Labour supporters may be ignorant.

trisher I think there's a huge difference between careless driving and injuries caused by drinking to excess. Drivers are insured.
I would have no problem with the NHS claiming their costs from the insurance companies for care provided due to careless driving, providing it was proven not to be an 'accident' - for example, if someone was using a mobile phone at the wheel.

There are more people living in temporary accommodation such as B&B’s because there are more people living here, full stop!
A lot of these people are immigrants from many countries, often earning low wages.The population of the UK has exploded in recent years. Also, quite a few will be single parents with children.This is why we can’t compare things with twenty years ago, since more are living here, it follows that more housing is needed.That’s why immigration has to be curbed, not stopped altogether, but curbed,

Don’t worry immigration will be curbed after Brexit, but not in the way you assume

You have information that the rest of us don’t ww ? Do tell.

lemongrove nothing to do with the number of people. Post war there was a huge housing shortage it was met by people with the will to change things In the decade after 1945, 1.5 million homes had been completed and some of the demand for housing had been alleviated. The percentage of the people renting from local authorities had risen to over a quarter of the population, from 10% in 1938 to 26% in 1961.

Apart from a massive amount of immigration ( everybody has to live somewhere) the sheer numbers of single parent families waiting for social housing now cannot be compared to after the war years.

Morgana it may be anecdotal, but that's just one of the ways hospitals try to hit targets because they don't have the staff and other resources like beds, etc.

Our local walk in centre is now run by Virgin on behalf of the NHS. You'd never know because it's done in the same place as when it was run by the NHS. However, now there's a list of what can be treated which wasn't there before. Most, but not all who arrive at the walk in centre can't get an appointment with their GP. Gone are the days there where you could be seen by a doctor at the walk in centre and referred to A&E if necessary. Now you won't be seen at the walk in centre at all if your problem is not on that list. So you go to A&E because there's nowhere else you can see a doctor.

Virgin now runs over 400 NHS contracts and has just been awarded a Children's Services contract worth over £100 million. Yes, the NHS is being privatised. Not, wholesale like British Gas, water and electricity. Slowly bit by bit by offering contracts to run on behalf of the NHS.

Earlier this year my 82 year old FiL was sent to A&E by his GP. He was seen within 6 hours. Unfortunately, The problem persisted and he ended up back at A&E the next day at about 5.00 pm. My DH took him and he was seen by a doctor at about 10.00 pm, who decided he should be admitted. He was moved out of the cubicle and waited in the corridor until about 8.00 am the next morning. My husband sat on the floor all night because there was no chair available. My FiL is insulin dependent and my DH had to keep flagging the nurses who were run off their feet to remind them of my FiL's diabetic needs (you're told not to take your own medication). It was a very bad experience. He was in hospital for almost a month. He'd been admitted to hospital through A&E via his GP 18 months before and although that wasn't a good experience, it was nothing like this year.

I was in the same hospital for 3 weeks in 2015 and spent 5 exhausting days and nights in an A&E ward before I went to the neurology ward. I saw 5 different changes in the bed opposite mine in one night - and one of them was the same person readmitted! Those 5 days were dreadful in comparison to the rest of my stay.

The amount of agency staff appeared greater every year and there was little if no continuity of the agency staff. I can only conclude that things ARE getting worse.

There seems to be a contradiction going on here. Day6 is claiming that services are overstretched because of immigration. In which case, why are hospitals being closed left right and centre?

This page of google results tells the story.

www.google.co.uk/search?q=hospital+closures+since+2010&oq=Hospital+closures&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l5.8185j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

It looks more like tory austerity policy causing the problem than immigration.

I would just like to add that I live in a multicultural area and in my experience of hospitals over the last few years, I can honestly say that I have not been aware of any particular increase in the number of immigrants on the half a dozen or so kinds of wards I have experienced (on my own account or with my FiL). However, probably the majority of the excellent doctors were not born in the UK and neither were most of the agency nurses. I doubt many were born in the EU either.

My FiL wears hearing aids in both ears and he often had a problem understanding the accents of agency nurses until he 'tuned' into the speaker, but then he wouldn't see them again and had to start over the following day. This is an aspect of his stay that could have been avoided if there there was not such a dependency on agency staff.

lemongrove sheer numbers of single parent families waiting for social housing now cannot be compared to after the war years
Does it really matter who needs to be housed? If the will is there to do it it can be done. We are now a richer more prosperous country and we should be ashamed that anyone is being housed for over year in inadequate emergency accommodation.

