Monthly Archives: August 2010

Big society: in Skelmersdale’s dreams

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Hazel Scully

Hazel Scully

Last week, I went to Skelmersdale to talk about David Cameron’s ‘big society’ ideas with council tenants Ted and Hazel Scully, and Sandra Porter. I spent time with them last year as well.

Cameron’s ‘big society’ concept is as hard to grasp as it is to buy into. It’s centered on the notions that people will volunteer to provide public services in place of the state and that residents should drive local council spending and direction.

Phrases like ‘community empowerment’ and ‘people power’ guff through big society rhetoric. There are already training courses (complete with hefty price tags) for government and third-sector officers who, presumably, can’t picture big society themselves.

The thing is – none of it matters a damn. Neither ‘community empowerment’ nor ‘people power’ will make it past rhetoric under Cameron’s administration. The realities of Tory rule in local government are vicious service cuts and a chilling detachment from people who need public services. There is no engagement. There is no consultation with poorer communities. Funding is cut and services eliminated without a word of discussion with service users and providers.

We’ve focused on this for several years at the Tory Hammersmith and Fulham and Barnet councils. Let’s spend some time now in Skelmersdale – a working-class town in the Conservative West Lancashire borough:

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Skelmersdale is a small (pop 38,000), Labour-voting new town that was built in the early 1960s to rehouse families from Liverpool estates.

Skem’s sprawling green fields and bright new estates drew the young families crowd in droves: Skem local Theresa Mackin, for example, made the move from Liverpool 44 years ago ‘because it was green, and I got a house [instead of a flat].’

‘We felt like films stars, to have this new house when we just got married,’ says Barry Nolan, a plumber and local councillor who moved from Bootle to Skem in 1966.

Ted and Hazel Scully, and Sandra Porter were also impressed. Ted worked as a builder when he and Hazel moved to the Firbeck and Findon estate in Skem 35 years ago. He and Hazel had young children, and they liked Skem’s green fields and sense of community. There were new schools for the kids and a decent standard of living for a family on a builder’s wage.

They also believed that council tenancy was synonymous with security.

Alas – all that has changed.

For the past three years, Firbeck and Findon tenants have been battling council plans to demolish their homes. Their Tory-led borough council wants to demolish the Firbeck and Findon estate, build plush apartments for private sale in its place and move tenants like the Scullies and Porter to homes on less lucrative land (Firbeck and Findon is right next to Skem town centre and the green (if presently unkempt) banks of the River Tawd).

The tenants first heard of the plans in 2007, when they got letters from the council alerting them to the forthcoming demolition. Not a single councillor came to tell them about the plans in person. No meetings with residents – some of whom had lived in their homes for nearly 40 years – were scheduled. Hazel Scully describes the news as “a complete shock. We hadn’t heard anything from the council.” (My own calls to West Lancashire Conservatives have gone unreturned for a year).

It was up to residents to defend their homes. Scully sniggers when we talk about community empowerment: for her, empowerment has meant spending her retirement acquiring an in-depth knowledge of council operations.

She and Porter have written a stack of letters, taken petitions around town, joined tenants’ groups and learned how to bail up councillors and St Modwen’s senior managers (St Modwen’s is the council’s private housing development partner) at meetings, in the street and/or whenever their paths sync. They’ve learned to read council files, shadow key political players and patrol their estate for anyone who looks like they’re planning to swing a wrecking-ball.

‘The council said – don’t worry, bulldozers aren’t coming over the hill in the morning… but nobody believes the council,’ Scully says.

Indeed. Here’s Hazel Scully on community empowerment (she starts with a few words on tenants’ concerns about George Osborne’s spending review):

Early in August 2010, David Cameron scared a whole strata when he said secure council tenancy was no longer a right.

I thought about this a lot as I walked around Skem. The likes of Hazel Scully and Sandra Porter don’t see council tenancy – or lifelong council tenancy – as a right, exactly. They see council tenancy as a deal. Continue reading →

Barnet council loses £6m

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Tory Barnet council – known as EasyJet council because of plans to permit residents to pay to jump queues for services  – will lose up to £6m as a result of an arbitration finding.

Catalyst Housing, partner of private carehome services provider Fremantle Trust, had demanded an extra £8m from the council to cover what it called a ‘care fees deficit’ in its income. The council disputed the demand and took Catalyst to arbitration.

Catalyst’s demands for more money have taken place over the same period that the Fremantle Trust has made vicious cuts to careworkers’ salaries, and terms and conditions to improve the Trust’s financial returns on its carehome contract. Barnet council outsourced its carehome contracts to the Trust in 2002.

Low paid careworkers have suffered under the Trust’s cuts regime. They lost weekend enhancement pay: Barnet Unison estimated that the takehome pay of some careworkers was reduced by 30% as a result. Workers’ wages were frozen at about £8 an hour, with new starters beginning at around £6. Leave allowances were cut by 11 days and sick leave reduced to the statutory minimum.

