From Unison East Midlands:

One to watch on Thursday this week –

“Members at Notts County Unison have voted to take strike action in defence of jobs and services. The one day strike is planned for 24 February, the day that the full council meets to set the budget.”

Of particular interest here is the fact that the union wrote to Notts county council and showed where the council could make £26m in savings. It seems that letter was ignored. The union takes this to mean that cuts at Notts are ideological, as opposed to judicious:

“We are left to draw the conclusion that the current budget position may be a deliberate misrepresentation taken for party political reasons, with the aim of building up a “slush fund” to reduce council tax before the next county council elections. Of course, we may be wrong about this and we would be grateful for written confirmation that the council does not intend to do this.”

About 1400 jobs are due to be lost at Notts county to meet a grants cut of £25m. Could be an interesting scene if strikers (a group which will doubtless include many of the 1000 or so people in line for compulsory redundancy) turn up to protest at the Town Hall.

This is the alternative budget Unison presented to the council (PDF 1.8MB)

Updates for week starting 28 February are at the end of this post.

Updates for week starting 21 February are further down this post.

Updates for Thursday 17 February are further down this post.

First post – Tuesday 15 February:

Bit surprised by the national political and press silence on the battles that are raging at council meetings this week…

As noted here, councils around the country have begun to agree and sign off budgets for the 2011-2012 financial year. Most will complete in the next two weeks. Council budgets must be set by March 2011.

These are budgets for the first year of much-reduced grants settlements from government – which means they incorporate the first wave of council service cuts.

Public council meetings to agree these budgets this week have been feisty and memorable – and it’s still only Tuesday. There are still several weeks’ worth of meetings to go.

It seems extraordinary that the public outrage at these local service cuts isn’t being followed more closely by the national press, or championed publicly by the Eds Miliband and Balls.

Councils are cutting services to very vulnerable groups. The Barnet protest last night (see below) included people who were trying to save the onsite warden service in sheltered housing. Service cuts in Cambridgeshire include a special education unit for children on the autism spectrum who couldn’t cope in mainstream schools. On Thursday, parents of disabled children in Lancashire will protest about council plans to introduce charging for care and to tighten care eligibility criteria.

Once these budgets are agreed and voted through by councils, it will no longer be a matter of fighting cuts. It’ll be a matter of fighting to have funding and services returned.

Since last night, we’ve had: Continue reading →

Over the next fortnight or so, those councils that haven’t already done the dread deed will sign off service cuts and budgets based on this year’s much-reduced local government grants. Councils must set budgets by March.

We have Barnet and Norfolk tomorrow, controversial Lancashire later in the week, Liverpool early in March, Leeds towards the end of February and most of the rest along the way. I’ve yet to hear of a council that has refused to set a budget, so – barring spectacular results at the many protests that are planned in the next two weeks – these budgets and cuts will be set. Hope I’m wrong.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people who use (Tory) Lancashire county council services and are extremely concerned about that council’s plans to cut and/or charge for adult and children’s care services.

They feel the cuts to those services are disproportionate. Lancashire has a staggering £110m in reserves (the seventh highest in the country – Essex is first with reserves of £200m), but will cut £179m from service budgets over the next three years. Eligibility criteria for adults who need care services will be tightened and children’s care respite services closed. The GMB says that council will cut 6000 jobs – a claim of a monumental cull that the council has rubbished so far, without making an alternate announcement.

All this with £10b in council reserves nationwide and nary a peep out of Labour about forcing councils to part with some of the stash to avoid this astounding frontloading. I’m writing a longer article on all of this at the moment.

From the Breckon Hill community enterprise in Middlesbrough:

Okay. You could argue that I’ve lost all perspective, but in my lefty way, I’ve started to suspect that George Osborne would prefer just to blanket places like Middlesbrough’s Breckon Hill community centre in napalm.

The centre has a daycentre for adults with disabilities, an accredited ESOL training programme, back-to-work support for people who are looking for jobs, computer classes, a youth club, a cafe with affordable meals and so on.

And that means they’re all bloody well here, aren’t they, George? – people with learning and physical disabilities, worried locals whose cafes and takeaways are going bust in the slump, youth offenders who want work experience on projects (that were once) funded by council, discarded public sector workers who want to retrain for jobs that don’t exist – you’ve got the whole, lowborn lot of them, George, right here in one building. You could pretend concern for their service needs and blather on about Big Society on Dave’s behalf, or you could just cut the paperwork and open a can on them. Boom.

Continue reading →