Jenni Russell

There are some news stories that are so staggering that, when you hear them, you immediately assume some important details must be wrong. That’s how it feels in the case of Betty Figg.
She is an 86-year-old Coventry woman who was unhappy about living in the care home she entered last summer. At one point she was admitted to hospital with dehydration. At another time her daughter Rosalind found her with a mouth caked in blood, complaining of hunger.
So last autumn Rosalind decided to give up her pottery business and convert a downstairs room into a bedroom and bathroom so her mother could be cared for at home. Wheelchair ramps and handrails were put in so that Betty Figg, who has dementia and is incontinent, could be moved around. An expensive mattress, with sensors to detect movement, was installed so Rosalind would be able to respond when her mother got up in the night.
In November they gave the residential home four weeks’ notice, but were told that Betty Figg could not be discharged until social services had done their assessments and referrals. Weeks and months went by with very little happening. Rosalind Figg became increasingly distressed by her mother’s state: “She was sat like a chicken in a battery house, head dropped on her chest, rarely up on her legs. Her pads would be soaking because they hadn’t been changed. And she’s in a room full of strangers with dementia – she can’t converse with them.”
Last weekend Rosalind went to visit and decided that, since her mother was so miserable where she was, she would wait no longer and simply take her home.
The change in her mother was dramatic and immediate. She asked for the kettle to be put on, talked and smiled, drank tea out of china cups instead of the nonspill baby cups given to her in the home and started to practise standing again.
But two days later all that ended. Two social workers banged on the door, accompanied by four policemen, two police cars, a battering ram, a doctor and an emergency warrant under the Mental Health Act, on the grounds that “a person believed to be suffering from a mental disorder is being illtreated and neglected”.
Police stood by to smash the door in unless Betty Figg was given up. She was loaded into a wheelchair and taken to a waiting car by two social workers, who casually threw a blanket over her face as they came down the path. She was returned to the care home.
Was this a story of a devoted daughter betrayed? Surely the council’s battering ram and warrant were a signal that there was something more sinister going on.
I rang Colin Green, acting director of community services in Coventry. He was grave and very measured. Oh no, there was no issue of abuse. There wasn’t? Then what on earth was this about?
Planning. Capability. Cooperating with social services. Protecting vulnerable people. An unplanned transition. Apparently Rosalind Figg had already been discussing her mother’s transfer with social services for six weeks, but Betty Figg had been removed from residential care before “the appropriate level of care was in place”.
After a lot of jargon, this boiled down to two factors. The council had to be sure that Betty Figg had her medicines and that Rosalind Figg would remember to administer them – “and we have no reason to suppose that is not the case”. More importantly, the council thought that nobody could provide an incontinent adult with 24-hour care and it was concerned that extra carers had not been arranged beforehand.
This was scarcely believable. Had a legalised kidnapping of a confused old lady really taken place for this reason? Thousands of people provide sole 24-hour care for others. My mother did exactly that for my demented and disabled father for the last 18 months of his life. It’s tough – but people do it out of love and compassion. And if carers were so crucial, why didn’t the council help find them? “That can take some time to organise. It should be done in a planned way. This was not a solution we could turn to on Monday.”
This had become robospeak. What if Betty Figg were happy with her daughter? “People can express happiness, but if that leaves them vulnerable and potentially puts their health at risk then a judgment must be made on that.” What about Rosalind Figg’s desire to spend time with her mother before she dies? “She should have continued planning with our staff. Clearly she was getting impatient. She thought she could just get on with it.”
This, it turns out, has been Rosalind Figg’s real mistake. She thought that love and life and death were more important than procedures. It isn’t that she has been endangering her mother; it’s that she has irritated an all-powerful bureaucracy. She didn’t realise that today’s state is obsessed with ensuring people’s physical safety, while ignoring the truth that what matters most to all of us is our emotional wellbeing.
The removing of Betty Figg, even as justified by the council, looks like an act of arbitrary cruelty, carried out for petty and vindictive reasons. And it’s inaccurate. Rosalind Figg had, in fact, booked extra carers from the Pulse agency, but no one had bothered to ask.
Caught up in their own jargon, social services have lost sight of the fact that it’s human beings who matter, not their own internal processes. Green says, with the warped logic that a machine might employ, there is no reason for Betty Figg to go to her daughter because “she’s never lived with her, so the place she’s used to is the care home”.
The very idea of bonds between people seems to have no place in this cold vision. When Rosalind Figg says to me, with real passion, “I know it’s not going to be easy, but I just want to look after my mum for as long as I can, for as long as necessary”, one can hear the longing in her voice. And she adds, sadly: “So many people have said to me they got such pleasure from looking after their parents in their last few months.”
What makes this official behaviour even more monstrous is that the real problem we all face over the next 10 or 20 years isn’t how to stop people looking after their parents, but how to encourage them. The number of over-85s is going to double in 20 years and we don’t have the money or the institutions to cope. We need people like the Figgs to be given every bit of help and encouragement they can get. They must not be crushed by a self-important bureaucracy that no longer understands that humanity must come first.