Lancashire Tories and lives without care

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To be updated.

To Lancashire, now, where disabled service users ready themselves for the realities of Tory Lancashire county council’s horrendous care service cuts.

In February, Lancashire agreed service cuts of £179m over three years, even though the council has about £110m in reserves and plans to pour £294m into road works and transport schemes in the next four years.

This council has rounded on its most vulnerable citizens for service cuts. Children’s respite carehomes will be shut. Eligibility criteria for care for disabled adults will be tightened (nearly 4000 service users will be reviewed) and care charges introduced.

Charges for some services will be introduced and the council plans to cut fees paid to some residential and nursing providers (who, naturally, will very likely look to recoup their losses from service users. I wonder if the good burghers of Lancashire know that their much-celebrated zero council tax increase is being paid for by people with disabilities).

Disability Equality Northwest is seeking a judicial review of the council’s consultation processes. Fair play to them, too – I’ve spoken to service users who say they weren’t aware for some time that consultation about their services was officially underway. Others say that the council tried to keep them out of the “public” consultation meetings that the council held in late January and early February.

If reviews go ahead and the courts find against Lancashire, they could force the council to re-run consultation exercises, which would buy service users time to lobby politicians and think up other protest and service alternatives. Judicial reviews are hardly cure-alls, but they can slow a council’s cuts ideologists down.

The rest is a shambles. Parents keep up the fight for respite centres. Nobody seems to know how many council staff will lose their jobs. Figures of up to 6000 are doing the rounds in the press – numbers the council neither confirms, nor denies. Meanwhile, parents and families of severely disabled people linger in a – well, soulless limbo.

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The first thing Ned Ludd tells me when we meet is that he’s tired. I see it right away, then: red, bleary eyes in his otherwise appealing face and skin that is about the same shade as his grey hair and beard. He looks exhausted.

He was up all night looking after his severely disabled adult son. His son has cerebral palsy and a range of health problems – some remain undiagnosed. His son can’t move independently, or speak. He is fed through a stoma and tube. He suffers regularly from fits (about ten a day) and breathing problems and chest infections. The chest infections frighten Ludd, because they’re potential killers. They have nearly killed his son several times. Continue reading →

Ta ta Tamworth

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So.

You’ll be pleased to hear that even as Call Me Dave liberates the grateful people of Libya, his ground troops in the UK continue to target the most vulnerable of his own citizens. Nothing like consistency, as I consistently say.

Tomorrow night, Hammersmith and Fulham council’s Tory cabinet will take a decision to close Tamworth – a 14-unit hostel for people with mental health issues. These people are among the borough’s most compromised as far as mental health goes. They need medium to high-level supported accommodation and care.

Tough titty for them, though: the council has decided to close the Tamworth hostel in the interests of strafing Supporting People funding for a £300,000 medium term financial strategy saving.

“The closure of Tamworth will allow the Supporting People funding to contribute towards the mental health placements budget savings,” tomorrow’s cabinet report tweely observes, for all the world as though mental health care budgets should be encouraged to hand themselves in. Existing residents will be shifted into alternative accommodation, and the council will flog the building off – generally its aim with useful community buildings. Continue reading →

Service cuts start to hit

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Over the next few weeks, I’ll be heading back out to talk to people who will be dealing with the realities of council service cuts now that those cuts have been agreed.

On Monday, I’ll be talking to Lancashire parents of adult people with disabilities. They’re dealing with new charges for care and tightened eligibility criteria. One parent is particularly concerned about cuts to the charity groups which provide his son’s nursing care. Other parents are concerned about the council’s proposals to close care respite homes for children. They say their fight is not over yet.

I’ll also be talking to users of The Grange daycentre for people with disabilities in Shropshire. They are waiting to find out when their centre will be closed. And I’ll also be talking to a number of disabled users representation groups about actions they’re taking to challenge agreed council cuts. People say they refuse to accept their services are finished.

Will update this post over the weekend.

Barnet council workers to take industrial action

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From Barnet Unison:

More than 140 staff at Barnet Council’s Regulatory Service’s Department will take industrial action, in a bid to remain directly employed by the council.

