Daughter’s despair as late mother’s care debt rises by £100 a month

A bereaved daughter is being forced to pay mounting interest on her late mother’s care home bill.

Ingrid Marsh owes the council £85,000 and is having to sell her mother’s house to pay the debt.

Her mother Trudy Hitchen, 90, died on New Year’s Day after three years in four care homes. 

Mrs Hitchen, a former nurse and parish councillor, had been a widow for almost 20 years and had little savings when she was diagnosed with dementia in 2015.

But she had to pay the full cost of her care because she owned a modest three-bedroom home in Newton Abbot, Devon, which the council put a charge on. Her daughter now has to pay more than £100 a month in interest fees, while she waits for her mother’s property to sell.

Mrs Marsh, whose mother came to England as a displaced person from the Sudetenland in 1949, said: ‘People talk about dementia being “the long goodbye” because as soon as that diagnosis comes through, your grieving process starts. I just wanted to be a daughter and spend time with my mum, and not have to think about all this admin, but the finances were a massive weight.

‘Whichever home you choose, the costs are astronomical, and I don’t think people realise that.’

The Daily Mail is calling for an urgent solution to the social care crisis, which has forced hundreds of thousands of families to pay sky-high bills for dementia care.

More than 215,000 have signed our petition demanding an end to the scandal in which countless people have to sell homes to pay for their care. With a green paper on social care having been delayed six times since it was promised in March 2017, new Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged to end the crisis ‘once and for all’.

Mrs Marsh, a former GP practice manager, said: ‘The last bill I had from the council was for £85,143.12. Each month it accrues about £109 in interest. We’ve already paid £1,300 a month through my mother’s pension for the time she was in the care home. In total my mum’s care fees have amounted to about £130,000.

‘I have to sell her house. I’ve got no other way of dealing with it, I haven’t got any money.’

Mrs Marsh fought back tears as she told how her mother was diagnosed with dementia after she began trying to light the radiators and electric fires in her home with matches, and was found wandering the street at night in her nightie.

The mother of two, who lives in Newton Abbot, Devon, decided a care home was the best place for her mother as she had a full-time job. But she was shocked after three homes evicted her mother because she kept ‘escaping’.

Mrs Marsh said: ‘At one home we found out she’d escaped and got all the way from one side of the town in Newton Abbot to the other at 11pm before they even realised that she was gone.

‘Another only kept her for 72 hours before saying we had to remove her because they couldn’t cope with her escaping.’

She eventually found a home in Plymouth, where Mrs Hitchen was very happy – but it cost £3,000 a month. Mrs Hitchen’s two pensions and attendance allowance, amounting to £1,300 a month, were paid straight to the care home while the council registered a charge on her house for the rest of the cost.

Mrs Marsh, 65, who lives with her husband John, 67, a retired teacher, said: ‘The figures are frightening. And the fact that the Government has delayed the green paper since 2017 is wicked.’

Mrs Marsh spoke of her mother’s life when she arrived in England in 1949. ‘She didn’t speak English, she had no possessions, and she was sent to work in cotton mills in Blackburn,’ she said.

‘She learned to speak English by going to the cinema every Saturday morning and she taught herself enough English to train to be a nurse. She threw herself wholeheartedly into life in Britain.’

You can help send a message: Sign our petition change.org/dementiacare