Category Archives: Council

Council service cuts stories

Lancashire cuts

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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.

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My “Banned Recording” recording

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Perhaps not quite as thrilling as the title of this post would have you believe… but this is the recording of the December West Lancashire borough council meeting that WL Tories told me to drop.

The chief executive stopped the meeting about halfway through to tell me to stop recording and tweeting.

The argument about my recording and tweeting starts at the beginning of the first clip below.

Councillors debate the recording issue for about a minute, then return to the discussion they were having about the refurbishment of council buildings.

Labour leader Paul Cotterill picks the recording issue up again at 6:56. Councillor David O’Toole, who made the complaint about the recording – and the dangers of members of the public editing recordings unprofessionally – is heard from towards the end.

Clip 1 (10 mins)

This second recording is an unedited version of the entire meeting.

Full (102 minutes)

A small resistance to be sure, but one I wanted to see through. Next West Lancashire council meeting is in a couple of weeks.

My life, their choice

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This is a slideshow (by the fabulous deptfordvisions) featuring users of the soon-to-be-closed Grange centre for people with disabilities in Shropshire. These are the people Shropshire council did not want us to interview.

My life, My Choice is Shropshire council’s tag for its adult social care programme. The Grange centre users modified it. I’ve used the modification for the title of this post.

This was the day after the Grange’s Christmas party – thus the hats.

More on ignoring the great ignored

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So…

I’ve been forwarded an email by a number of people who are desperate to protect the Hammersmith library service from cuts, and jobs and service downgradings.

The email exchange is between a local union rep and H&F Tory councillor Greg Smith, cabinet member for the (deliciously-named) Residents’ Services department and the councillor responsible for the libraries ‘restructure.’

In the email, the rep pleads with Smith to visit staff at the very popular, but-soon-to-be-disbanded, home library service (this dedicated service, which is run centrally from Barons Court library, will be devolved to other Hammersmith libraries. They’ll have to find time and staff for home deliveries – at a time of cuts and staff downgradings).

The rep suggests that Smith join home library staff on one of their rounds to the housebound people who rely on the service for delivery of library books and DVDs (at any one time, there are 6000 books on loan to service users).

Smith’s answer – a resounding No Thanks – turned up just 12 minutes after the rep sent the original.

I reproduce the email here – not just because it demonstrates the airy Tory dismissal of service users and staff that speaks – if you will – such volumes, but because it points up the worrying lack of interest in consultation that I’m finding more and more. Continue reading →

Disabling users

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This is a post about the efforts two Northwest Tory councils have made to stop me reporting on public sector cuts:

My visit to the soon-to-be-closed Grange daycentre in Shropshire hit the skids before it started.

The Grange daycentre is an adapted community facility used by people with severe physical disabilities. Their conditions include multiple sclerosis, severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy. Many have had debilitating strokes.

Last week, they asked me to visit Shropshire to record their views about Shropshire council’s sudden decision to close their daycentre. So off we went, my photographer and I: skidding and crawling (in a car) across the snow and treacherous ice between Manchester and Shropshire, only occasionally breaking the silence to scream as lorries greased past on black ice, etc.

Turned out the drive was a minor inconvenience compared to the rest. The real obstacle was the Shropshire Tories. It emerged that the council had banned journalists from entering the daycentre. We were allowed no further than the foyer. Furious centre-users – some in wheelchairs, some needing physical support – turned up to say that nobody was allowed to talk about the centre, or its impending closure, because the council had ruled that talking might upset people (upset the service users, that was – not the press or the frigging council. I’ve talked to a council spokesperson since. He agreed that was the council’s line).

The centre users didn’t feel the council had the right to tell them who they could and couldn’t talk to. Who over the age of five would? Physical disability hardly disqualifies adults from conversation. Centre users Chris Alvison, Andrew Millarkie, Donald Gibson, Anne Lee, Victor Baylor, Eddie Davies, Terence Jones and Trevor Brian Steadman (all in their 40s) said they were prepared to move outside into the snow to talk if I wasn’t allowed through the doors.

The council backed off in the end, although needed a good slapping first. Local disability rights campaigner Nicky Clark (who has two disabled daughters herself) intervened on everyone’s behalf and shouted the council down. She was a while on the job: she spent the better part of half an hour on the phone to council management (council managers are due to talk to me in the next day or two about their decision to ‘protect’ people with disabilities). In the end, we were able to set up the cameras and recorders inside the Grange.

—– Continue reading →

Frontline services at Barnet take the hit

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You’ll find below a press release from Barnet unison’s local government branch.

The Barnet Alliance for Public Services (of which the union is part) has already held standing-room-only public meetings to organise against cuts in Barnet.

Barnet is one of the controversial London Tory boroughs. It’s known as EasyCouncil because of its plans to take money from residents who are prepared to pay move to the head of queues for services. It lost some £27m on bad investments in Icelandic banks. It has spent millions on a yet-to-be-delivered councilwide outsourcing programme called Future Shape. Tonight, the council’s cabinet committee will sign off a budget which proposes massive cuts across frontline services.

Council trade unions and residents from Barnet Alliance 4 Public Services will hold a lobby of a full council meeting tomorrow night outside Hendon Town Hall: Tuesday 14 December 6 to 7 pm.

The lobby should be pretty fiery if the earlier ones are anything to go by.

Continue reading →

How student protests inspire

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A few thoughts:

One of the teetering Right’s favoured anti anti-cuts tactics is to dismiss UKuncut’s movers and shakers as unrepresentative gremlins.

“I do not see any blacks protesting – wonder why,” one charmer observed under a video I posted of last week’s anti-cuts demonstration at Lewisham council.

The point of that and similar comments is, of course, that the Lewisham protestors were neither local, nor representative, and that actions like the Lewisham one could comfortably be written off as the deviant recreations of a small posse of middle-class Goldsmiths Trots.

Which was wrong.

The videos below are short clips of some of the people who spoke at Lewisham just before the crowd charged the hall. The first was a teacher from John Roan school. The second spoke on behalf of the now rather ironically-named Open Doors. Open Doors is/was a popular, help-to-employment service that will shut its doors in February – a casualty of the cuts programme that Steve Bullock’s council signed off last Monday. The third was a speaker from the local pensioners’ forum.

You’ll note from the clips that there was a range of genders, political viewpoints and ethnic groups at Lewisham. People had a good few things in common, though: extraordinary gratitude to the student movement, fury at public-sector cuts, and a willingness to rush the hall. The Right can shout those things down, I suppose, but that doesn’t quite change the fact of them:

Lewisham protests

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All on tonight at a Lewisham council meeting where councillors gathered to vote on a nasty and very controversial programme of cuts in this most deprived of boroughs.

Locals have long been furious at Lewisham mayor Steve Bullock’s perceived willingness to offer local services to Osborne’s scythe.

“It would be easy to declare our opposition to the cuts the coalition is proposing,’ Sir Steve told us at the council’s AGM way back in June.

It’s even easier, it seems, to put up no opposition at all. Locals have gone mad at Bullock’s proposals to cut libraries, refuse services and staff (especially in a borough that depends on council for employment to the extent this one does). As early as June, Lewisham had bullocked ahead and forecast a budget gap of up to £60m for 2011 to 2014 (although though it was still in the dark about government plans for key grants). People expect (for reasons that will forever escape me) a little more from Labour. It has been clear for a while that Sir Steve ought to keep an eye on the tide.

This evening, he tried to ignore it. Several hundred people turned up to protest at the early-evening council meeting. All went well, until they heard the public gallery would be restricted to 40. Then, someone said 28. Then, people decided they’d head in regardless. Why didn’t Bullock hold this meeting in a large hall somewhere and have it out?

Here are a few videos I shot during the rush.

Where consultations go to die

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A helpful someone has sent me comments submitted by users of Hammersmith and Fulham’s soon-to-be-disbanded home library service.

The disbanding of the home library service is part of a general Hammersmith and Fulham council assault on library services and staff – staff across libraries are being downgraded and posts cut as the council attempts to squeeze a few coins in savings out of this most popular and blameless of services.

The home library service is run from Barons court by a small, experienced team that is much valued by the elderly and disabled residents that it services. The council has told local libraries that from now on, they must run their own home library services, which of course they won’t be able to. At best, a home library visiting service will become a tacked-on extra. The staff cuts and downgradings will make it almost impossible for local libraries to spare staff to visit homes with the books, videos and CDs that home library users appreciate.

And they do appreciate those things, to say the least. The comments below make that clear.

The comments were made earlier this year when the council was ‘consulting’ (easily our era’s most meaningless word and act) local residents about its plans to dispense with the dedicated home library service. The really galling part is that the comments never saw the light of day. Word is that the forms they were on were shoved into a box that was, in its turn, shoved into a corner from which it only recently emerged. Even if the comments did end up in a report somewhere (and I haven’t seen it), they’ve been ignored. The dedicated home library service is coming to an end.

Anyway – here are some of the comments from home library service users. If nothing else (and there is nothing else), they show that locals are as passionate about their library services as Hammersmith and Fulham council is about eradicating services that don’t make a financial return:

“The Home Delivery Service, and its first rate reliable always cheerful staff. They know what to choose for each individual customer and find what is ordered.”

“As our Home service scheme is based there (Barons Court Library) I wouldn’t approve of any alternative arrangements which I feel might make working conditions for our lovely delivery people more strenuous.”

