17/02/2015
About 12 councils are using online-based auctioning systems to find beds for people in need of care.
The practice, which was likened to bidding on eBay, was met with anger by the public after BBC Radio 5 Live released a report exposing the approach.
Among the local authorities that are using online auction systems are Birmingham City Council, Kent County Council, Southend Borough Council, and Devon County Council.
Birmingham City Council said it started using the system back in 2012, which resulted in lowering its care spending by up to a fifth.
The online auction process starts with the council providing anonymised information of the elderly, such as mood and medication, to the providers who then placed their bids online. The system will then trim down the bidders, which may reach up to a hundred, to a shortlist. Shortlisted providers will be informed of their respective rankings. Those who desire to rank higher may lower their price and/or offer additional care services.
In choosing the winning bidder, councils say their prime consideration is the quality of care offered by the provider. However, BBC's Radio 5’s findings found otherwise. The report said data from a Freedom of Information request revealed that in the case of Birmingham City elderly patients were sent to lowest bidding care homes 92 per cent of the time. To compound matters, some of these winning bidders were even rated poorly by the council.
Prime Minister David Cameron told Kent Online that local authorities using the online auction system should reconsider their approach. Cameron said the practice is inappropriate and may be against provisions of the Care Act.
The head of elderly charity Independent Age, Janet Morrison, told the Daily Mail that her organisation is worried that the system favours price over need as the main factor in selecting a bed for the elderly. She said: “Do we really want to treat older people as a “product” to be bought and sold this way?”
