Jane Ashcroft - Views on the market and future - Wednesday 11 January 2017

“We have a service of some kind in every local authority area in England,” Jane Ashcroft told Care Conversation delegates. “As a housing association we have no shareholders, so profits are re-invested in the business. I think that means it’s incumbent on us to invest in innovation and new opportunities.”

Her organisation would be celebrating its 50th birthday in 2018, she told the seminar, and now operated 121 care homes, 700 sheltered housing schemes and 250 blocks of retirement flats, as well as a growing number of retirement villages. The aim was to have a turnover of £500m by 2020, she said.

In the US, 17% of people in their 60s and above lived in retirement housing of some kind, compared to just 1% in the UK, despite the fact that the UK would see 3.5m more older people in the next decade. “We know that people are living longer, and these numbers are going to hit us very soon.” Longer life expectancy for men would also have its own impact on service provision, she stressed.

One inescapable challenge in the current climate was Brexit, she said. “For us, it’s about general market uncertainty and how that plays out in terms of the impact on older people’s spending behaviour and the decisions they make.” It would also have an inevitable impact in terms of workforce, she said.

“We try really hard to look to the future and think about the needs and expectations that people will have. Older people’s needs are no different to anyone else’s – safety and security might be more of an issue than for younger people, but basically people like to be somewhere that’s bright, accessible, easy to live in and close to amenities. But older people are not just ‘everybody over 55’ – they’re obviously not all the same.”

There were major opportunities around the adoption of digital technology, as well as around using existing technology in different ways, she said. “The use of iPads in our care homes is hugely popular, for example, with staff using them to engage with customers in a meaningful way.”

Although there were a “huge amount” of opportunities in the sector, public funding remained a challenge, as did reputational issues, with the public’s perception often shaped by negative media coverage. There was also the perennial problem around workforce issues, she stressed. “We have a very low staff turnover rate at Anchor but we still need to recruit thousands of people a year, and they all need to be skilled, compassionate and willing to work shifts. That can be quite a challenge.”

However, some challenges facing the sector, such as those around capacity and the National Living Wage, meant that “more mature conversations” were now taking place with local authorities, she said. “Some of the traditional roles, such as ‘I’m the commissioner, you’re the provider’, are being broken down, and we’ve moved on from simply ‘this is how much we’re going to cut the fees by’. There’s much more of an understanding of the challenges now.”