Roskov, Book 20, page 1
Ricky Roskov
Book 20
Copyright © Geoff Wolak
This book is a work of fiction, technically accurate in the detail of geographical locations, and the time period history. It is young adult romance, conspiracy and murder-mystery.
Sleeping in the dirt
I woke having dreamt about the Crusades, and I woke wishing I had not dreamt about the Crusades. Finding myself in a warm and comfy bed with two beautiful twins was a relief, a relief that I was not cuddled up to Bonza on a cold night. A shiver went through me at the thought.
Easing out, I used the spare bathroom quietly, no one else up at the moment, but after I had boiled the kettle Bonza appeared, yawning. That shiver went through me again, since I figured that I was beyond the days of seeing him first thing in the morning.
‘I hoped not to see your face again first thing.’
‘Huh?’
‘I was dreaming last night, you and me cuddled up against the cold during the Crusades, some mountainside.’
‘We did that a few times,’ he complained, and I passed him a mug of tea. ‘Now we have a kettle, no need to find some kindling and make a fire.’
‘Time has moved on, yes, but we still have our enemies,’ I noted. And I noted that I sounded like Richard of Charmaine.
Sat, we sipped our brews and slowly started to wake up. Pat had slept in the big double bed in third room and now appeared, shoulder holster on, a brew handed to him without a word. We were like three zombies, teabag zombies.
When I heard the twins use the en-suite toilet I took them cups of tea, and they would also sit like teabag zombies for a while, before taking a shower.
Breakfast was simply toast and biscuits, but Pat had spotted a good café a mile away, and it offered breakfast as well as take-away breakfast baguettes.
Bill and Ted, plus Dingle, arrived at 9.30am, but with Gloria and Rupert in tow. The twins greeted Gloria and hugged her, and we soon had a small party in progress, Gloria’s luggage left at the door.
Half an hour later, Gloria and Rupert inspected their new home, and Gloria would unpack many items and leave them here. I had a look around their apartment, but it was simply a mirror image of mine.
An old and plump lady cleaner turned up, a page handed to me, her contact details and rates. I told her that there was nothing to clean so far, but could she go shopping for us?
She was back twenty minutes later weighed down, and we soon had more bread, some cake, cup-a-soups and tins of soup, as well as a dozen sandwiches in plastic.
Gloria grabbed a sandwich, not a big eater, I tipped the cleaner, and the lady would return when I called.
Blair called at 10.30am, to ask if we could meet at 2pm? I agreed the time, to meet at Party HQ – he was not in No.10 Downing Street just yet.
The twins would go shopping with Bill and Ted and enjoy some lunch, which left myself and Bonza with Pat and Dingle, and we waited till 1.30pm before setting off. But I did make sure that Rita had a spare key for the apartment and one for the front door – as well as this address on a piece of paper.
At Party HQ we met a gaggle of familiar faces, hands shaken again, Bonza introduced as my assistant, a side room found for Pat and Dingle.
In a large room, I found Blair with Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Blunkett, plus our new Health Secretary, our new Pensions Secretary, the Social Services Secretary and several others, all of the people gathered here seemingly related to health and social services.
The Press Secretary, Alistair Campbell, was sat with pad and pen, and looking sour-faced. There were three white boards set-up ready, and everyone had pads and paper ready. Ready for me it seemed.
I sat at the main table, Bonza off to one side, a cup of tea placed down for me; they even had biscuits. I sipped the tea.
Blair began, dressed casual today, ‘Can you give us a rundown of Three-Phase nursing homes?’
‘Sure.’ I sipped my tea again, stood and drew a graph onto the first white board, a bell curve with a sudden drop. That sudden drop had a line drawn down through it. ‘As people get older the costs to the NHS rise … in the frequency of GP and hospital visits, medications taken regular.
‘When a person goes into a traditional nursing home those costs are suddenly and dramatically altered, no more ambulances, very little in the way of NHS costs – but with a fixed cost to the local council of the nursing home accommodation.
‘What we have before that time is the peak, the peak cost, a huge amount of money being spent, much of it wasted since there are alternatives.
‘Here, the peak of the curve is what we wish to reduce, and my Phase Zero and Phase One buildings attempt to do that.
‘But let’s be clear for a moment where the savings are greatest. The initial savings are greatest for the local council more than for central government, the high cost item being the monthly cost to keep a poor pensioner in a council house and then in a traditional small nursing home.
‘The local council has to buy or build that council house, furnish it, maintain it, nominally a figure of around four hundred pounds a month outside London.
‘You then have the private renters receiving council benefits, such as a pensioner who was paying rent when they had some income but now gets council housing allowance, typically three hundred pounds a month, and they need support for electric and water bills as well.
‘So if in Leicester I take three thousand pensioners out of council houses, the council can sell many of those council houses and it no longer has the same burden of payments.
‘When someone is in my Phase Zero or One, we estimate the core monthly bill to the council to be around two hundred pounds at most, half what they were paying before.’
