Should you (unwisely) think that EDDC has not stooped so low as to charge £26 to pick up elderly people – think again – it has MANY more charges than that! Here is a list of the EXTRA charges that EDDC plans to charge its elderly, vulnerable people in private housing from April 2016 (there is no similar list in this document for what it currently charges or will charge its own sheltered housing residents).
The table in the link below compares EDDC’s charges to those of Exeter City Council and Torbay Council, and, by and large, the EDDC charges are mostly slightly lower than those of both councils. However, all the councils make extra charges of some kind. Do note that, in the case of EDDC, it appears that there is no personal visit involved in all these services:
“Activate the alarm in an emergency and one of our operators will respond within 60 seconds. They will assess the situation and call for help from a contact or emergency service when necessary.”
http://eastdevon.gov.uk/housing/housing-support-for-elderly-disabled-and-vulnerable-residents/home-safeguard-alarm-services/how-the-home-safeguard-system-works/
Here are the extra charges from April 2016:
Additional Pendant £1.00/week
Smoke alarm £0.50/week
Heat detector £0.50/week
Extreme temperature £0.50/week
Carbon monoxide £1.00/week
Flood detector £1.00/week
Falls detector £1.00/week
Pill dispenser £1.50/week
Click to access the-knowledge-18-december-2015-issue-32.pdf
On a different site, it appears that, for the basic service (and what would that be!) EDDC charges “less than £5 per week” from which we can gather that vulnerable people pay around £250 per year for the basic service.
If one adds ALL the extra services to the basic amount, vulnerable people will be paying an extra £338 – a total cost of around £558 per year if all services are taken.
Careline itself will provide a basic service for £125 per year (current special offer) or a basic plus falls service for £195 per year.
https://www.careline.co.uk/order-careline/
Just one small query: modern alarms mostly combine smoke, heat, carbon monoxide and extreme heat sensors in one alarm – why would one pay for four?
For those vulnerable people who have relatives, they might prefer to look into one of the mobile phones and/or pendants that calls relatives and/or the emergency services immediately, such as this one from Amazon that includes a pendant for a one-off charge of £29:
or this one with a fall monitor for £150
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0186FP8RU?psc=1
(though there are MANY others at similar or lower prices and neither of these have been personally verified nor are any of these personally endorsed or recommended by Owl being simply for comparison purposes) nor do these pendants go through to a 24 hour control centre (though these are available from providers other than EDDC, see above).
For those vulnerable people who do not have relatives – tough, you are old and you must pay for it.
This is Austerity.
East Devon Watch 
The full alarm service costs £558 per year or over £10 per week.
The state pension is £116 per week – so if you are liable to fall and want the full service but the state pension is your only income you either have to pay > 8.5% of your total income (i.e. much much more of your disposable income after rent and food and heating – assuming of course that you have any disposable income left after these expenses) or risk being unable to call for help if you fall and lying there until you die or someone happens to come by.
Oh what a caring society we live in – NOT!
P.S. I love the way that EDDC makes it easy to read the sparse details it provides by spreading them across five web pages. And if customers of the service want to confirm that the service is a good one by reading the annual report, then they need to be internet savvy – and presumably pay another £10 a month for internet service.
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P.S. The latest “annual report” covers September 2013 to August 2014 – so apparently paying £558 pa for this service isn’t enough for them to produce an annual report for September 2014 to August 2015 within 4 months of this period ending.
The latest annual report starts off with 7 pages of marketing waffle with (presumably selective) quotes from customers saying how wonderful the service is before getting to the statistics on page 8 – statistics which show that customer satisfaction on Quality of Service dropped by 10% from 96% to 86% in the space of a single year.
On page 9 it goes on to say how they organise occasional meetings for customers to discuss important things about their service – like the possibility of a new logo (I kid you not – read it for yourself), but they now realise (though of course it is quite obvious to most of us) that their customers may not be the most mobile of people able to travel at their own expense to such a (useless) meeting – assuming of course that their customers have any money left after paying for their service from their pensions to be able to afford to pay for travel.
On page 10 they explain how 574 people calling them (presumably because they have some sort of emergency) had to wait more than 3 minutes for someone to answer their call (do the calculations for yourself) with more that 4,780 people waiting more than a minute. On page 11 they go on to explain that their formal targets allow for over 1,900 calls to take over 3 minutes to answer before they consider that they are failing their customers.
If your system breaks, you need to hope that you won’t fall in the following 48 hours because it can take that long to get it fixed. And although on page 10 they claim that “all were repaired within our target times of 48 hours for critical”, on page 11 they state that “96.5%” “of critical faults completed within 48 hours”. So which was it? “All” or only “96.5%”?
(Leaving aside this discrepancy, they could probably also benefit from some statistical training – because saying that average line utilisation is 6.63% against a target of 50% gives no meaningful indication of whether customers are getting an engaged tone because all lines are busy. For example, it is possible to have a line utilisation of 6.63% whilst having all lines busy and giving an engaged tone to some callers for as much as 1.5 HOURS A DAY. If you want to know whether customers are getting an engaged tone you need to measure peak line utilisation not average line utilisation.)
(They could also benefit from some statistical training when running pilot projects as described on page 13 – a pilot with one user does not provide a sufficiently large “statistical universe” for the single experience to be a guide for what will happen with a more extended user base. So claiming that it is “very successful” is statistically misleading however wonderful the single user said it was.)
On page 14 is a list of their action points for 2014/15 – most notable by its absence is any objective to improve their Quality of Service in order that customer satisfaction on this gets back to their previous levels. Presumably since they are exceeding all their service targets (which are obviously not really challenging), they don’t see any need to e.g. try to reduce the number of people who wait more than 3 minutes to be answered. Indeed, it would appear that they would still be happy if the number of calls which took longer than 3 minutes to answer more than tripled (from 574 to 1,900) because it would still be within their service target.
So, leaving aside the lower costs of alternative services identified by The Owl, you might want to think about whether you would want to put your rescue in the hands of people who appear to worry so little about their service quality.
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P.P.S. It also appears (from the annual report) that Home Safeguard is a service run by the EDDC rather than the private sector.
Given EDDC’s propensity for outsourcing in order to achieve efficiency savings – and given the cost savings that appear to be possible given the alternatives outlined in the original article, why is EDDC continuing to run this service – whilst it sells off assets which can never be replaced and fritters away our council tax on vanity projects and vast legal bills for court cases which later turn out to have been completely unnecessary.
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