Care home funding plea to maintain quality meals

A care home has called for more "realistic" funding from a local authority to ensure it can continue providing high-quality food for residents amid rising costs.

Banbury Heights, which provides council funded places in Oxfordshire, said that balancing the increasing costs of care, staff and food had become a "constant pressure".

Charles Taylor, who owns the home, said it was trying to ensure food quality did not slip but that it was "challenging" given council funding.

Oxfordshire County Council said it had to "operate within very tight budgets", while the government has pledged to address "the adult social care sector's urgent need for support".

Taylor runs a mixture of privately and council funded homes across the South.

He told BBC Radio Oxford that current local authority funding left limited budgets for essentials like food and housekeeping, which means at times, he is forced to take money out of his privately funded homes to keep on top of costs.

"This year we think costs have gone up 6% and we were given 2% [extra] by the local authority, so you're already having to find 4% of your costs," he said.

"You start off with the price you're going to get [from the council], you look at the care you're providing, the number of carers you can have on shift.

"You work all of that out and then the bit that's left tends to be things like the food and house keeping. So you put as much as you can there but it's limited because your focus is on the other areas."

After budgeting, Taylor said Banbury Heights food budget comes to "£5.50 per resident per day".

Executive chef Bob Stratta said providing healthy, nutritious meals on such a tight budget was hard work: "I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a challenge - prices are always going up.

"I'm just looking at the latest market report I got from our purchasing company, it's quite frightening… at the beginning of the year cod went up 60%."

Anna Clews, home manager, said providing good quality food for elderly people was vital: "Food impacts every area of their wellbeing, it's skin integrity and mental health… it affects absolutely everything."

She said they tried hard to provide healthy food on a budget but not all care homes were able to.

"Care home's can't always help it. We fund a lot of things and food has to come into that somewhere - but what we're getting per resident from the county council isn't equating to how the standard of living is going up," she added.

Oxfordshire County Council said its care home funding rates were regularly reviewed, include flexible uplifts, and were currently sufficient to secure quality placements without major issues.

"Care homes that choose to join our framework do so knowing and accepting the agreed rates, while also continuing to set their own prices for privately funded residents," a spokesperson said.

"We are keen to keep working with providers to understand pressures on a case-by-case basis and would encourage any provider experiencing serious financial difficulty to come forward so we can work with them, always prioritising residents' care and wellbeing.

"Like councils across the country, we must operate within very tight budgets, and adult social care funding remains a national challenge.

"We will continue to press government for long term, sustainable funding for the sector, while doing everything we can locally to support a stable, high quality care market in Oxfordshire."

The government has set up an independent commission to examine the whole social care system and said it was "addressing the adult social care sector's urgent need for support" with billions of additional funding in the years to come.

In a statement issued to the BBC in April, the government added: "We are addressing the adult social care sector's urgent need for support with over £4.6bn additional funding available for adult social care in 2028-29 compared to 2025-26."