The local authority’s controversial decision to sell off care homes — and their residents — to the private sector has been doggedly pursued on the basis that money would be better spent supporting elderly people in their own homes.

But now it seems there is not enough cash to maintain the present home care service, let alone extend it, and people who have been looked after at home for years may have to be transferred into residential care.

Cue the inevitable wrangling between Glenurquhart Road and Holyrood over who is responsible for this latest funding shortfall.

The Scottish Executive must take a large portion of the blame for not fully financing a policy that was never going to be cheap, but questions must also be asked about why council officials did not alert members to the looming crisis sooner. The imperative to make substantial savings by the end of the financial year leaves no time now for anything other than crisis management.

So what happens next? Campaigners insist that all the threatened residential homes, including Ach an Eas and Burnside in Inverness, must be retained in public ownership and upgraded to meet current standards.

However, this week’s news simply makes the sell off more likely. The only change will be that the capital sums raised and money saved in running costs will go towards balancing the books and minimising cuts instead of bolstering an expanded system of home care.

It is, of course, no way to run a key service and councillors must meet urgently to revise their strategic priorities.

The rest of us ought to remember that next year sees both local and national elections, and no opportunity should be missed to call our representatives to account for this sorry mess.

Safety a priority

THE news that the two Peruvian boys killed on the A9 in Inverness last week were not wearing seatbelts at the time of the accident can only heighten the despair of their families.

Whether restraints would have made any difference to the outcome we will never know, but parents who entrust the lives of their children to the care of organisations such as the Free Church have a right to expect every effort will be made to protect them. At the very least, they should be able to take as read that the law of the land — in this case that vehicle passengers should wear seat belts — will be complied with.

The church promises today that its procedures will be reviewed. So they should be.

But it is not acceptable to suggest that because the organised youth camps had finished and the boys were being taken on a private visit, the church’s safety policy did in some way not apply.

Neither does the comment that the approach to seatbelts in Peru is “a bit more lax” absolve the church or car driver Donald MacLeod, whose care the boys were in and who also tragically lost his life, from blame.

Carlos Ruben Gonzales and Gianmarco Stefano Peschiera were the responsibility of the Free Church from when they arrived in Scotland to the moment they were delivered back to their families in Lima.

Sadly, it failed them.

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