Alston Moor Parish Council
Westmorland and Furness Council’s Health and Adults Scrutiny Committee meets on Wednesday 23 September 2026 to consider the report on the consultation about the future of Grisedale Croft Care Home. Alston Moor Parish Council has put a written submission before the Committee, sent on 18 September 2026, and all three documents are published here in full.
The submission does not ask the Committee to take the Parish Council’s word for anything. Every point in it is drawn from Westmorland and Furness Council’s own published documents: where a figure is given, it is the authority’s own figure, and where a table is said not to add up, the columns have been added.
What the submission says
Two matters are put first. The covering report states that the consultation ran “from 14th May 2026 – 19th July 2026”. The consultation closed on 19 August 2026, having originally been advertised to close on 5 August; 19 July was never the closing date at any point. And in Part 2 of the consultation — the only phase in which people knew that refurbishment would mean the home closing for 12 to 24 months and residents being displaced — refurbishment led the authority’s preferred option by 66 responses to 58. The report nowhere says so, and its 10 key messages contain no figures at all.
Fourteen further findings follow. Among Alston Moor’s own residents, on the authority’s Table 7, options keeping care on the Grisedale Croft site total 87 against 82 for the preferred option. There is no occupancy figure, no cost and no referral data anywhere in the 59-page report, although it names these as the most contested evidence of all. The £2.5m–£3.0m refurbishment estimate appears in the Applethwaite Green Care Home report as well — the same figure for a different building 50 miles away — and the authority holds no survey of either. The sentence recording drop-in attendance is word-for-word identical in both reports. Of 199 responses, one supported closure.
The submission also compares the two consultations decided at the same Cabinet meeting. A preferred option was named for Grisedale Croft Care Home and expressly not named for Applethwaite Green Care Home in Windermere. The phased refurbishment idea that came from this community was recorded as “Other”; at Applethwaite Green the equivalent idea was named, given its own row in every table, its own theme and its own appendix.
What the Parish Council asks the Committee to do
The Committee is asked to put to officers how a closing date this consultation never had came to be printed, and whether a corrected report will be published before Cabinet meets. It is asked to seek an explanation for why a preferred option was named for Alston Moor and not for Windermere. It is asked to request that the Cabinet decision of 13 October be deferred until a corrected and complete report exists, the promised equality impact assessments are finished, and the occupancy, referral and net cost figures are in the public domain. It is asked to require a building-specific survey and a costed phased refurbishment that keeps residents on site, and to ask that work with NHS partners on an integrated bed base begin now, since it is needed under every option and has not started.
Read the documents
Grisedale Croft Care Home — at a glance → A single page: the 16 findings, the comparison between the two homes, and what the Committee is asked to do. Also available as a PDF.
The written submission in full → Eighteen pages, with every point referenced to its source.
Questions for officers → Prepared at an officer’s request, as a plain list so that they can be answered one by one.
The meeting is held in public. Papers for it are published by Westmorland and Furness Council on its committee website.