News

Berkley Care Group

A leading healthcare company is set to invest around £8 million in a state-of-the-art care home near Warwick.

The Berkley Care Group is applying for planning permission to create a 90-bed care home at the Tournament Court development, and hopes to start work on the site later this year.

The three-storey building, set in an acre of land, will offer care to dementia suffers and people who have sustained brain injuries and will create around 100 jobs.

Berkley currently operates two homes in Oxfordshire but has six more in development in London and the South East.

Seamus Halton, of Berkley, said: “We have been looking at the Warwick area for a while, and feel this is the perfect site.

“There is a chronic shortage of care for the sufferers of dementia at a time when the older population is growing at quite a rate.

“This will be a very valuable resource to meet that need in the Warwick area.

“We aim to replicate what we have created at our home in Abingdon and have plans for a bistro, hydrotherapy, a library, a hair salon and a private transport service. It is not certainly what many people think of a care home.

“It is perfectly located and will allow us to create the sort of modern, purpose-built home that offers residential, nursing and dementia care to meet the specialist demand of dementia sufferers and those being treated for brain injuries predominantly suffered as a result of car accidents.”

The new home would also be a significant boost to the local economy.

Halton added: “A home like this is very good for the economy in the area. As well as paying staff – of which around 90 per cent will be local – £1.5 million in wages every year, the home will spend around £800,000 per annum on supplies and services, again which will predominantly be sourced locally.

“And, because of the nature of these developments, they are very good from an environmental point of view. They create little traffic and most journeys to and from the site, tend to be local.”

Tournament Fields, which has been created by Sackville Developments, is now home to more than 15 businesses and has planning consent for 700,000 sq ft of new headquarter office buildings.

Bill Wareing, of Wareing & Co which is marketing the development with Savills, said the new investment was a testament to its location.

“It is the classic combination of location and quality which has made Tournament Fields such a success and thereby continued to attract tenants when other developments have struggled,” he said.

“Berkley Care is planning to invest heavily to provide what will be one of the finest facilities of its type in the country and the knock-on effect of that can only be good for the local economy.”

Around 16 per cent of the population is currently over 65 and by 2034 that is set to rise to 23 per cent.

The fastest population increase has been in the number of those aged 85 and over. In 1984, there were around 660,000 people in the UK aged 85 and over. Since then the numbers have more than doubled, reaching 1.4 million in 2009.

By 2034 the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to be 2.5 times larger than in 2009, reaching 3.5 million and accounting for five per cent of the total population.