but with the support of a "warden", someone employed to check on residents, to make sure they're ok and to offer help and support when asked.

The best wardens build great trust and friendship with the residents and become much loved - in fact the strong personal connection is the whole point of such schemes.

The Conservatives are now planning on destroying this link - and with it the trust and security that goes with it - by forcibly rotating wardens around all the borough's sheltered schemes every two years. Worse still, they've done this without consultation with residents and without any council overview and scrutiny. This is not just bad practice and gross arrogance - it has caused real trauma among residents.

The bizarre logic behind this upsetting plan is that senior sheltered housing officers are apparently overworked. How rotating wardens will ease workload is something understood only by the Tories. Wouldn't the rest of us take the view that if a service is overstretched then either workload needs to be reduced or more wardens need to be employed?

There seems to be some belated admission from the Conservatives that they may have failed to consult properly, but that has not prompted them to halt their plans - which come in on 02 March. This is not good enough and I'm doing all I can to help our senior citizens - who deserve so much better - from losing their wardens.