Monthly Archives: January 2011

I’m Right, but cuts are wrong: rightwingers for benefits

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At the back of Mel Richards’ adapted housing association flat on Grassmarket is a flight of stairs to magnificent (and magnificently central) Edinburgh castle.

This juxtaposition does the heart good. Most council or HA flats I’ve seen so far have been stuck at the butt-end of town, but these guys have killed on Location. This is mixed residence at its very best, in the bricks-and-mortar sense: a great castle rising from Castle Rock at one end of a flight of stairs and a small block of housing association flats at the other. Paul Dacre would detonate at this evidence of the poor shoehorning themselves into a fancy tourist address on housing benefit, but let’s leave him to blow for now. It’s cheering to find these flats in such a beautiful part of town. It’s also uplifting to know that they’d get right on Dacre’s tits.

As would some of the people inside the flats, I imagine, although I wonder if he’d know how to class them.

The woman I’ve come to talk to – Mel Richards, a one-time British-Australian journalist who has a degenerative and disabling nerve-damage condition – is a rightwinger. “I’m definitely from the right – I’m not a Tory, but I would describe myself as from the right.”

She is, however, fiercely opposed to the government’s benefit cuts proposals. This is partly because she relies on state support (and will continue to do as her health deteriorates – “come back in ten years and I’ll still be on benefits”) and partly because she believes that there is such a thing as welfare entitlement. She says that government and media rhetoric about Scroungers and The Workshy should have no place in an adult discussion about give-and-take taxation.

Continue reading →

Barnet Unison starts to ballot

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Press release from Barnet Unison:

Today, a number of key council staff working in regulatory services will be balloted for industrial action.

Barnet Easy Council gained notoriety in 2009 when it launched the budget easyjet airline model for public services. In 2010, the model was criticised in a report by external auditors for its failure to draw up a proper business plan.

The first group of council services to be given ‘easyCouncil’ treatment will be cemeteries, planning, highways, land charges, registrars, environmental health, building control, trading standards.

The council is looking to cash in on Hendon cemetery and crematorium. This is a highly valued and well run service which provides income for the council. It appears that Barnet has forgotten the Westminster Cemeteries debacle, which haunted the former *leader for many years.

At a time when all council services are under intense scrutiny, the common factor for these services is that they are high performing and low cost, The only way the private sector is going to make profit is either attacking staff terms and conditions and hiking up charges for services.

The council, which was caught up in the Icelandic Bank fiasco for £24 million and recently had to settle an arbitration claim to a contractor for almost £8 million, has spent approximately £3 million on the easycouncil model so far.

The council has recently published a budget proposal to save approx £54 million and at the same created another reserve of £9.2 million to pay consultants to deliver easy council.

John Burgess branch secretary for Barnet UNISON said “We have spent the last two years trying to seriously engage with the council. We have tabled over 20 detailed reports in an attempt to find a way to address the challenges to council services. The council has ignored our submissions. UNISON is prepared to sit down with the council but the council must put aside political ideology and genuinely engage staff, trade unions and residents about the future of council services.”

Barnet march against the cuts: Sunday 30 January

Assemble: 11.30am, Finchley Central. Indoor rally from 1pm, Arts Depot, north Finchley. More details here on False Economy.

Note for Editors:

1. John Burgess Barnet UNISON on 07738389569 or email john.burgess@barnetunison.org.uk

The end of Breckon Hill

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Yep: a faceless service user

Deptfordvisions has photos from the Breckon Hill community centre in Middlesbrough, which we visited on Thursday.

The centre is likely to close as part of Middlesbrough’s austerity measures. The income it used to generate through hall hire to community groups is disappearing as those groups have their funding withdrawn by the council.

The centre also used to receive some income for projects from the council, but that funding source is also drying up – a good example of the knock-on effects of these big council cutbacks.

The centre offers daycentre facilities for people with learning and physical disabilities, skills classes, language classes and back-to-work employment support. About 500 people use the centre every week. On Thursday, when we visited, the centre was full by 10am.

The back-to-work support is especially popular – small businesses in Middlesbrough have suffered particularly badly in the recession and people need to find other sources of income.

Will post in more detail about this soon.

Northeast and confused

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To Newcastle, then, where chaos (to borrow the Standard’s favourite word) reigns over those who have any sort of relationship with Newcastle council. The council has not released detailed proposals for cuts yet, and people are finding the suspense unpleasant. Either the council is dithering, or it is playing one of the all-time long games with the government, as we shall see:

Tucked into a two-desk office in the converted Holy Jesus hospital in central Newcastle is Launchpad, a voluntary sector group for people who use mental health services.

Launchpad runs focus groups, does outreach work, produces a service users’ guide to day services and assists a wide variety of local self-help groups.

Launchpad is an open-access service, which means that anyone can use it. All sorts of people stop by: people with schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, personality disorders, and the drug and alcohol-related problems that sometimes accompany mental illness.

