Laundry service is axed

A CONTROVERSIAL move to go ahead with plans to axe Rotherham's laundry service for old people won council backing this week.

After months of protests by pensioners and their supporters, borough councillors confirmed on Monday their decision—first taken in March—to scrap the service altogether from the end of the year.

It will save Rotherham Borough Council £200,000 a year, although the costs of winding up the Eastwood-based laundry building and redeployment or redundancy for the remaining eight staff are unknown.

Nearly 200 old folk will be left without the service, often relied upon by pensioners who suffer from incontinence.

At a meeting of the Cabinet Member for Health and Social Care, Cllr John Doyle, it was agreed to decommission the service and “make arrangements to meet customers’ needs in other ways” from December 30.

All service users will be given a full assessment and appropriate measures will be introduced to meet those assessed needs in a personalised way, Cllr Doyle decided.

He said afterwards: “We genuinely believe that this decision is in the interests of the people who need the service moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to a genuinely personalised service.”

Existing service users will get individual care needs reviews, which have begun but are not yet complete, according to a report.