SWINDON Council looks set to make a u-turn on its plans to increase charges for elderly people attending day centres.

Last month the Adver tiser reported that pensioners faced a rise in charges of nearly 4,000 per cent since last year.

The charges were increased by nearly 700 per cent from 65p per day to £5 in October.

Then Swindon Council announced it planned to increase the daily charge to £26, an increase of 420 per cent on the current charge but a 3,900 per cent rise from last year's 65p charge.

Now it is to revise the maximum charge for day centre users that it was planning to ask the public for views on later this month.

As part of the budget setting process, it had originally been suggested that the fees for visiting a day centre would be on a scale of nothing to £26 depending on a person's ability to pay.

Acting cabinet member for social services, Coun Roderick Bluh (Con, Dorcan), said: "When we realised that almost 20 per cent of people would have to pay the full amount, it just didn't seem to make sense.

"Informal conversations suggested that many of those would not attend if it did cost them £26, so the total amount of income could actually go down. We are now going out to consult with day centre users on a maximum of £10 a day.

"But I must stress that of our 312 current centre users, more than half would still pay absolutely nothing."

He continued: "It costs us about £40 per day to offer a place at a day centre.

"Budgets are tight and, while we would never expect that service to be self funding, we do feel that there are some people with income levels which could sustain a bigger contribution towards the cost than they do at the moment."

Catherine Turnbull