Who cares about elderly people? As an older person (70 years), I am becoming increasingly aware just how difficult it is for my contemporaries to find residential, day or home care when they need it.

Anecdotal evidence exists to suggest home care is being asked to achieve as much as 25 per cent reductions in expenditure. Although criteria for being granted care have not changed, they are being more severely applied. People who would have previously been granted help now miss out. This has the added advantage to East Sussex County Council of masking the large number of people who really need care.

Earlier this year, the chairman of the council's social services said they were to be made more efficient, which usually means budget cuts and staff dispensed with.

I was pleasantly surprised, on checking through proposed county spending for care of the elderly in 2002/3, to find a 9 per cent increase in the budget - not for long, though. The allocation is split into several parts. The first is public provision, cut by 6 per cent so, with inflation, this makes a cut of nearer eight per cent. The third item, private provision, is up by nine per cent. There is no mention of increased efficiency or increase in numbers of places. So where is the money going? Bigger profits for the private sector?

Now we find East Sussex has not placed one elderly "bed blocker" into care since April, using some of the £500,000 Gordon Brown made available. There are no plans to deal with the problem now or, apparently, in the future either. So who does care about the elderly? Not the Conservatives on East Sussex County Council.

-Bob Matthews, Seaford