Mary Feilding residents in Time of their Lives

• THANK you so much for your reports on the sale and imminent closure of the Mary Feilding Guild in Highgate, (100-year-olds told to find somewhere else to live after historic care home is sold off, March 11).

It made painful and disturbing reading and I would be very interested to know if anyone is running a campaign locally. I’m sure many would want to lend their time, energy and voices to it.

It is difficult to understand exactly why Highgate Care has decided not to honour the commitments made to residents and staff.

Mary Feilding Guild is their home. Whatever the faults of the guild’s business model, however naïve or mistaken their trustees, the residents should be secure in that home.

We made a documentary for the BBC called the Time of Their Lives with residents at the Mary Feilding Guild some years ago.

The residents then were inspiring, the staff dedicated, the environment warm and convivial. Anyone would be happy to live there.

At the start of the pandemic, we saw the low priority given to the health of elderly and vulnerable people living in care homes.

But the desperate state of social care in the UK dates back so much further, to the legacy of the Margaret Thatcher years and the creeping privatisation of public services.

What happened to the idea of publicly-owned care homes which local communities could be proud of?

What has happened at Mary Feilding Guild may be irreversible but it should never have been allowed to happen. And it must not happen again.

This is the moment for a national conversation on social care leading to policies that ensure that the health, safety and wellbeing of elderly, and sometimes vulnerable, people are protected by the state rather than cast out of their homes in the interests of profit.

HILARY DURMAN
Redbird Productions