“My husband and I get through over 15 books (large) print), loads of videos, DVDs and CDs in the three-week period between visits. Without this service we would be left twiddling our fingers!”

“No trust could compare with the service at present. They have become “friends for life” rather than different individuals coming to us, if the service is farmed out to trusts or volunteers.”

“The Home Library Service is a life saver for us as we are both old and even if we were taken to a library we wouldn’t be able to carry the heavy books we enjoy so much.”

“Desperate to have the visiting library continue this service. Will sadly miss my supply of books to cover lonely days. In my case, being disabled, the books and whoever delivers them each time is important. Always such charming people, bringing a chirpy atmosphere.”

“The staff that comes to me always takes the trouble to bring books written by authors I like and also the H&F News which keeps me in touch with the outside world. Money is not the only answer to change, so do please think carefully on what you intend to do.”

“Barons Court Library and its services are wonderful, and it houses a wonderful Outreach service. The staff have worked under pressure for many years. The range of books and knowledgeable staff it’s time you rewarded their hard work and not downsized. It would be like losing my right arm.”

“The Home Library Service – my husband and I are very old and unable to get about much. The HLS has brought us books, talking books and DVDs every three weeks and the service is very much appreciated. I realise it may cost but since the number of people over 85 is increasing, the demand for such a service will also increase.”

“As I’m housebound my only way I could receive my library books is the Home Library. Without this service I would no longer enjoy the pleasure of reading.”

“I am not able to visit a library. My own service – The Home Library – is, as it always has been in mind exceptionally good and I judge the three people who run it exceptional also. To run the service on one full-time and two part-time employees is well nigh unbelievable. Not only do they bring the books but knowing one’s tastes they choose books also. I have always enjoyed their choices; they are well thought out and always interesting. These three people are so much more than ordinary library clerks and I would judge pretty well irreplaceable. The service they give me is of the highest order.”

“I totally depend on the regular service provided by the staff of the Home Library Service.”

More soon.

How cuts reduce us all

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Updated 7 November 2010:

This morning, I went to the Shepherd’s Bush library on the Westfield shopping site to help out at a small protest that a group of Hammersmith and Fulham librarians had organised.

The librarians’ salaries (library assistants earn about £21,000) are due to be cut as part of Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council’s gleeful pursuit of ‘savings’ and local annihilation of any notion of community, or public service. The home library service is to be dismantled and word is that some local libraries will shut.

Tis my view that closing local libraries ranks near book-burning as a social contribution, but what would I know, I suppose. Hammersmith and Fulham libraries will close and the free reading sessions and activities for kids they provide will disappear, along with the books, CDs, DVDs and free computers that so many enjoy and need. The reading and IT classes for adults that many libraries run will take their place among history’s sweeter dead, like sonnets. Thus it is that the Tories plan to build a happy, deficit-free tomorrow. My main hope in life these days is that I won’t be around to see it.

Anyway – the protest. Three or four librarians – all middle aged women – stood outside the library for about an hour in their own free time and handed leaflets about their worries to members of the public. I was there – no spring chicken myself – along with two long-time reps from the Hammersmith Unison office, and a well-known local blogger and a reporter. My leg hurt and we were all moving slowly because it was cold and we were all getting old. Armed rebellion was hardly on our agenda.

But hey-ho and you never know – suddenly, we found ourselves surrounded by four or five very heavy-looking guys in black jackets – Westfield security. Thus the high camp began. These guys were ridiculously combative – Christ knows what they had on the PS3 back in the office. At least one member of our group was hanging out to meet the resource-allocation genius that decided to send in five heavies to take out three librarians.

The first guy in the video below was incredibly aggressive – ‘you can’t be here. You haven’t got permission. You have to get out.’

He got very upset when he saw I was filming. He came after me down the street, putting his hand out every now and then towards me – I thought he was going to try and grab the camera and maybe even grab me. I hurried down the road – another slow-moving, near-fogey on the run – then back up Uxbridge Road and down a side street so that I could film the scene from across the road. So far, so very tragic. People on the sidewalk were laughing, watching my little legs trotting off to safety.

You can see three of these guys on the film, standing over the women who were protesting:

You can also see one of the guys rush at the camera on Chris’ blog.

There were so many security guys hassling the librarians that people walking by observed that security inside Westfield itself had to be compromised and that now was the time to start thieving.

So. This is how public sector cuts for the hell of it look when you get down to it, people – four or five probably-badly-paid security guys trying to score points off three greying librarians on a pavement. And all for a handful of change in public-sector savings. I don’t think that this is us at our best, you know. I’d cry, if I was the type.

Here’s one of the library assistants – a ten year veteran of the job – explaining the reasons why she wanted to hand out leaflets (it was her day off, so she wasn’t on library time). She also talks about the work library assistants do.

I’ve had a lot of stupid days in my life, but today really took the biscuit.