AFTER six years of New Labour, J. Holden (Letters, December 12) still harks back to the Tory years in an attempt to defend the current turmoil which besets long-term care for the elderly.

J. Holden should consider the fact that there can seldom have been a better recipe for creating cost, confusion and heartbreak than today's system. Yet even the very term "system" is misleading since it conveys an impression of structure and order, both of which are conspicuous only by their absence in the present muddle.

Because the number of places in care homes for the elderly and disabled has shrunk significantly over the past 18 months, including those in the homes closed by Bury's Labour council, the responsibility of looking after some of society's most vulnerable people is effectively being devolved to relatives and to the National Health Service, and both are struggling to cope.

Without appropriate accommodation to which to send them, it is often impossible for hospitals to discharge elderly patients who no longer need intensive medical treatment. The consequent knock-on effect means that other patients requiring urgent attention are forced to wait, often exacerbating their condition to the point where it becomes an emergency.

This so-called "bed blocking" has become a huge problem for the NHS, and yet the Government still refuses to release necessary funding to local councils and private sector care homes that would allow them to expand their capacity.

True to form, the Government is not only failing to alleviate the shortage of care home places, it is actively aggravating it through piling excessively costly bureaucracy on to managers, thereby encouraging them to cut costs, if not sell-up altogether.

The reams of red tape applied by this government indicate little relevance to the actual quality of care and is often a key factor in choking the life out of the care profession. But it is by no means the only one.

For a number of years, council social services departments have been responsible for assessing and funding the need for care; they purchase some of the provision and are therefore able to keep care-homes fees low. The drive to cut costs results in lower wages, leading to a shortage of nurses and other care workers, again forcing homes to cut the number of places available.

As a result of this contraction in the care profession, more and more hard-pressed relatives are forced into looking after elderly relatives whose physical or mental state has deteriorated so much that they are in desperate need of skilled residential care. It is no wonder then, that the Health Service Ombudsman received a record number of complaints last year, an increase due almost solely to complaints relating to long-term care of elderly and disabled people.

Meanwhile families have been reduced to abject confusion by the shortage of places, by the complex way that care if funded, and by the lack of anything in the way of straightforward guidance.

The demographic figures show that the number of elderly people is set to grow considerably in the years ahead. It is a problem affecting not merely the elderly, but all generations, and New Labour or any other aspiring party of government must no longer ignore it.

JEAN ALLISON (Mrs),

Ramsbottom.