Bath & North East Somerset Council has given the parents of young adults with the highest and most complex care needs in the area assurance that they will not be left without the care they need when the “lifeline” service they depend on closes in January.
Newton House on Tanners Walk in Twerton, Bath
Newton House is the only place in Bath and North East Somerset where people with severe care needs who live with their families can access respite care, a short stay away from home, so their full-time carers can have a short break.
This can be the only time their parents can get a full night’s sleep or get chores done.
But Newton House is set to close in January 2026, and parents have warned the council that they will not be able to cope without it.
Now, council care chiefs have given assurances that people who need respite care will not lose out on it, or have to go out of area to access it.
Bath & North East Somerset Council is reassessing the needs of the 17 families who use Newton House. It will then carry out a review into the best way of providing respite care in the future to those who still need it. But families have urged the council to act fast.
Wendy Lucas, whose daughter Rhiannon is 28 and has attended Newton House a couple of nights a week for ten years, addressed the council’s scrutiny panel on children, adults, health and wellbeing on Monday 14th April.
She said: “Most of us want to continue to look after our loved ones for as long as possible.
“They are our children and for their entire lives we have provided their continuity of care. However we cannot do this without statutory support we are entitled to.
“I therefore urge this panel to pick up the pace and ensure that robust plans are in place to replace Newton House by 1st January 2026. I also urge the panel to commit to ensuring that continuity of service is guaranteed to all the Newton House families.”
She told the panel: “These young adults are some of the most complex young people who require support from this council.
“As a result, their move to any other care scenario will need to be managed carefully and eight months is an extremely tight deadline in which to achieve this.”
Newton House is run by registered housing association Dimensions, which said the short breaks service had become unaffordable. Bath & North East Somerset Council is the sole customer of the service.
The council is under a statutory duty to assess and provide for people’s care needs, including providing respite care where required. Despite the closure date in January, council care chiefs said this was not a hard deadline and they expected to have more time if required.
Council cabinet member for adult services Alison Born told the panel: “We have given assurances that we will continue to commission respite services from Newton House and it will remain open until we have completed the needs assessments and commissioning review.”
She told the families in attendance: “We are listening to what you say you need to shape what we commission in the future.
“We absolutely recognise that we cannot have a gap in services.”
A council report will come before the panel in June setting out three options for how the council can provide respite care services in future.
The options are expected to be: continuing to commission respite care through Dimensions, the council directly providing its own respite care service in-house, or putting a tender for respite care services out to market.
Suzanne Westhead, the council’s director of adult social care, said that if the contract went out to market, the council would still only commission a service that would be “local to local people”.
She said: “We have no intention of going out of area. The plan is, geographically, it will stay within B&NES whatever the three options are.”
Ms Westhead said her preferred option would be for putting respite care out to market, but families are hoping that the council will run it as an in-house service.
Whatever option is chosen in June, Ms Lucas told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “They are not the kind of children who you can pick up one week and deposit somewhere else the next.
“It takes months for both the families, the children, and the providers to be comfortable they are providing the service our children need. And they are all very different.”
Also attending the panel alongside Ms Lucas was Derek Greenman, whose stepson, Michael, is 30 and has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and no voice, and Richard and Julie Franklin, whose son Ryan Probert is 28 and has an unbalanced translocation of chromosomes which means he is small, is non-verbal, and needs medication and a very high level of care.
The Franklins were only both able to attend the panel meeting because Ryan was at Newton House.
Newton House was originally scheduled to have closed at the end of January this year, but the closure was pushed back to 2026 after outcry from families and councillors. Families received a letter in November 2024 telling them that the service would end in just a few months’ time.
Mr Franklin raised the alarm on Facebook, launched a petition now singed by almost 3,000 people, and took the issue to the council with his local councillor David Biddleston (Keynsham South, Labour). Top councillors had been unaware of the decision to close Newton House until Mr Franklin shared the news.
The commissioning team at Bath & North East Somerset Council had been told by Dimensions back in January 2024 that they were ending the service, but the message was not passed on to Councillor Born or to Ms Westhead.
Council policies had now been changed so that this would not happen again, and Ms Westhead said the council had learnt from the incident. Ms Born told the panel on 14th April: “The letter should not have gone out.”
Mr Franklin has described Newton House as Ryan’s “lifeline”.
He said: “We are left to enjoy the free time, something of a bit of a normal life.
“We know Ryan enjoys his time there and away from us having a break is no different to all our kids going away from their parents and enjoying that free time.”
John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter
