More transcripts from a series of recordings I’ve made in the last fortnight with people in Weymouth who were employed (in the armed forces in some cases), or had businesses and then went through periods of homelessness after losing their incomes. A number of these people have drug and alcohol problems.

They’re exactly the people who will be targeted as Iain Duncan Smith pushes through his plans to permit Jobcentre Plus staff to dock benefits for people who refuse drug and alcohol treatment. The irony is that most have had their benefits cut at one point or another anyway – because they failed Atos work capability assessments, or missed jobcentre appointments, or didn’t realise they had to fill in forms to reapply for benefits, or didn’t get forms because they didn’t have fixed addresses, or had their housing benefits stopped through administrative errors and so on. That’s how they ended up on the streets in the first place.

Anyway – way to go, Iain. You’ll really claw back the deficit when you kick these people into touch. If anyone caused the recession, it was surely people in these sorts of situations, as opposed to an out-of-control financial sector, etc. You’re a genius.

Update Monday June 11 2012 – there’s a list of cuts to youth services at the end of this post. These are very interesting in light of Eric Pickles’ comments about “troubled” families yesterday and today. Some councils (Norfolk, for example) have cut their ENTIRE youth service budgets. Truancy officers, youth clubs, mobile units which youth workers use to travel round to meet and talk with kids in the places they hang out – they’ve been threatened and cut all over. 

Perhaps needless to day, those sorts of cuts have caused considerable (and under-reported) upset in local communities, where people are extremely concerned (particularly in the wake of last year’s riots) about possible fallout from high youth unemployment and unrest. Neither Pickles’ “initiative” nor Theresa May’s “crimbos” can disguise the fact that millions have been slashed from youth budgets, experienced youth workers’ jobs have been threatened, or cut and the kind of services which may have helped at-risk kids lost. This is quietly going on all around the country.

Thought I’d rush out a little something on cuts to youth services budgets, in the interests of crapping on Theresa May’s ridiculous criminal behaviour orders idea from the height that it deserves.

May is sonorous on punishment, but extremely quiet on the monumental cuts to council youth budgets and services that have excited (much under-reported) protests, petitions and community concern about potential youth problems and violence (particularly after last August’s riots) in recent times. Councils have tended to file those petitions and that concern in the Tough Shit pile, but we’re going to have a quick poke through it all the same.

“There is no doubt that sometimes difficult behaviour, particularly by teenagers, remains an issue of great concern in many neighbourhoods,” Enver Solomon, the Children’s Society policy direction and standing committee for youth justice chair, told the Guardian this morning, “but youth engagement programmes, community mediation and interventions that address the whole family rather than just the child are far more effective than rushing to rely on court orders.”

Enver is right. Unfortunately, we’re fast entering an era where your local council will be funding those services out of petty cash. If you’re lucky.

This post is a short outline some of those cuts to youth services. Am a bit rushed for time today, but will add to the list at the end over the next few days.

Last month, I attended a full and fraught Derbyshire county council meeting where several hundred locals turned up with a petition to save youth services that had been signed by themselves and more than 16,000 others. Local people were and are very concerned about a council proposal to cut youth service budgets by about £800,000 this year and to outsource parts of whatever is left to the voluntary and independent sectors.

People doubted that the same services could be delivered by those sectors, particularly on nearly £1m less. About 157 youth workers are likely to lose their jobs. Threatened services, as you’ll see from the video below, include a mobile service where youth workers travel around the county to talk to youngsters who might be hanging about and getting into trouble. The council confidently asserted that all sorts of voluntary and independent groups would and had come forward to fill the gaps that the cuts would open up. Unfortunately, the council was not prepared to release a list of those organisations.

Anyway – local youth campaigner Greg Roberts had collected more than 16,000 signatures for a petition to save budgets and directly-provided youth services. As you’ll see in the video below, the council spent most of the afternoon fumbling through its constitution looking for the clause that would excuse it from debating and voting on the petition. You’ll also see that this went down none too well with local people. They didn’t seem to think that the council’s plans for youth services boded well for social harmony at all.

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This is the latest in the transcripts from interviews I’m publishing as I talk to staff and service users who are dealing firsthand with fallout from public sector cuts and the recession.

This is a transcript from a discussion with a housing association officer in the southwest. The housing association assists people who are at risk of becoming homeless – because they have lost jobs, or benefits, or their rent has increased and so on. The officer talks about the fast-escalating need for social housing and the trouble that the association is having keeping pace with that need.

“Initially, the main criteria for our service is that somebody could become homeless because of their problems, but we [look at a range of issues]. We fill in a generic form with people that covers everything – from employment, to education to social [needs]. [The main thing for us is] we need to be working with them to saving their tenancy. The tenancy is the most important thing – keeping a roof over your head.

“The majority [of people come to us] now because of cuts in benefits – because of the cuts in housing benefit, because of the cuts in ESA and it’s just all a big dominos effect…

“Demand is going up massively. We’ve always been busy and even in the last year, we’ve had a significant change from people with just general housing problems to the majority of people [needing help] because of the reduction in benefits.

“Sometimes, they are looking at homelessness. Unfortunately, because of the accommodation that’s on offer, a lot of the time people are being put into accommodation that isn’t suitable for them – whether that is because they have physical disabilities, or mental health issues. That is going to have a knockon effect, because their mental health will get worse, or their physical disabilities will get worse and they will have to be moved somewhere that is maybe more supported.

“In the long term, you wonder where the government is going with all of this… the government seems to think that there are a lot more bludgers than there are. It’s the people who were already struggling who are now getting to the end of their tether and not quite knowing where to turn. They’re having to turn to foodbanks on a regular basis – rather than just every now and again when something crops up with their benefits [in the past, people used foodbanks in emergencies, when their benefits were unexpectedly delayed]. It’s now a regular event, because that’s the only way that they can feed their children.

“The reallocation of housing benefits for the under 35s – [that has had a] huge, huge massive impact. The people that were already in a one-bedroom flat are now being told that they are no longer going to have benefits to fund that. Then you’ve also got people with mental health issues who can’t go into shared accommodation, but unless they’re on mid-rate DLA, or they’ve been in supported accommodation in the past, that’s all that they’re being offered. In their circumstances, it’s wrong. Continue reading →