‘That’s cheap,’ Blair noted.
‘We make money on supplies and services, drugs and food and … trips to the zoo, the profit allowing us to be cheaper on rent.
‘And at the moment I’m not billing anyone for our first nursing home, it’s consortium money. We’ll wait a few months and cost it out properly then sit down and discuss it with you, a fair price to both you and the local council.
‘By time we have the huge Manchester home working we’ll have an accurate figure, and although my investors want the best profit … they follow my lead and I’ll not hand them the best profit, I’ll make sure that our prices are reasonable – or there’s no point in moving people over to us.
‘As to the drugs cost, the Big Pharma people don’t want us to charge you less than a typical GP would, but we buy our drugs in bulk and so make some money on them, lowering our need for that higher profit margin, and although we subsidise our food and drink we still make money from it.’
‘What figure do you think it will be?’ Blair asked.
‘Around two hundred pounds a month core placement cost – not including drugs and medical bills; it’s a small apartment that’s well insulated, cheap to run. That means that the council is motivated to want to move people to us.’
I drew a pie chart on a second white board, half to council-assisted pensioners over seventy years old. A small slice went to social services, the final slice to the NHS.
‘What you can see in the pie chart … is that the local councils save the most … because they spend the most, at least in theory and not including someone with a serious medical condition. I’m using averages, and most pensioners do not display a serious medical condition that needs two trips a week to the hospital.
‘Next comes the NHS, and this past week was a good example, because we treated six people on site that would otherwise have needed an ambulance, simple domestic accidents, plus the lady that microwaved the tin of beans and had walked off and left the machine to explode.’
They laughed.
‘If you extrapolate last week forwards, we’ll save the NHS a shit load of money, all the minor issues treated on site. We also have a programme for getting people slimmer and fitter, and that will save the NHS money, less diabetes to treat.
‘And finally we have the crime cost, none of our residents at home and being broken into. If one was killed that would be a million quid in police and court time.
‘We then have Social Services, who instead of driving around to sixty people a week can walk to them and see twenty in a day easily, no car and no petrol and no wasted travel time.’
‘A good saving,’ our Social Services Minister put in.
Blair asked, ‘Why was that huge Phase Zero being built in Leicester?’
‘The local council did the maths, then said to us: get a fucking move on and take eight thousand pensioners please. They can see the cost savings.’
I tapped the bell curve. ‘By tempting many of these people here on the curve into a Phase Zero - otherwise known as a protected environment building, the council saves a huge amount, so do Social Services.
‘Now, a difficult point. A middle-class family has a son with a rare disease. He gets three visits a week at home and spends two weeks a month in hospital, annual cost being a million quid. What will you do?’
Blair glanced at his team. ‘His parents will resist any attempt to get him into a home, legal action to follow.’
‘Yes, but there are many like that example. Personally, I’d order the kid into care, for the greater good of the rest of the taxpayers.
‘But consider the pensioners. Some are costing a fortune yet refuse to move, we have to entice them. When I finish building nursing homes there’ll still be tens of thousands of stubborn old ladies sat at home.’
‘Little we c
‘And forcing them out of a council house?’ I posed.
‘Less tricky, but still an issue. We have to entice as many as we can.’
‘When the main group is housed, you’ll have that headache, a few years down the road.’
Blunkett cut in, ‘By then someone will have filmed a sitcom in one of your nursing homes, and everyone will know exactly what they look like, less of an issue to ask people to move to one.’
‘Yes, it will get better as time goes on,’ I agreed.
Blair asked, ‘And with a hundred such cluster homes open and running, what cost savings do you see, as a percentage?’
‘I’d see Social Services cutting half the budget for visits, I’d see the NHS saving five to ten percent of its budget - which is geriatric focused, and I see the councils saving half what they spend now on pensioners in council houses.
‘To that we add a drop in crime, since the vulnerable are not sat at home waiting to be attacked, and we’ll see a huge windfall for the councils, millions of pounds raised by selling council houses to me.
‘If you take whatever the figure is - spent by councils on pensioner subsidies, council houses or rent subsidies – you cut it by more than half, say sixty percent. Add to that a massive drop in winter fuel allowances and care allowances added onto pensions.’
Gordon Brown noted, ‘That’s a huge number. What about the timescale?’
‘I’d suggest that you loan my consortium money each year, and that we have a five year plan, no sudden burst of spending seen. In the fifth year that figure would reach its maximum annual saving perhaps.
‘But you need to carefully plan the spread of nursing homes, starting with where they’ll have the most impact.’
‘Where would that be?’ Blair asked.
‘The towns that are suffering the highest numbers of social-level pensioners being a burden to the council. Start with Middlesbrough, which Experian highlight as being … a real shithole; the younger people all move away to get a job.’
They made a note.
‘Then Burnley, Oldham, Leeds, I have a list. Oh, and Northern Ireland of course, they cost us a fortune. Newcastle will be a prime target, then Birmingham.
