07/10/2013 Inside Out South

Hello from Bournemouth and welcome to Inside Out. Your stories from

where we live. He was what is coming up tonight. Who am I? Isabel. Well

done! Poor food and not enough of it, we investigate how residents in

care homes are suffering from malnutrition. We were shocked to

discover from a chef in a care home that his budget has been reduced to

£8 per week per resident. And the future of green energy or a

blot on the landscape? We are in Dorset for the battle of Navitus

Bay. We are providing power, the equivalent of 790,000 homes,

directly into that area where you have that high demand. Offshore wind

is all about money, it is about harvesting subsidies, much more than

it is about Britain developing renewable energy. I am John Cuthill

and this is Inside Out for the South of England.

We start with that disturbing story about malnutrition in care homes.

Poor food or not enough of it or even when there is, not enough staff

to help you when you need it most. Tonight, we investigate how a system

set up to protect some of the most honourable in society is not

working. —— the most vulnerable. You may have seen them on the X

factor. Many of the people here belong to the nostalgics, a surprise

group of pensioners voted through on the talent show. —— the Nostalgics.

Although they were thrilled, they decided to bow out of the

competition and stick to singing for charity and that their weekly yet

together is. But what an inspiration they are. Sadly, not all of us will

stay this active. About one in six people over 85 will

end up in a care or nursing home. And when we get there, we will be

paying hundreds of pounds a week for the privilege. So you think the

least they could do is make is a good meal. But that is not is what

is happening in many home is up and down the country. It is estimated

that one in three residents right now is suffering from malnutrition.

For the body responsible for inspecting homes, the Care Quality

Commission, that is a huge concern. Shockingly, all of the inspection

reports you are a bad to hear come from homes in the South of England.

—— you are about to hear. Three people told us they did not

like the food. Although some of the homes featured

have turned a corner, they paint a worrying picture of staff unable to

help and budgets cut to the bone. We have been speaking to families

across the country who were worried about relatives. Many have seen

mothers or fathers dramatically lose weight after they go into a home.

The first year, I think everything was OK and in the second year he

began to lose weight and I noticed his clothes were loose so I

mentioned it several times and people would say, " weight loss goes

hand—in—hand with dementia." I am sure it does but when he was with

me, she would always eat everything. He needed a lot of support when

eating. If you gave him a sandwich, you would need to say, "put it in

your hand, put it in your mouth." He would eat the plateful. Eventually,

when his clothes fell off, I took him to the doctor, who said we

should put him on supplements but that seems crazy when he had

recently been to my house for Christmas dinner and eating the same

amount as everyone else. Too often, people who need extra support do not

get it. During lunch, we observed one person...

It was is changing attitude to food that first confirmed to Sarah that

her father had dementia. She very soon realised how much help he was

going to need in the future. He would not recognise his favourite

food, for instance he loved lasagne and I made it for lunch and he was

sort of... What is this? I would say it was lasagne and he would ask...

What is that? That is when I realised. He would try to fill it a

parsnip like a fish and eat the lemon or the wash rabbit shores ——

or the horse radish sauce. He did not have any full or empty signals.

He was not able to say when he was hungry. If you offered him a choice

of food, he would say the last thing you said or no thank you. If you

gave him food, he would eat it all. He would tell you he didn't want

anything and then eat a full meal. Bill Francis lost so much weight in

his previous care home that his daughter thought the Care Quality

Commission should take action. I reported things to the CQC and they

did an inspection and it was then that it struck a chord with me and

the penny dropped, they failed the home on three of the five main

outcomes, one of them being that the nutrition and hydration was not

being recorded correctly. The staff were unable to cope. Although weight

loss can be linked to health, groups such as the Relatives And Residents

Association say that leaving anyone malnourished is a form of abuse. The

CQC study showed that one in six care homes were not helping people

enough to eat and drink. That is a huge number. We're talking about

something like 17% of all care homes and we don't really know what is

happening to those people. We know of people who have lost huge amounts

of weight in homes because their weight has not been noted, they

nutrition and hydration intake has not been measured and it has been up

to the relatives to point this out. We know that something like 20,000

people in care homes have no relatives or visitors and who is

looking after their welfare? Who am I? Isabel. Well done, yes!

