What's in the news? The Independent

A selection of the latest social care news stories from The Independent. We also list new stories from other sources to give you a broader view of social care in the news.

'Is there no limit to what this Government will privatise?': UK plasma supplier sold to US private equity firm Bain Capital

Sell-off puts blood supply at risk, warns Lord Owen

The Government was tonight accused of gambling with the UK’s blood supply by selling the state-owned NHS plasma supplier to a US private equity firm.

The Department of Health overlooked several healthcare or pharmaceutical firms and at least one blood plasma specialist before choosing to sell an 80 per cent stake in Plasma Resources UK to Bain Capital, the company co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a £230m deal. The Government will retain a 20 per stake and a share of potential future profits.

PRUK has annual sales of around £110m and consists of two companies: it employs 200 people at Bio Products Laboratory (BPL) in Elstree, Hertfordshire, and more than 1,000 at DCI Biologicals Inc in the US. DCI collects plasma from American donors and sends it to BPL where it is separated into blood proteins, clotting factors and albumin for supply to NHS hospitals in the treatment of immune deficiencies, neurological diseases, and haemophilia.

British jobs are being safeguarded in the deal and Bain, which has invested in dozens of private and state-owned health companies worldwide, is prepared to spend £50m in capital investment on the Elstree laboratories.

However, critics of the deal warned the Government that Bain Capital was the wrong company to own the NHS plasma supply line.

Lord Owen, the former Health Minister, wrote to David Cameron earlier this year asking the Prime Minister to intervene and halt the sale. “In 1975, against some resistance from those guarding the finances of the DHSS budget, I decided as Minister of Health to invest in self-sufficiency in the UK for blood and blood products,” he wrote. “I now believe this country is on the point of making exactly the same mistake again. The world plasma supply line has been in the past contaminated and I fear it will almost certainly continue to be contaminated.”

After hearing of the sale Lord Owen told The Independent: “It’s hard to conceive of a worse outcome for a sale of this particularly sensitive national health asset than a private equity company with none of the safeguards in terms of governance of a publicly quoted company and being answerable to shareholders.

Read the original article here.

19/7/13

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More than 300,000 people are employed on zero hours contracts in social care alone, according to new figures which show the practice is much more widespread than previously thought.

The revelation has fuelled demands from trade unions and think tanks for tighter regulation of the contracts, under which workers are put on standby without a guaranteed minimum number of hours.

Previously, the only official estimate of the number of employees on such contracts was a 200,000 figure by the Office for National Statistics, based on the Labour Force Survey used to compile the unemployment figures. Now Norman Lamb, the Care Minister, has told the Commons in a written reply that 307,000 workers in the care sector in England are employed on such a basis. He said the figures are not collected by the Department of Health but were obtained by Skills for Care, skills council for the social care sector. There is no breakdown between carers employed by local authorities and privately-run care homes or firms.

Labour seized on the disclosure. Andy Burnham, the shadow Health Secretary, said the figures meant that about 20 per cent of the social care workforce are employed on a zero hours basis . "Good care cannot be provided on a zero hours basis and a wing and a prayer. How can people who don't themselves have the security of knowing what they will earn from week to week pass on a sense of security to others?"

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The Independent