Nick Hood, a 72-year-old corporate adviser and former CEO, CFO and Chairman of the Board, lives on the edge of the English countryside in a leafy suburb north of London that is almost comically British and upper middle class. (The badgers tore up his lawn recently and the foxes got into his compost.)
For most his professional life, which began in the mid 1970s, Hood has been proudly, and quite successfully, corporate. He worked in finance. He believes in private enterprise. When he ran away as a young man, it was to Ontario, to work as an accountant.
That may be why, when Hood talks about seniors’ care, he can surprise even himself with his fervour. “I sound like a socialist,” he said when I spoke to him over the phone. “I sound like Bernie Sanders.” (He pronounced it with a long ‘u,’ like “Saunders.”) “But nonetheless, that is where I have arrived.”
In 2012, Hood, who was then the chairman of a corporate restructuring firm, was asked to publish a report on the British care-home sector — a largely publicly-funded, privately-run space roughly equivalent to Ontario’s long-term-care industry. For Hood, it was, at the time, largely a PR exercise; a consultant thought the work might drum up business for his firm. But what he found when he dug into the sector appalled him. “It was horrifying,” he said.
British care homes for the elderly were largely privatized beginning in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. In the early 2000s, “dazzled by the demographics” of Britain’s aging population, property investors, private equity firms and hedge funds began investing heavily in the sector. They rolled up smaller operators into larger chains, split the property assets away from operations, larded the homes with debt and built out Byzantine webs of companies and subcompanies that made it difficult to know who the ultimate owners were and where the profits were going. “And this was all going swimmingly,” Hood said, “until we hit the global financial crisis in 2008-09.”
The industry investors had weighed the homes down so heavily with rents, debt payments and management fees that when the British government slashed care-home budgets, it thrust the industry into a massive cash flow crisis. One of the largest chains went bankrupt. Several others were forced to the brink of collapse. The investors — the ones who hadn’t already taken their profits and gone home — were still making their money, through interest payments and rents, but the homes themselves, where the elderly lived and received vital medical care, were barely hanging on.
Hood saw all this as a disaster waiting to happen. The government, he believed, had to do something, fast. “We published the research, did a press release and ran the distress signal up the flagpole,” he said. He met with top government officials. But nothing really changed. Eighteen months later, he published another report, released another press release, met with the government again. But again, nothing really happened. “I have been publishing that research about every year since,” Hood said. “And somewhere down this path, it stopped being a matter of financial analysis for me, and it’s become a campaign.”
Hood isn’t sure when it finally clicked for him. But at some point, his fundamental view of the industry changed. “I look at this, and I just say, philosophically, it’s wrong,” he said. “I mean I’m no rabid, extreme socialist,” he said. “I’ve made a very good living, and I’m comfortable in older age, as a result of being in business and the money I’ve made.” But after years of study and speaking out, he has come to believe the problem with the care home business is the fact that it is a business at all.
“The more you look at this, the more you see what’s going on, the more I say to myself, why is social care — which is a responsibility of society — being run for profit?” he said. “The government has to step in here.”