Some families have become so concerned that they want to start a

nationwide campaign to force improvements on the whole sector.

Isabel Brown moved her mother Rita three times, the latest move just

the previous day to somewhere with excellent food. She did not see why

the previous home should charge nearly £600 a week and serve her

mother the sort of food she had never eaten a full and did not want

to start eating now. This was less yesterday lunchtime, some of the

food that was being served. Everything looked the same, orangey

brown. It was baked beans on toast. Mum had the same everyday. What did

you have for lunch? Two poached eggs is every lunchtime and you have high

cholesterol, which does not help. Mum did not eat those sorts of

foods, she was a brilliant cook and would sort out local produce from

the market we lived. It was just old people's food, sloppy things. School

dinners. You got there and! You like vegetables. Yes, vegetables. You

haven't had many, have you? No. Sometimes, for financial reasons,

they cut back on the amount of money they spend on food. It is supposed

to be your home. It is not up to the manager or the catering manager, the

government has decided in the regulations that people must have,

not should or could, but must have a choice of nutritious, healthy food.

They must also be able to choose when they eat and so it should not

be like school dinners, that you have to eat when you're given it.

And it should be something you enjoy, something sociable or not,

according to your preference. But according to the staff's preference

or what is easy, but what you want and, for a lot of people, they don't

feel they have any choice and that is not good enough.

Is what food do you like. —— what food do you like? It is all right.

You like vegetables and fruit. The vitamins are good for you. There no

vitamins in a tin of ravioli. We want to start a campaign that they

have to provide good, nutritional food. You can go into a supermarket

and buy some vegetables. You can make fresh food. Like you did and I

do. We were shocked to discover from a chef in a care home that his

budget had been reduced to £8 per week per resident and he left

because he said he couldn't do a decent job on that kind of budget.

It is excellent that the CQC have done a study showing that attrition

and hydration —— nutrition and hydration needs to be parsley

improved in care homes but it is not good enough to do a study in

isolation, they have to go back to those homes and check that they have

improved and, if not, why not. For many in care food is the highlight

of the day but too often it would seem the quality and quantity leave

a lot to be desired. One man we came across found things had got so bad

he actually checked himself out of his residential home and is now

catering for himself. The food wasn't brilliant. Some of the meals

were very disappointing. Some were all right, but many were served with

tough meat, tough pastry and I don't know how people managed to eat them,

especially with the older people with false teeth. I had to have some

food brought in. One of the things I used to do is have fish and chips

brought in at night and so did one or two of the other residents. Some

of the food we had was perhaps a fish finger at tea, with two or

three waffles and a spoonful of baked beans and perhaps Ely and some

—— Ely and some cream —— jelly and cream, not nutritious for people.

Have a piece of cheese on toet. The —— on toast. The toast was probably

burned and not very nice. It wasn't very filling. He was very unhappy in

the home. He was short of food and what he was given was not very

appetising. Obviously cheap food, and it became —— and he became very

unhappy and I used to take food in virtually every day. Colin is now

managing well at home with the support of visits three times a day

to help him get up and go to bed. I am pleased to be able to look after

myself and cook my meals as I wish and how I want them. It's quite an

interesting thing. I was a little bit of a misfit in the home due to

the fact that I got my faculties and could see what was going on. A

number of other people couldn't, they didn't know. I feel sorry for

them. With 151 homes currently recorded as failing on nutrition by

the Care Quality Commission the regulator told us they would like

people to contact them if they have concerns. What we would hope is

people would be able to talk to the provider and say this isn't good

enough. We know sometimes that's not easy for people and we would invite

people to tell us about their experiences. They can do that

directly with an inspector when they're on site obviously, but all

the time they can contact us through our website where people can leave

comments about the services they're actually using. We really do want to

hear from people. That's how we decide — that's how we know where we

need to focus our attention and go from the comments we receive, and

it's obviously key. We know that many homes do offer

excellent food to their residents. But it doesn't take long to find

reports that show that when it does go wrong or corners are cut it can

have disastrous consequences. During one inspection officials saw a care

homeworker pick up porridge from down the side of a chair, scrape it

back into the bowl from which a resident was eating, and wipe their

fingers on it. Pies were served covered in mould to other residents

suffering with dementia. A pensioner looked like a skeleton after she

starved to death at a nursing home where she was a high—risk patient an

inquest heard. As you get older, it's very

important to enjoy food, very important.

