THE LAST WORD by TONY HAZELL: Who the hell does care?

Updated: 19:37 EST, 2 March 2010

Relatives of sick, elderly people are being put through hell by health authority bureaucrats who are desperate to protect their limited budgets.

When an elderly person is forced into care because of ill-health there are clear national guidelines on when the health authority should pay.

But the evidence suggests these are being ignored by some authorities and manipulated by others. As a result, thousands of elderly people are still being forced to use their life savings and sell their homes to pay for care which is supposed to be free.

Anger: Thousands of elderly people are still being forced to use their life savings and sell their homes to pay for care

Relatives who attempt to fight for their rights are hampered at every turn by health authorities who have become experts at Soviet-style bureaucracy.

The whole system is weighted against the individual. From the start, the health authority has a fundamental conflict of interest because the money comes from its budget, but it decides who needs it. Some are attempting to avoid assessing patients, refusing to allow relatives to see them and banning lawyers from attending meetings.

This dictatorial stance is designed to confuse, intimidate and delay people who are already under severe emotional stress as they watch a loved relative in decline.

The national guidelines for deciding whether an elderly person is entitled to funding were introduced after Money Mail highlighted the countrywide difference in support offered.

It is a disgrace that sick elderly people can still be forced to sell their home and that their relatives can be subjected to delays and humiliation because they happen to live in the wrong part of the country.

The Government must now take stronger action to ensure health authorities apply the rules fairly and uniformly.

Endowment apocalypse

Eleven years have passed since Money Mail was the first to warn that millions of endowments would fall short of promises to repay the mortgages they were supposed to cover.

At the time, we were derided by the insurance industry and financial salesmen who saw a rich seam of income under threat.

But we were proved right as payouts tumbled by more than two-thirds from the preposterously inflated figures that were dangled under the noses of homebuyers.

Many salesmen simply failed to understand the dangers, while insurance companies chose to hide them.

Now, as we approach the peak years for endowment maturity, this ticking timebomb is about to explode. Despite repeated warnings from the media, regulators and even the lackadaisical insurance industry, it seems that many homeowners have done nothing to address the shortfall.

There are still around five million endowments, around two million of which will mature over the next five years. Incredibly, no one seems to know how many are linked to mortgages.

Why 'incredibly'? Because you might have thought that the banks and building societies lending the money would want to know how it is going to be paid back and how big a gamble they are taking with their members' and shareholders' money.

Analysis of the number of interestonly mortgages and those that are only partly on a repayment basis suggests that the majority of endowments are still being relied upon to repay at least part of a mortgage.

Borrowers who have endowments cannot afford to ignore this issue any longer. If you have a shortfall, then you must save extra elsewhere or increase your mortgage repayments to cover it.

Rising house prices won't buy you out of this mess. For a start, prices are falling again, and second, the size of your mortgage, not the value of your house, is the key figure.

The greed of a short- sighted financial industry - lenders, salesmen and insurance companies - got you into this mess. But it is your home that is at risk not theirs, so for goodness sake act now.

Move that Isa!

Banks and building societies may be bowing to our demands and launching new cash Isas that beat or equal taxable accounts, but that doesn't mean they are playing fair with money you've already saved.

If you do one thing this coming weekend, check your cash Isa interest rate; if you're not earning a decent rate, transfer it to one of the top-payers. A saver with £10,000 earning a typical 0.5 per cent could boost their interest by £390 a year by switching to Nationwide's three-year fix paying 4.4 per cent.

Now, surely that has to be worth getting out of bed for on Saturday morning.

Solvent style

I have boundless admiration for the fashion expertise of my colleague Liz Jones, who expounded on her debts in Monday's Daily Mail.

But if I were to give her one tip on personal finance, it would be to pay more attention to what is in her handbag and less to the label on it.

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