Chapter 108: Conditions of Registration
Nobody was arrested. I need to keep saying that, because it is the true shape of the thing.
What happened instead took fourteen months and looked, from any distance, like paperwork.
Willow Bank was placed in special measures with conditions imposed on the provider's registration.
No new admissions. Monthly reporting.
A named responsible individual required to submit an action plan every twenty-eight days.
The local authority suspended placements at all four homes in the group, not just the one.
That is where the money starts.
Wrenfield Care Group was prosecuted for failing to provide safe care and treatment.
It pleaded guilty at the first hearing, because companies do.
The fine was two hundred and forty thousand pounds plus costs, reduced from three hundred and sixty for the plea.
The court heard that the group's turnover was eleven million a year.
Denise Corrigan's registration as a manager was cancelled. She did not appeal.
Paul Sherborne was struck off by the nursing regulator sixteen months later, after a four-day hearing.
Nobody attended it except the panel and a legal assessor.
He did not attend it himself. Most of them do not.
That is what happened to the two people whose initials I read off a chart in a corridor.
No handcuffs. No van.
A cancelled registration and a strike-off, which between them mean those two will not work on a floor again, and mean nothing else.
Damon was never the registered manager. That was always the point of the structure.
He was a director of the operating company.
He was also a director of the property company that owned three of the buildings and leased them to the first at a rent he set himself.
His exposure was real and it was entirely corporate.
Director disqualification proceedings were commenced.
He gave an undertaking rather than fight, which is what solicitors advise when the documents are bad.
Seven years.
He cannot be a director of a company in this country for seven years, and cannot manage one without leave of the court.
He is twenty-nine. He will be thirty-six.
He kept the house in Fenchurch Row, he kept his passport, and he was never once required to explain himself in a room with a jury in it.
The local authority audit is the part the family felt.
For four years the group had invoiced for nursing hours at a contracted ratio, and the rotas showed the ratio had not been delivered.
The recovery claim, when it was finally agreed, was one million one hundred and forty thousand pounds, repayable over six years.
The homes were sold in March of the following year to a group from the north-east.
Willow Bank was not sold.
Willow Bank was closed, because a building in special measures with no placements is a building nobody buys.
Forty-one people were moved. Bill Trewin was one of them.
It took nine weeks and it was done by a team from the council working off a spreadsheet.
I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence in this book.
I went looking for the truth about a corridor, and the corridor stopped existing.
Forty-one people over eighty were put in vans and taken to other towns.
Six of them died within a year.
That is what happens when you move people of that age, and it is written in a paper anybody can look up.
Nobody can tell you which of those six would have died anyway.
I am not going to pretend I am at peace with it.
I am also not going to pretend the alternative was better.
The alternative was a building where a man with Parkinson's got his tablets three hours late for fourteen months and a chart said otherwise.
Both of those are true and neither of them cancels the other, and anybody who tells you they do is selling something.
Margot Ashford's income came out of the property company as rent, and it was fifty-one thousand a year.
That is the answer to a question I had been asked in an interview room and had not been able to answer.
I had assumed for three years that the money was old.
The money was a rent, on three buildings, paid by a company that was billing a council for nurses who were not there.
The house I knelt in eleven times was bought in 1998 and remortgaged in 2011.
The remortgage is in the sale pack of the property company, which is a public document.
I read it on the library computer with fifteen minutes left on my session.
Then my time ran out, and the machine logged me off mid-page, and I sat there in front of a blue screen with my hands flat on the desk.
That was the eleventh of September.
On the nineteenth, Julian wrote to me for the first time in nine months.