A SOUTHAMPTON MP has called on councillors to rethink cuts in adult social care spending due to be agreed today.

Itchen MP John Denham is urging ruling Conservatives to review £3.25m of cuts from its £70m care budget.

He has compiled a 25-page dossier which reveals one third of residential homes inspected last year are failing to meet minimum Government standards.

However Conservative care boss councillor Ivan White insisted the council would not let standards slide and accused Mr Denham of “putting two and two together and coming up with five.”

The Labour MP’s dossier reveals that nearly half of elderly care home residents were last year in homes that failed at least one of five risk based minimum standards, and one fifth were in homes that failed three or more.

The council paid the fees or placed around two thirds of the 740 over-65s in the city’s residential care homes in 2010.

Eleven of the 29 homes inspected last year received critical reports from the care watchdog Care Quality Commission, Mr Denham’s report revealed.

Council bosses were recently forced to suspend admissions at Woodside Lodge, one of three residential homes the authority runs, after it failed four minimum standards. And the Bupa run Oak Lodge Nursing Home, built in partnership with the council, failed all five standards categories.

Mr Denham said: “We know that a third of the homes that were inspected last year weren’t offering the safety, the dignity and the security that we would all want for our own parents and grandparents and the worry is that things will get worse rather than better.

“People will be expecting assurances from the council that if savings of this scale are going to be made it’s not going to make things worse.”

Councillor White said: “This is scaremongering by a Cabinet member of the former Government that left the country in a financial mess.”

He said the council was putting more resources into improving care homes in the city. He added most of the proposed savings were efficiencies and they would not affect care in residential homes.