Hammersmith funding cuts demonstration

A couple of months ago, Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council voted to cut voluntary sector funding by 16%. The cut will be considerably more than that in real terms, because the council has stopped adjusting its voluntary sector fund for inflation.

The squeeze is due in the next three years – savings targets of £158,738 for 2010 to 2011, £284,772 for 2011 to 2012 and £257, 481 for 2010 to 2013, with a total savings target of £700,791 by 2014.

The council claims, of course, that the recession has forced its hand – “the impact of [the coalition’s public sector cuts] will need to be shared with the third sector,” thunder cabinet agendas.

The amusing (kind of) part of this claim is that the total annual allocations budget for Hammersmith and Fulham’s voluntary sector is a comparatively tiny £4m. That’s hardly major money, no matter how you slice it.

The amounts that the council wants to slice from it will destroy voluntary groups (some exist on amounts as small as £50,000 pa), but barely touch the sides of the council’s own three-year £50m savings target. As for the chances of annual cuts of £200,000 having pregnant impact on the national deficit – well, you have a quiet life if that adds up in your mind. These are petty savings, not temperate ones.

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Hammersmith and Fulham’s cuts are – as they always have been – part of an ideological raid.

Hammersmith and Fulham Tories started slashing the borough’s voluntary sector in 2007 – long before the national deficit ‘justified’ a blitz.

The council began in April 2007 with a 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. Voluntary groups that provided services for people who were unlikely to vote Tory and/or presented an ideological threat to Conservatism were at the top of the hitlist.

Affected groups weren’t consulted for a second. The first that the Hammersmith community law centre heard about the proposed 60% cut to their annual funding, for example, was when one of the centre’s lawyers, a guy called Tony Pullen, happened upon the report that recommended the cut when leafing through a council agenda that had arrived in the morning mail.

Many other groups only found out they were due to lose their money when Pullen finished reading and raised the alarm.

By then, it was almost too late for groups to organise formal deputations to protest at the cabinet meeting that would vote on the cuts recommendations. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Hundreds of people turned up to the April 2007 meeting to protest about the cuts. Two-way discussion wasn’t a feature of this event – the cabinet simply picked up its papers and left when people started to shout and complain. The cuts went through unscathed.

So much for David Cameron’s broomhandle for volunteers. Cameron’s vacuous line is that his community-driven, people-powered Big Society will place voluntary groups, charities and social enterprises (whatever they are) at the centre of public service provision. The truth is that Tories want nothing of the kind.

This is business

What the Tories want is a lineup of voluntary groups in which business sees a potential buck.

It will surprise nobody to hear that last year, Hammersmith and Fulham council made substantial changes to funding application criteria for voluntary groups.

Topping the list of revised commandments were statements about prioritising in favour of groups that could ‘lever in additional resources through income generation,’ and ‘raise increasing levels of funding from a range of sources including through social enterprise activities.’

In other words, we’re leaving behind the days when public money went to groups for services like advice, free legal help and the emotional and ‘time out’ support provided by immigrant help groups like Hammersmith’s Horn of Africa. We’re moving into an era where public money goes to groups that might offer services for sale.

Rather than use the third sector investment fund infrastructure specification to provide funding to organisations to fund their direct service delivery, we are particularly interested in funding the core costs, including overheads of infrastructure organisations which are able to show how they can lever in funding for a range of projects which will then provide the outcomes listed.