Specialist outsourcing company Mitie has decided home care isn't profitable any more. Its departing chief executive Ruby McGregor-Smith, Tory peer, announced a £100 million loss as the company withdrew from the domestic home care market.
“The cuts have gone too deep…there’s no understanding of what that’s going to do to the elderly in the UK,” she said. And there was more: “It’s so badly paid that it’s not easy to attract staff to that market. Pay needs to be much higher than the living wage.” But Mitie has never paid well, leading to demonstrations against it between 2013 and 2015.
Since Mitie can no longer make a profit out of health and social care, it’s off out of it. These were the vultures queuing up to take over social care from local authority control, whose options now are either to sell it, shut it down, or even return it to local authority control. The economics of privatising home care which made Mitie millions in recent years are now driving it to quit.