# Sing, sing a song... Let us know your stories, good and

bad. You can e—mail me. Or even better send me a photo of the food

and we promise to try and help sort out some of the worse ones

Now the argument over our green energy sources continues as Britain

tries to up its renewable energy sources. Here off the Dorset coast

there are plans to build 200 wind turbines out there, great for the

green energy lobby, but not so good if you want to enjoy the view. The

coast in Dorset, deemed so special that like the Great Barrier Reef

it's a world heritage site. The view from this cliff remain —— from this

cliff's remained the same. But that could change if a wind farm — let's

get our bearings. There is Bournemouth. The Isle of

Wight, the Needles over there. This is where the wind farm is planned

for. Over nine miles away from the second closest spot to the wind

farm. They will be highly advice fribl

from the coast —— highly visible from the coast. It spans about 60

degrees of the horizon which is roughly that. When you are looking

out to sea you see this wall of turbines before you. The

Government's keen to build offshore wind farms in order to meet its

target of producing 15% of our energy needs with renewables by

2020. Thanet off the Kent coast is designed to pump a maximum of 300

megawatts into the National Grid. Developers claim Navitus Bay could

provide almost four times that, 1100 megawatts, equivalent to almost 2%

of the UK's electricity needs. It's easy to say it's 2%, therefore we

must have this 2%. My argument would be, well, before you start

detracting from areas like this, the nation's jewels really, why don't

you try harder to exploit other areas which have fewer and negative

impacts? Why is there a plan to build a wind farm which at its

nearest point would be 8.6 miles off the Needles? The area was chosen by

the Crown estate, they're the landlord of the seabed. They

identified nine zones around the UK coastline, it's got good wind

speeds, wind off the Atlantic. Relatively shallow water. Really

importantly, it's very close to a high area of energy demand. We are

providing power, the equivalent of 790,000 homes, to about nine times

the number of homes in Bournemouth, directly into the area where you

have that high demand. Latest Government figures show 3% of the

UK's electricity is now produced by offshore wind.

Tea, please. The thing is we don't just need more energy, we need to

find new ways of producing it. Right. No biscuits, we will crunch

numbers instead. Boiling your average kettle will turn up 2.2

kilowatts. Navitus Bay claims its turbines could provide one gigawatt

of electricity, that's the same as 454,000 kettles. A lot of tea.

But some say we should question these estimates as some existing

wind farms haven't lived up to the claims they first made. Wind is

intermittent. When there is no wind, which is frequently, particularly in

hot or very cold weather, then no energy is generated by wind

turbines. We have to be very careful about the claims made by companies

for the capacity of their wind farms. They tend to either quote

100% capacity, when we know that is not the case. Or they use the

industry standard which is 30% efficiency. In fact, the actual

capacity, the production from these wind farms is sometimes in the order

of 22%. So significant project, delivering 790,000 homes worth of

energy and it would contribute to the national targets, not just for

renewable energy, but for combatting climate change. It will reduce the

amount of carbon dioxide by 1.15 million tonnes per year, so it's a

significant project in a major contribution.

Another controversy is over these visuals Navitus Bay has drawn up to

show how the development will look. This is the view from a beach near

Bournemouth. The 200 metre turbines just about visible on the hor ie

zone. —— horizon. The group commissioned

its own graphics which it says give a more accurate idea of the scale of

the turbines. The major difference most locals will be aware of is the

landscape in the developers's visualisations looks smaller than it

really is. When you see our videos on a television screen I think you

get a much more realistic impression of scale so the turbines look more

like they will look in practice. The official guidelines for producing

visuals like this were drawn up seven years ago by Scottish National

Heritage. They're currently under review after complaints that

turbines on some wind farms in Scotland looked much larger once

built than the visuals had suggested. We are following what is

deemed to be the best practise within the industry and endorsed by

the landscape institute. The problem is it's seven years old. It's seven

years old, but irrespective of that it's still acknowledged to be the

best industry practice. If it changes, we will obviously adapt our

images accordingly. Angela is a green campaigner. She

lives in Bournemouth where the wind farm would be 12.2 miles out to sea.

