Charity which has provided care for vulnerable people for 40 years shuts - here's why

Cymryd Rhan (Taking Part) says it had been using its reserves to prop up its service – but those reserves have now run dry and the charity ceased operating on Monday - March 31.

The charity supported vulnerable people to stay in their own homes, easing pressure on the beleaguered NHS.

The Llanidloes-headquartered charity provided support for about 2,000 people in various parts of Wales including Flintshire, Wrexham, Ceredigion, Merthyr and Powys.

But over recent years the organisation says it has been forced to hand back its care contracts to councils because it was not being paid enough to provide the standard of support required.

And now the charity is closing because of the funding headache – with bosses saying: “Enough is enough”.

Chief executive Nick Evans said jobs would be lost and the care of hundreds of vulnerable people the charity had on its books would be transferred to alternative groups.

He said: “We’ve been in Wales for 40 years and the charity was originally set up by a group of parents whose sons and daughters had finished their special education and were struggling to find opportunities beyond their education.

“In the last year we had about 300 individuals that we have supported.

“We have massively reduced, but we were running at around a couple of thousand people at the height of our work.

“Our decision to stop is because we can no longer live with the fact that people’s choices and the controls they have around their lives are being interfered with because of the attitude by which funders and commissioners are going about their daily business.

“We are being placed in a position to live with underfunding but also to meet the same expected requirements under the regulations of quality and monitoring.

“So Cymryd Rhan has decided enough is enough because we can no longer guarantee our ability to do the right thing for people.

“So, the decision and the recommendation I made to our board of trustees is that we should stop, it’s as simple as that.”

Mr Evans, who has led the organisation for 10 years, said the charity had been working to find alternative groups which can support the 300 people it had on its books.

He said: “We have found alternative options for a lot of those people and we have been strengthening our volunteers as well.

“Others are trying to find alternatives as well, so there’s a bit of a mixed bag there.”

He said jobs would be lost as the charity folds.

Mr Evans said: “In the last two years we had about 146 staff, but we had a wave of handing back those contracts and a lot of the staff transferred to the new providers.

“Right now, we’re down to about 25 staff. Out of that, 20 are transferring to another provider and there will be five posts made redundant.”

He said the closure of the charity is another worrying development in the Welsh social care sector.

Members of the Care Forum Wales campaign group have been warning the impact of National Insurance and wage increases as well as how much councils were prepared to pay for care will affect the sustainability of many organisations and care homes within the sector.

Mr Evans said the social care sector was facing huge financial challenges.

He said: “This decision that we have taken isn’t just because we have spat our dummies out and thrown our toys out the pram because we want more money.

“It’s far deeper than that. We’ve spent the last few years really engaging with the local authorities in bringing about the changes that people keep talking about of needing a reform in social care.

“So we have changed our own organisation and delivery methods to meet those challenges and share that learning with the local authorities, but they themselves continue to behave in the same way.“

The charity’s chair of trustees Freda Lacey said the way contracts were structured made it difficult for the organisation to know what it would be paid for delivering its service in the long term – meaning there was constant financial uncertainty.

She said: “In terms of business modelling we’ve always chased the long-term contracts with the councils, we’ve always looked at their seven-year contracts with a three-year extension so we have a business model with stability.

“The problem with the annual uplift fee is those contracts are year-on-year, you can’t control, influence or know what those uplifts will look like into the next year.

“Every year when you come into January you start asking the question about the uplifts.

“You can see there’s an increase in staff salaries coming in terms of Real Living Wage increases, operational delivery costs are increasing as well, but you are at the hands of the local authority to decide what they are prepared to give you.” 

Mario Kreft MBE, the chair of Care Forum Wales, said: “The news that Cymryd Rhan is being forced to call it a day is tragic but sadly all too predictable given the chronic underfunding of the social care sector.

“It defies logic that a local authority expects a charity, or indeed any care provider, to operate at a loss.

“There are severe legal and financial implications for any trustees who accepted such operating conditions and we completely understand why Cymryd Rhan felt they had no choice but to bow out of their contracts. It is completely unsustainable to have to subsidise social care services commissioned by a council.

“Regrettably, Cymryd Rhan’s situation is not an isolated case. We have long warned of an unjust postcode lottery of fees with local authorities and health boards, with an ever widening North-South divide which has seen local authorities in North Wales paying irresponsibly low fees.

“In the meantime, care homes, nursing homes and care providers across Wales are closing or withdrawing from contracts because they simply cannot afford to continue at the current levels of funding.”