No, it doesn’t matter ( who needs to be housed) but I was pointing out that single Mothers with a child or children are now waiting for social housing in large numbers,which was not the case fifty or more years ago.
also the reason that all housing, both social and affordable to buy or rent is in short supply, is that ‘singletons’ want to be housed, either unmarried or divorced, and that immigration ( both from the EU and outside of it) has pushed up the population.
Thousands of houses have been built in the past five years, where I live, which is where there are many jobs, but every large village in the land will need houses each ,the way the population is growing.

There were probably far more families with just a mother after the war than you realise lemongrove. Fathers had died and some women had babies out of wedlock. There were also families where the father was unable to work because of war injuries. Nursery schools opened to free women for munitions work stayed open until the 1950s to accommodate the children of these families. There was more free nursery provison then than at any time since.

Just wanted to chip in here and say there's another big difference between now and after the war. Women no longer have to stay in bad or unhappy relationships. On one hand that's a good thing, but on the other hand a family split in two means two homes needed.

Even in the early years of the Right to Buy scheme, families could be rehoused by the council. Often the property would be a 'hard to let' property in a rough area, but it gave the family options even just as a stopgap. Sometimes councils would refer a family to a housing association who would help. These options have all but disappeared. Of course, social security might be available to help the family move or settle in and that's gone too. Rules about the number of people living in a property hardly exist and tenancies are allocated to families where boys and girls will share rooms no matter how old they are. New tenancies allocated now would not have happened before because of overcrowding rules.

The consequences of the Housing Act 1988 and the Right to Buy scheme means the rental market is unrecognisable now compared to 20 or 30 years ago. The balance swung from firmly in the tenants' court to firmly in the landlords' court. From what I have seen changes to the private rental sector are good if you have a good landlord, but have not made much difference to make tenants feel secure in their homes.

I grew up on a council estate trisher and on a very long road there wasn’t one single Mother family.No child in my class at school only had one parent either.
Things have changed completely since those days, marriage now ( before children) is not considered ‘the norm’.
Very few people now get married before the age of thirty, and they all need housing too.
Marriages break up at a higher rate too, so all those families need housing.
Add mass immigration into this mix and it’s easy to see why
There are not enough houses.

Not just houses, but hospital places, being able to see your doctor and getting places in schools for children.
Both Labour and Conservative governments have let us down badly with reckless immigration policies.

In the 1950s the demands on the NHS were much lower than they are now - antibiotics were only just being prescribed and there were none of the treatments for cancer, heart disease etc that we receive today.
I can still remember being prescribed a 'miracle drug' for tonsillitis when I was a child - M&B tablets.
Now people grumble if the doctor decides not to prescribe paracetamol when it can be bought cheaply over the counter!

Many people do expect to be prescribed a panacea for all ills and often do not look to help themselves in the first instance - that is why A&E departments are over-crowded and those with real or more urgent problems are forced to wait.

The single parent families in those days were in the main war widows.

I grew up on a council esrtate too lemongrove I didn't know every family down my street. I do know that I went to a nursery school and that at least one of the children there was fathered by an American service man who had gone home.
As for NHS treatment, anti biotics were being used in the 50s to treat TB an illness that had until then been virtually untreatable. There were epidemics of polio, and children needed long and complicated treatment. The illnesses treated were different. Everyone agrees that people were much poorer and yet a free, comprehensive health service was offered. Why? Nothing to do with less demand, everything to do with the will to make it happen

I didn't grow up on a council estate, but I can remeber four families that I know of down our street where there were children and no father, another one where the father couldn't work because of war injuries, a woman across the road who had TB, and was bedridden and quite a few immigrants who worked on the buses and in the hospital.
We couldn't have coped without them in the fifties and sixties.

Immigrants in the fifites and sixties? Where racist signs in windows was acceptable and legal , yes the windrush immigrants were needed, bus drivers, road cleaners etc.

What’s the point you’re trying to make in your last post Annie, because it’s not clear at all?

Yes, Annie, immigrants in the 50s and 60s, living down my street, and even in my house. West Indians, Nigerians, on their own, in couples, even families. We even had a German family living in our house in the mid-fifties. Usually just for a year or so, until they had been given a council house, in the good old days. A very cosmopolitan group of children to play in the street with, and go to school with.

Yes we had an area like the one you lived in Jen, Tiger Bay in Cardiff

So why did you query it?