‘But if you consider a joint approach to spending, then somewhere like Middlesbrough would get a jobs boost from building the nursing home, some extra jobs when it opens, and a big boost to the housing sector as I revamp the old council houses.
‘So the benefit to a town like that, a town on life support, is fourfold. We might just bring it back to life.’
‘Many angles to it,’ Blair noted with a nod as he made notes. ‘A well-targeted approach.’
I told him, ‘When I pay local small companies to decorate the old council houses it will boost jobs greatly, for a while at least.’
The Health Secretary asked, ‘So you’re not currently billing us for the nursing homes?’
‘No, I’ll do that when I have an accurate figure, not a guessed one. Part of me is businessman wanting to make a profit, part of me is Labour MP.’
Brown noted, ‘So the Phase Zeros will have the largest effect?’
‘Yes, if you run a council. The Phase Three will have the largest combined financial effect, combining you lot and the NHS and Social Services.’
Blair asked, ‘How quickly can you build them?’
‘Each building cluster is nine months just about, no lack of builders here, but I was waiting to analyse the first home, some fine tuning. Everyone involved says that it’s not needed, that I’d simply be selecting paintings for the Ritz.
‘As to the Phase Zero buildings, they’re a block of apartments with a small café on each floor, just that, some offices, and a carer on hand. But we place them next to the Three-Phase so that they can use the facilities, and the aim is to get as many local sick people as we can into Phase One.’
‘But … that’s what the Three-Phase is for?’ Blair puzzled.
‘Consider the example of the kid costing us a million a year. For my Leicester Phase Zero … we have twenty dialysis volunteers wanting to live there, non-pensioners. Make that fifty and the cost saving is huge.
‘If a person is fifty years old, and sick, but in no way inclined to want to go into a nursing home, we nudge them towards Phase Zero, just a block of apartments.’
‘But next door to a care centre and GPs and dialysis,’ Blair noted. ‘Hence the cost saving.’
‘A huge cost saving; no ambulances, no Social Services in a car, carers on hand.’
‘How many people will your current building programme see housed?’ he asked.
‘Around twenty-eight thousand poor people, then we have the posh nursing homes.’
‘And a realistic roll out?’ he asked.
‘Experian believe that the target audience is six hundred thousand people. That’s pensioners in council houses, plus poor pensioners in private rented accommodation, plus people that would suit a Phase Zero. But the Phase Zero benefit could nudge that figure up another half a million.’
‘So call it a million people,’ Blair noted. ‘As a target for our second term. And you’re on your way to housing twenty-eight thousand, so we need to pick up the pace.’
‘I’d suggest that the pace be modest this year, and that we fine tune costs and building design, then increase. I can get the builders and start the homes, and whether that’s ten or twenty homes our admin overhead is not increased.’
‘And your warehouse would supply them all…’
‘Yes, keeping the cost to you down.’
‘Could you add forty thousand people to the tally this year?’
‘Yes. But the profitability and practicality will slow up after we finish the large cities and look at small towns. To start with … it will be fine, then a struggle to decide where to place a home when the pensioners are spread around rural villages.’
They nodded.
‘And the cost of that first tranche?’ Blair asked.
‘Each Three-Phase plus a large extra Phase One would be a raw cost of around fifty million to build, to house roughly two thousand five hundred people. If you loan us that we’d pick up any differences. And we’d pay that back in ten years.’
‘You can make it twenty years, so long as everyone sees the money coming back in steady,’ Blair told me. ‘Make a plan, that you start an extra ten of those buildings this year, money available in a month so.’
As I sat, I pointed at Gordon. ‘An inflationary effect?’
‘Yes, but we wish to boost jobs, and we can’t do that without an inflationary effect. So we have to deal with it as best we can.’
I nodded. ‘What about prisons?’
Blair noted, ‘We want two refugee detention centres straight away. When will your first big prison be ready?’
‘Four months or less, it’s a simple design, capacity of five thousand give or take some bunkbeds. It will have a mental health place for the criminally insane, and an AIDS prison – for a lifer with AIDS, plus a women’s section, which could hold three hundred women for you.’
‘And the number needed?’
‘Four more after that, less what G4S are doing, at which time you can decommission some of the crumbling old places, and the effect of my new prisons will be a dramatic drop in crime in certain areas - where a soft prison is available.
‘Leicester saw a fifty percent drop, so you can consider a cut in police numbers and still be the party of law and order.’
‘And these refuges for women?’ Blair nudged as he made notes.
‘We found … that in Leicester, a population of a hundred thousand, that one place housing thirty women short term was enough, after which the ladies were housed in other towns. And the drop in murders was stark, eleven attempts to murder women inside the place.’
‘One place per hundred thousand,’ Blair noted. ‘It will be passed into law, the access to such a refuge.’
Mandelson asked, ‘What happens to the ladies afterwards?’
‘They get an apartment in a new town for a few months, then cut loose, to apply for help from the council where they end up, or they get a job there.’
Mandelson followed-up with, ‘And you’ll proliferate soft prisons in city centres?’
