Keep Grisedale Croft open.
Grisedale Croft is the only residential care home on Alston Moor. On 21 April 2026, Westmorland and Furness Council launched a twelve-week public consultation on its future. Alston Moor Parish Council, working with the wider community, is making the case for the home to be kept on the Moor.
About Grisedale Croft.
Grisedale Croft is a thirteen-bed residential care home on Church Road in Alston, Cumbria. It is owned and operated by Westmorland and Furness Council, having transferred from Cumbria County Council on 1 April 2023 when the new unitary authority was created.
It is the only sizeable residential care provider on Alston Moor — a parish of around 2,000 people centred on Alston, England's highest market town, with outlying communities at Garrigill and Nenthead. The home has thirteen single rooms and is registered to provide care for older people, including people living with dementia, and people with physical disabilities and sensory impairments.
Two of the home's beds have, since 2018, been designated for use as NHS re-ablement and intermediate-care beds — the “step-down” provision agreed when the in-patient beds at the Ruth Lancaster James Cottage Hospital were closed.
The most recent full Care Quality Commission inspection, in October 2018, rated the home Good overall and Good in every domain. A short Infection Prevention and Control visit in November 2020 carried the 2018 rating forward. The home has not been inspected under the current Westmorland and Furness Council registration.
Beyond its formal role, Grisedale Croft has long been a focal point of community life on the Moor. It receives regular visits from local schoolchildren on health and social care courses, hosts community events, and provides end-of-life care close to home for residents whose families would otherwise face journeys of twenty miles or more in winter.
What is at stake.
It is not simply one care home. It is the principle that an isolated rural community should be able to care for its older residents close to home, with the people and things that matter most to them.
An older population in one of the most isolated communities in mainland England
Alston Moor is, on the Government's Indices of Deprivation, one of the most geographically isolated communities in mainland England. The nearest Care Quality Commission-rated alternative residential homes are seventeen to thirty miles away over roads that close in winter. Public transport is twice-weekly and term-time only to Carlisle; there is no scheduled bus to Penrith. The minimum ambulance response time is one hour.
For a frail resident, displacement out of Alston is not a routine relocation. It is the loss of daily visits from family and friends, the loss of familiar streets and faces, and — for many — an end-of-life care experience that becomes institutional rather than intimate. The wellbeing case is real, and it is what the Care Act asks councils to take seriously.
The Council's own published commitments
Westmorland and Furness Council's Annual Plan for 2026/27, finalised in mid-April 2026, commits to supporting people “in the place they call home, with the people and things that matter most to them”. It lists intermediate care and people remaining connected to their communities as priorities. It commits to co-producing a new Adult Social Care Strategy in 2026/27 and to supporting the development of a Neighbourhood Health Plan.
The Cabinet decision to consult on closure was taken eight days after that Annual Plan was finalised. The Parish Council's case is that those two positions cannot both be right at the same time.
The precedent
Occupancy at Grisedale Croft has fallen from nine residents in 2018 to five in 2020 to three in early 2026. The Parish Council reads that fall as the consequence of how the home has been commissioned, not of any decline in local need. If a service in England's most remote communities can be reduced to low occupancy and then closed on the grounds of low occupancy, no rural service is safe. That is a precedent the Council should not wish to set.
A documented public agreement.
The case for keeping Grisedale Croft does not rest only on the present. It rests on a documented public agreement made less than ten years ago, and never fulfilled.
In 2017 and 2018, the in-patient beds at the Ruth Lancaster James Cottage Hospital were permanently closed under what was then the NHS “Success Regime”. The closure was accepted by the community on the basis of formal commitments from Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to a package of alternatives. Those included enhanced community nursing, a rapid response service, day services, and — in the Trust's own published wording — the use of “residential beds as intermediate beds for health purposes”. On Alston Moor, the only residential setting that can meet that commitment is Grisedale Croft.
That 2018 commitment was set out in what was then called the Alston Alliance Plan. The two NHS-designated re-ablement and intermediate-care beds at Grisedale Croft are the surviving piece of it. To close Grisedale Croft now would dismantle the 2018 settlement unilaterally, eight years on, without any equivalent local replacement in place.
There is a longer story behind that. In January 2008, Cumbria County Council — the predecessor authority — formally committed to replace Grisedale Croft and five other Cumbria Care homes with new dual-registered facilities by 2013, in partnership with what was then Cumbria Primary Care Trust. The replacement was never built. The current condition of the building, sometimes cited as a reason for change today, is the direct consequence of that earlier promise being set aside.
The current position.
On 21 April 2026, Westmorland and Furness Council's Cabinet resolved — in a closed session — to launch a twelve-week public consultation on the future of Grisedale Croft. The Council's stated preferred option is to find an alternative building in the local area. No alternative building has been identified. No funding for any replacement has been confirmed. No timeline has been published.
On 28 April 2026, Alston Moor Parish Council held an emergency meeting and unanimously passed a series of resolutions formally adopting its position. The Parish Council is asking Westmorland and Furness Council to pause the consultation pending a joint review with NHS partners; is gathering evidence from families with experience of Grisedale Croft and of out-of-area placements; is establishing a Working Group to draft the consultation response, identify suitable replacement buildings if needed, and explore community-ownership models; and is using the Freedom of Information Act to recover the full record of what was committed in 2017 and 2018, and what has happened since.
The Parish Council's tone in this work is firm but cooperative. It is asking Westmorland and Furness Council, and its NHS partners, to honour what they themselves promised — and to do so in keeping with the Council's own published 2026 commitments. It is not seeking confrontation. It is seeking consistency.
Stand with us.
The single most useful thing any resident or supporter can do now is to make their view part of the consultation record — in their own words. The Get Involved page sets out the practical ways to do that.