Another article I’ve written about people I’ve met while talking to service users who are dealing with cuts. These are women on incapacity benefit in Gateshead.
Author Archives: Kate B
The end of Breckon Hill
2
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The income it used to generate through hall hire to community groups is disappearing as those groups have their funding withdrawn by the council.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
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
A journey through austerity Britain
An article about some of the public service users I’ve talked to on my trip round the UK so far.
Balls (however small) in Newcastle?
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
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
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.
Lancashire cuts pdf reposted
Several people have alerted me to the fact that the Lancashire county council pdf that listed the council’s service cuts proposals has broken/been taken down/been lost/moved/whatever. Anyway, it seems to have gone from the site.
Fortunately, those people had saved a copy and kindly sent it through. You can read it here (PDF 512KB).
Back soon
Having a few connectivity issues in current location, so will be back with new posts later this week.
Still available for abuse via phone on twitter @hangbitch.
Be good.
Lancashire cuts
Update January 12 2011: The link to the pdf on Lancashire council’s site below seems to have broken, so I reposted it here.
So – here’s a sorry pile to read, if you were looking for one: Lancashire county council’s proposals for service cuts.
Not much escapes the scythe here. Note the proposal to tighten eligibility criteria for adults needing care (page 18: the council wants to raise the base eligibility rate from “moderate to substantial”) and to increase charges for homecare (page 68). There’s a general proposal to cut the overall level of non-residential social care services: a move that would reduce the levels of support by up to 20%.
As one parent of a severely disabled man said to me today – “they’re going to consult us on how they cut, but they’ve already decided to do it and decided how in a fair amount of detail.” Indeed they have. A great deal of time has been spent on the paper linked to above.