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You and Yours: Care home top-up fees, Working holidays on farms, BT digital voice

20/06/2022

Care home top-up fees, Working holidays on farms, BT digital voice

BBC Radio 4 - You and Yours, Care home top-up fees, Working holidays on farms, BT digital voice

Who should pay care home top-up fees? The joys of working holidays. Digital landline woes.

Should you be paying care home top-up fees? How about a working holiday on a farm? The latest on the BT digital voice upgrade for every UK landline.

We look at how some families in England still end up paying top-up fees for relatives in care homes, even when they're entitled to a council funded place. By law, councils have to offer at least one suitable place in a home where no top-up fees are needed. It's been seven years since the law was changed to prevent unfair top-up fees being charged. We ask why some councils in England are still flouting the rules, making relatives pay hundreds of pounds a week towards care. We speak to a woman who was wrongly charged £56,000 in top-up fees for her mother by Stockport Council over a five year period. Following an investigation by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, the council has now agreed to refund the money. We hear more from Donna Campbell, an assistant Ombudsman and  David Broome from Age UK.

Many of us will already be looking ahead to a relaxing summer holiday either here in the UK or abroad. But for some people the ideal break involves something more active such as learning new skills on a working holiday and often paying for the privilege. Our reporter, Bob Walker, visits an organic farm in the Shropshire countryside and talks to volunteers there who are both taking a break and working at the same time.

We return to a story we've covered a lot in the last year - the woes of customers who've been cut off phone and broadband following an upgrade to BT's new Digital Voice system. The new internet phone service replaces the old copper wire connection. BT halted the mass rollout at the end of March and has told You and Yours that it won't be resuming, it has technical solutions in place. We speak to Dennis Reed from Silver Voices, a campaign group for the Over 60s.



Presenter: Winifred Robinson
Producer: Tara Holmes

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