The careworkers had been promised their terms and conditions would be protected when they were transferred to Catalyst and Fremantle from the council’s employ. They launched a strike campaign, which lasted nearly two years. The Trust later admitted the cuts had failed to deliver the expected returns.

Barnet Unison has described Catalyst’s demand for an extra £8m and Fremantle’s attempt to improve financial returns at the expense of carehome staff and services as examples of private sector greed.

The total cost of the Catalyst award to March 2010 will be included in the council’s 2009/10 accounts prior to final signoff by auditors. The value of the award to March 2010 has not been finalised, but will be up to £6m which will be funded from the risk reserve.

The cost will be funded from the risk reserve (currently £17.7m), leaving a reduced balance to manage other risks – risks which include the council’s cover of problematic deposits in Icelandic banks. The council lost £27m in investments in Iceland when Icelandic banks collapsed in 2008.

Meanwhile, Barnet council must cut £4m from its in-year budget to meet coalition government demands for in-year savings from local government. Charities and other service providers are expected to be targeted for cuts.

The council is considering the future of the Catalyst contract. Papers discussing the care contract are exempt from public examination and discussion at council meetings.

The council report on the findings is here (Item 1.3).

How Kit Malthouse risks safety with pitbull bans

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Does our new, liberal government have what it takes to throw out the UK’s pitbull ban?

This week, DEFRA considers tougher laws to control dangerous dogs – and rightly so. It’s time the dangerous dogs act was changed and its breed specific ban abolished.

I’ve been talking to dog control experts around the world this year. They say politicians who insist on pitbull bans compromise public safety – bans do not reduce attack numbers. They’re lobbying government to put proven dog control programmes in place:

Partway through a discussion about Ontario’s pitbull ban – a ban deemed a roaring success by UK politicians like Kit Malthouse – the Ontario SPCA’s Alison Cross parts with a fascinating piece of information.

She says that the OSPCA skirts the pitbull ban when it can. When the OSCPA picks pitbulls up, instead of putting them down, ‘we put them through behaviour tests, and if they pass, we try to adopt them outside of Ontario.’ The OSPCA does this because it believes breed bans are useless. You might say the OSPCA is in revolt against breed specific bans.

The OSPCA is not alone. Experts loathe the pit-breed ban phenomenon – and they’re not wild about politicians who refuse to accept how utterly these bans have failed.

In the past few months, I’ve spoken with the Dogs Trust in the UK, the American SPCA, the OSPCA and a variety of dog trainers. They all say breed-specific legislation is costly and difficult to enforce, and a documented failure when it comes to reducing dog attack numbers.

They are – without exception – of the opinion that in the right home, a pit breed dog makes as reliable a pet as any other canine (indeed, American pitbull terriers and Staffordshire bull terriers bumbled along as national US and UK favourites until about 30 years ago).

Dig a little in North America, and you find dog owners, fosterers and sympathetic authorities across North America pooling resources to spirit pit breed dogs out of euthanasia zones to safe localities and states. Some of these escape tales rival the Pimpernel’s. Continue reading →

Hammersmith: local fines for local people

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This is the latest in a series of interviews I’m collecting from low earners in Tory Hammersmith and Fulham’s Big Society:

About a month ago, Notting Hill Trust tenant Johnny O’Hagan, 53, found a fat letter from Hammersmith and Fulham council in his morning post.

Now.

Hammersmith and Fulham council rarely writes to its poorer burghers to talk love and/or mercy. O’Hagan assumed the crash position as he peeled back the envelope’s fold.

He was right to worry. Opened, the envelope coughed out a pile of accusatory correspondence about a rubbish bag that O’Hagan had put out for collection a day before he was supposed to. His collection day is Wednesday. He put his single rubbish bag out on Tuesday. There were letters, closeups and wide-angled photographs of the offending bag sitting by itself outside O’Hagan’s home on Hammersmith and Fulham’s Leamore Street, and a threatening notice – complete with paragraphs in red ink – demanding payment of a fine.

Little wonder that Hammersmith and Fulham’s less well-off residents live in fear of their council. One strike, says O’Hagan, and you’re gone. He’s an exemplary tenant and touches often on this clean sheet: ‘I’ve been a [Notting Hill Trust] tenant for 15 years and I’ve never been in trouble.’

So.

O’Hagan’s offense is poverty and ill-health, rather than attitude or a longterm love of life on the state. He was a manual worker for most of his working life – he started on the production lines in East Acton light-industry factories in the 1970s and 1980s, then spent ten years on the night shift at Sainsbury’s, unpacking West London’s frozens. He liked the routine and the regular work: he’s on the autism spectrum and prefers the beaten track.

