Cornwall Partners in Care News

Cornwall Partners in Care hold weekly briefings with Cornwall Council and Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation trust. These meetings involve Jonathan Price (Joint Director Adult Care and Health for Cornwall Council and NHS Kernow) and occasionally colleagues from the Council, David Smith (CPIC Chairman), and representatives from the CPIC Committee.

Daily update - 12th November 2021

Attendance today was: Jon Price, Kate Alcock, Val Smith and Nick Hayden from the council; from CPIC was Mary Anson, Christine Rowberry and Phil Hartley.  Richard sent apologies.

The meeting started with us being asked to introduce ourselves to Nick Hayden.  He is the programme lead for Carbon Neutral within Cornwall Council. 

1. Jon said he had some exciting news, which was that there is an opportunity to bid for NHS investment of £10m for ‘in year’ spend, targeted at driving home care recruitment.  This bid has to be in by Wednesday.

This would perhaps connect with considerations around electric vehicles as a recruitment tool.

1. Nick Hayden then talked about his role and considerable discussion was about de-carbonising the internal council workforce, and then moved to how this might move on to our own staff.
2. Digitisation will reduce council staff essential journey times but not all, so electric options are on the table anyway (not out of Jon’s bid for the £10m).

Phil talked about his own use of electric pool cars, and there was general discussion about the tax position, whether this might aid recruitment (or not), about salary sacrifice schemes (which can only help if you are a tax payer so possibly not for those staff who keep their working hours down).   The best benefit, according to Nick, is to those who do the highest business mileage.  Current reimbursement is 40p/mile; electric cars can only reimburse 0.4p per mile so significant savings for business mile reimbursement.

1. We also touched on the possibility of homes and agencies being ‘helped’ to install electric charging points. 

The above took up most of the meeting.  Jon and Kate then had to leave for another urgent meeting and the points I had ready to raise were given to Val Smith who will take these away.  They were:

1. Question about the twitter feed which informed the public that the council has bought 130 affordable homes (around mid Cornwall) and my question was will any of these be earmarked for social care?
2. I also asked whether there was any information about a previous request we have made regarding social care workers being included under the ‘Key Worker’ option for priority housing.
3. A further point was to inform them that there is new guidance out for International Recruitment agencies (which I hadn’t had time to do more than skim prior to the meeting).  At first glance it seems the cost of bringing in a potential overseas worker will now fall on the employer because the agencies, who currently advertise ‘no cost’ to the employer, will now not be allowed to charge as a service to the worker.  Val asked me to send her the link.  Thanks to Christine for coming up with this today.

That was it, apart from Kate Alcock saying she is working on the next infection control grant and hopes to have an Act of Entrustment out to the sector ‘soon’.