"We have been told from on high that we are not to take any new cases onto the books unless they are critical." This is care in the community today.

There are rules that require the caring services to liaise, formulate care plans that involve all relevant agencies and at the head of each case plan there should be a leader. The leader can be for example, a nurse, a health visitor or social worker though if medical requirements are involved close liaison with a community doctor is paramount. That carefully formalised commonsense idea gets blown out of the window when one or more of the agencies concerned is unable to function because of orders from on high. It is a high risk strategy, a recipe for courting high profile complaint as the least worst scenario or at the other end of the scale, a disaster, which, no doubt, would highlight the impossibility of meeting statutory community care regulation and requirements on contrained budgets. It is stark rationing.

In an area where provision in all quarters rose from nothing in twenty years to the bare minimum that it can get away with without breaching U.K. Law and human rights, there is nothing to pare back to but bone.