Swindon and Wiltshire care homes are in great shape and there is no real shortage in the county, is the message from the newly-formed National Care Standards Commission.

Swindon and Wiltshire area manager Liam Scanlon, 40, has been in the post since the NCSC was formed almost exactly a year ago, and he says there is nothing but good news from Wiltshire. Mr Scanlon said that since the agency was formed all care homes, nursing homes, residential special schools and boarding schools in the county are inspected twice a year.

He said: "Before the NCSC was formed each local authority had a different set of standards for how care homes should be run, which meant that there were 240 different systems within England, and nobody knew quite what standards they had to uphold.

"The NCSC has simplified all that by giving one set of rules to all residential homes in England, which we then enforce."

All care homes now have to be registered with the NCSC, and are inspected twice a year.

Mr Scanlon said: "We do one planned inspection, then we drop by unannounced to do another inspection just to check that it is all running as it should."

The NCSC also takes complaints from residents of homes or their families about the way the homes are run. Unsurprisingly, the cause of most complaints in residential homes is the food.

Mr Scanlon said: "Food seems to be quite an emotive issue, and we do get a fair amount of complaints about institutional cooking or lack of choice, which we try to solve by working with the home owners to make sure residents are satisfied with what they get to eat."

There are more than 5,000 people in residential care in Wiltshire, and this year (March 2002 to March 2003) the Commission received less than 100 complaints.

Mr Scanlon said: "That is actually up on last year, because we are out there in the homes a lot more, raising our profile so that people know where to go if they have a problem.

"Where possible we would encourage people to go the the home owners first and then come to us."

Although there is a national shortage of beds in care homes, Swindon and Wiltshire fair better than the rest of the country.

Mr Scanlon said that an influx of elderly from other counties led to a slight shortage in care beds, but added that plans for a new care home on the old Princess Margaret Hospital site would alleviate the problem slightly.