He’d probably still be at Sainsbury’s, except that he had a heart attack on the job and went off sick, which led to the sack. Angioplasty followed, along with serious depression and a stint in Charing Cross Hospital’s psychiatric unit. Now, he collects an income support payment of about £90 a week and housing benefit for his £80 a week one-bedroom flat. He says he’s bored out of his mind. ‘I applied for dog walking, but they never got back to me. I’d like to work in a charity shop, or something silly like that.’

But enough of the laughs – back to the rubbish. Two days before he made his fatal collection-day mistake, O’Hagan woke up with feet and legs so painful that he could hardly walk. He went straight to his GP – he worries about arthritis and other permanent injuries, because he spent so much of his working life on his feet. O’Hagan’s doctor prescribed strong painkillers. They went to his head, so he decided to head off to bed. Before he went, he put his rubbish out. ‘I was out of it a bit. I got my day wrong.’

A couple of days later, the letter turned up. O’Hagan was shocked. These fines are heavy. The immediate demand for the single bag was £100, with a chance to get that down to £60 if O’Hagan paid within ten days. Both amounts were beyond him.

As for the £1000 fine that he faces if the council decides to prosecute for non-payment – well, forget that. Hopefully, the council will forget that: the costs (for councils) of taking people to court are exorbitant. Certainly, it seems that pursuing these fines is less about saving money than it is about terrorising citizens into handing over whatever they’ve got.

Eric Pickles is considering scrapping these fines and rewarding people who recycle (opponents of that plan say rewarding people for recycling encourages them to consume more). Hammersmith could choose to run such a scheme already, of course: unfortunately for O’Hagan, Hammersmith and Fulham prefers to prioritise in favour of revenue generation. It fleeces lower earners to keep council tax down. Vulnerable and disabled tenants have taken the council to court to fight the council’s various charges.

O’Hagan didn’t have £100, so his only option was to head down to the council offices on King’s street and ask staff to drop the fine. He left his contact details three times before he was able to talk to someone. He was told that he might be excused if he could give the council a doctor’s certificate. He went to the doctor, got his certificate and dropped it off at the council.

He hasn’t heard a word since, so he’s hoping that the whole thing is over. He says he’ll give it a couple of weeks and then relax. Been a tense few days so far, though. The last council officer he spoke to said he’d keep the doctor’s note just in case. ‘Do you know how much power do they have to take the money off us?’ O’Hagan asks. ‘Can they come into the flat?’

Big society: Hammersmith then and Tories now

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From April 2007, we covered Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council as it started to dismantle Hammersmith’s voluntary sector.

Hammersmith’s voluntary sector funding cuts were barbarous.

Hammersmith & Fulman funding cuts demo

Hammersmith funding cuts demo

The council began with an in-year cut from £2.3m in the first half of the year to £1.9m in the second. A 26% cut was planned for 2008 to 2009. Organisations that served people who were unlikely to vote Tory, and/or presented a threat to Conservatism were at the top of the council’s blacklist. This was long before the recession and deficit ‘justified’ nuclear-grade cuts. Hammersmith’s was an ideological raid.

So.

Over the next little while, yours truly and a couple of other journalists will be using real-life histories like the one below to compare Tory pre-deficit public services rhetoric with their current public services rhetoric. Our aim is to show you exactly what Big Society means to millennium-era Tories. The deficit has nothing to do with it.

Here’s a piece to be going on with (Big Society rating of f-all at the end):

April 2007: It was purely by chance that the Hammersmith Law Centre discovered that Hammersmith and Fulham council was about to cut the centre’s funding by 60%.

Centre lawyer Tony Pullen happened upon the report that recommended the cut when he was thumbing absentmindedly through a council agenda that had arrived in the centre’s mail. The report was called ‘Voluntary Sector Funding, 2007 to 2009’ and proposed that the law centre’s annual £261,000 grant be reduced to £159,000.

‘We hadn’t had any warning. We hadn’t heard anything from the council,’ Pullen says. ‘I don’t know how we would have found out if I hadn’t seen that report.’

It wouldn’t have been long before the cheques started to bounce. The report recommended giving voluntary groups that were due to lose funding just six months to organise ‘strategies’ and ‘contingencies’ before cutting them loose. Continue reading →

Big society gets small

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The NCVO has been encouraging voluntary sector groups to share information about the effects they expect that public spending cuts to have on their organisations:

“All of these [public spending] cuts are sure to include some significant reductions across the voluntary sector – at least one third of the sector’s income is exposed to risk. More than 700 of you have already shared information about how these cuts will affect you – if you’ve not already done so, please do spare a moment to take our quick survey or email almanac@ncvo-vol.org.uk with your stories.”

You’ll find a spreadsheet with detailed responses from the 700 groups here. I spoke to the NCVO – this work is ongoing, so the list will grow. And grow, I imagine.