She's keen to get moving on renewable forms of energy. But she's

meeting opposition from the tourist industry in the town. Councillor

Mike Green is for renewables but against the wind farm. His concern

is tourism, hence these sticks of rock. Brandishing their respective

weapons, but promising not to use them, we have asked the two to meet

and thrash things out. We all know we will need to be able to reduce

our carbon emissions, we need to look at carbon saving. Let's look at

an efinishent way rather than coming up with something that could be

catastrophic for the local tourism economy —— efficient. I believe the

evidence used is anecdotal. It hasn't been proved. In other areas

where they've had concerns, one recently, it's been proved wrong.

What Bournemouth should be doing is say look, come on, see this

wonderful wind farm, we are committed to renewables. We are

committed, we have a green agenda. Come and see what we are doing

locally. All of our economy is based on tourism. We can do what we can

for the green economy but this is the wrong place at the wrong price

and at the wrong time. Whilst these two are sorting out their

differences time for me to do a little survey.

Wind farms or tourism, which is more important? I don't think the

tourists will mind a wind farm. They're friendly looking things. It

doesn't worry me. I am not a tourist, I live here. Doesn't worry

me. No, stick them up. This town needs tourism because this town —

tourism brings money to us. I wouldn't like to be able to see

them. You don't want to see anything out there? Keep it natural like

that. If there's wind farms nobody's going to sit and look at them.

They'll still come here. You still have the beaches. Which one?

Turbine. Yeah, turbines. So, that's the word on the waech. —— beach. All

this new technology doesn't come cheap.

The cost today is about £140 per megawatt hour which compares to...

Phil from the carbon trust says companies producing offshore wind

can get Government subs can Is —— subsidies. This could drive down the

cost for Navitus Bay to £50 per unit, potentially upping its

profits. The Government is investing heavily now, hoping to bring costs

down later. The cost reduction depends a lot on how many you build.

If you build enough wind farms there is an incentive to promote new

technologies, introduce new competitors into the supply chain to

drive down the costs. You need to invest now and then you have a

sustainable low carbon electricity generation for the UK, you have more

jobs in the UK from this new industry. But others suggest these

Government subsidies paid for by the taxpayer are simply lining the

pockets of developers. Offshore wind is all about money. It's about

harvesting the subsidies much more than it is about developing

renewable energy. In fact, I would say that aside from the National

Lottery and possibly illegal drug legaling, there is no finer

mechanism for taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich,

developers and landowners. Navitus Bay has held public meetings in

every town which could be affected. And in swannage San drew is still

far from convinced by the visuals. In this one the Isle of Wight is

really hardly visible. It looks smaller. I know what the Isle of

Wight looks like ap that doesn't look right. The feeling generally, I

suppose, is negative. Sadly. But they have to look at the big

picture. If we don't get away from fossil fuels, and don't invest more

in renewables, then we are going to ruin our coastline anyway. The

difficulty for us is trying to deliver a project which is going to

contribute to the UK national requirements but also take on board

the considerations of the local communities that will be affected by

the project. I was very surprised that they were, in effect, 155

metres wide. I know — I have watched 100 metres being run. And it's — it

takes imagination to see something that's half as wide again as that.

I am sure you will let me know your thoughts on that one.

Talking of e—mails let's see what caught your ear last week. First,

our story about compulsory kill cords. I am horrified the wearing of

kill cords in any power boat hasn't been made compulsory. It correctly

worn saved the lives of my children 20 years

Next week, how safe is the food we put on our tables? We ask a

celebrity food critic to investigate.

Join me for the truth behind food fraud. That's Inside Out next Monday

here on BBC up with. —— on BBC1.