Trust fends off care home price charge

The North and West Belfast Health and Social Services Trust has not
broken the law in the level of payments it makes to a private care
home company, the Office of Fair Trading has found.

BetterCare, which runs private care homes across the UK, complained
to the OFT that the trust was abusing a dominant position in the
purchasing of social care for older people, offering low and
discriminatory prices for residential and nursing home care
services compared with what it paid its own residential
homes.

But the OFT said the trust neither set the prices that BetterCare
was paid nor determined the funding for its own residential homes
so it could not have breached the Competition Act 1998.