The lives led by Launchpad’s clientele are not especially enviable: I’d like to see George Osborne banging on about “lifestyle choice” in here.

I speak to Jim Davison, a once-homeless, recovering alcoholic who is heavily medicated for psychosis. He says he wandered the streets of Edinburgh pissed for three years before he finally gave up the drink and got help finding proper accommodation. He volunteers at Launchpad several days a week now. He is laudably snarky about the miles and prescriptions he’s clocked up over the years. He says that he takes “loads of medication, including antipsychotics. I take Diazepam, nearly the whole Benzo family…I have auditory hallucinations – except they’re not hallucinations,” he smiles. “They’re real.” It’s an oldie and it’s a goodie. Everyone in the office laughs at it. Continue reading →

Balls (however small) in Newcastle?

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Liberal Democrat Newcastle city council puts these objections about grant settlements (the council was finalising the list this week) to government on Monday, I think it is.

Interesting. Is this a Liberal Democrat council standing up to its own party in government? “Standing up” might be too generous a phrase (as time goes on, I’d prefer a full-scale Ted Knight-esque resistance myself), but we could be seeing a vaguely compelling tantrum at Newcastle.

Newcastle City Council Lib Dem leader David Faulkner has already accused the Lib-Dem/Conservative government of failing the Northeast with a harsh local government settlement (£50m to be cut this year and the loss of the all-important working neighbourhood fund grant which was paid out for the country’s poorest areas). Faulkner also told students that he would have voted against tuition fees if he had been an MP. It’s true that any Lib Dem with half a brain in Newcastle would have said that, but it’s worth noting. I’ve heard no such fighting talk from Steve Bullock at Lewisham, to give a comparable, if unfortunate, Labour example.

Massive redundancies and service cuts are still likely in Newcastle, and I understand that Newcastle unions are gearing up to ballot. The council has listed some cuts proposals and is under pressure to show its hand on the rest. More on the impact of cuts in Newcastle in the next few days.

Barnet frontline in the firing line

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Was just sent this: a list of the frontline services down to be cut in Barnet. About 1000 staff have received risk-of-redundancy notices.

The most vulnerable people will suffer here. Run your eye down this:

Adult social care:
· Reduction of mental health social workers
· Reduction of brain injury social worker and closure of brain injury unit
· Closure of gardening project for adults with learning difficulties
· Cuts to staff working in residential and independent living services (learning difficulties)

As is the case across many councils, social workers will be told to reassess vulnerable adults to find ways to reduce budgets.

Older people’s services:
· Sheltered housing – removal of onsite wardens

Children’s services:
· All school crossing patrol (lollipop man/lady) staff to be cut
· 33% cut in staff working in Youth & Connexions
· 33% cut in staff working in youth offending service
· No youth services by 2014
· 97 children’s centre workers at risk
· More social work posts to go in 2012 and 2013

Good on ya, Dave.

Where is Labour on this?

Short shrift from Cambridge

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To Cambridgeshire, then, and a small anti-cuts protest outside Cambridge country council:

I talk to a couple called Tracy and Stuart Evenden. Like the 20 or so people here, the Evendens are fighting a shock (parents got a letter out of the blue just before Christmas) Cambridgeshire county council decision to cut resources to a special needs education unit. The unit is called EOTAS, which stands for Education Other Than At School. The Evendens’ 15-year-old son is a student at this unit.

EOTAS caters for children who are unable to cope in the mainstream. Some have problems with physical health, and some with mental and emotional health. Some children are on the autism spectrum. The Evendens’ son attends EOTAS because he was bullied so viciously by students at his mainstream school that he started to go under. It seems that by the time he was 11, his terror was destroying the family. The move to the EOTAS unit, with its expert staff and supervision, pushed that horror into the past. Now, of course, it is back again. The council’s plan is to return these refugees from the mainstream to mainstream schools. “The only other alternative for [our son] is home schooling,” Tracy says, “but then he’s out of school.”

The council is running a consultation exercise with service users until 20 January, but nobody here is investing much in it. The Evendens say their emails to councillors and their MP (their MP is Andrew Lansley) have gone unanswered. While we’re here today, EOTAS students take a petition into a councillor’s office and try to talk to him, but they are downcast when they come out an hour later. They say the councillor was not reassuring. He would not back the EOTAS unit and would not commit to reversing the council’s decision. He told them every effort would be made to support them when they were returned to their mainstream schools. That was the first – and in the Evendens’ case, at least – only contact these people have had with the council about the threat to EOTAS, apart from that letter just before Christmas.

I speak to an elderly couple who say they are worried about their daughter – her behaviour problems meant she was moved from mainstream school to mainstream school before she settled at EOTAS. They are new to this kind of fight and don’t seem to understand how council operates. Not many do.

This is the first part of a longer piece which I’ll upload when I get to a better bandwidth.