Barnet council is a flagship for the Tory’s small-state vision of outsourced public service delivery. Instead of directly providing services, the council plans to shrink the workforce down to a small core of a few hundred staff, who will commission services from outside providers. The current workforce is 3500.

The Regulatory Services Department is first in line for sell off, which includes Trading Standards and Licensing, Land Charges, Environmental Health, Planning and Development, Highways, Cemeteries, Registrars, Building Control. The programme of action is designed to cause maximum disruption to councillors and to their plans, but very little inconvenience to local residents. Continue reading →

Who pays? – the myths of the benefits of privatisation

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If you want to hear from a widely-respected academic who has a truckload of case studies on failed private sector attempts to deliver public services, this one is for you:

From Barnet Unison:

Barnet UNISON and the Barnet Alliance for Public Services (BAPS) have organised a public meeting which will address some of the myths of the benefits of privatisation. Professor Dexter Whitfield will be guest speaker (director of European services strategy unit, author, published in the Guardian on privatisation, etc).

The meeting will take place on Tuesday 15 March at 7pm in the Greek Cypriot Community Centre, 2 Britannia Road, London N12 9RU.

Barnet Council is embarking on policy called One Barnet Programme (widely referred to as ‘easycouncil’). This programme has already begun – 24 out of 25 council services have already been told they are to be privatised. Up to £4 million has been spent on consultants and other staff resources in the last three years with no discernible savings for Barnet residents. A further £9.2 million has been put aside for consultants to help deliver this mass privatisation programme.

Dexter will address:

– Costs and consequences of Barnet council policies
– Community needs decided by multinational companies
– The effects on jobs, terms and conditions
– The erosion of democracy and transparency
– Implications of the government’s white paper on public sector reform

This will be followed by a Q& A session

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

Last week, Barnet council passed a budget making £54 million in cuts/savings which included cuts to frontline services and increases in fees and charges to Barnet residents.

Working for nothing

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From Liberal Conspiracy, November 8 2007

In the London Borough of Barnet, a large number of careworkers who work for a grim outfit called the Fremantle Trust are planning another day of strike action this Saturday. Their dispute isn’t a Grunwick yet, but it’s on the road.

Fremantle careworkers Carmel Reynolds, Anne Quinn, Lango Gamanga and Sandra Jones say they knew their working lives were about to take a turn for the perverse when Fremantle management began talking about cutting careworkers’ sick pay and holiday allowances late last year.

It didn’t take long for the talk to evolve into policy. “It went from ‘we’re going to have to take your holidays and your sick pay’ to ‘we’ll do all that and we’ll freeze your pay and cut your weekend enhancements,” Reynolds says.

She and the other careworkers had been worried about their salaries and terms and conditions ever since Barnet Council outsourced its care contracts to Fremantle and transferred staff to the trust’s employ, but the council had fallen over itself to reassure careworkers their new employer would be as great as their old one. God knows those of us on the union circuit have heard that one a million times in the last few years, but unfortunately, there are hundreds of consultants out there who can still make it sound fresh at negotiating meetings, and even more local councillors who are dopey enough to fall for it, so it’ll be a factor until such time as leading members of the New Labour cadre stop privatising public services (fat chance) and/or decide to legislate to consolidate worker protection (ditto).

“Oh yes,” Reynolds says. “They said it was all going to be super-duper and we were going to be fine.”

Continue reading →

Back soon

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There’ll be a short break in posting for a few days as I finish a couple of articles. Still around for abuse on twitter @hangbitch.

Be good.

Government says we can film council meetings. Get in.

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We win! Woo hoo.

Having spent several years telling bloggers and journalists to get lost, councillors have been told by Eric Pickles to welcome bloggers, journalists and anyone else who wants to film, record and tweet council meetings.

Bring your cameras, phones & recorders to council meetings this week as more cuts budgets are set:

I’m one of the many blogging journos who’ve been told by councillors to stop recording and tweeting council meetings over the past few months.

West Lancashire borough councillors were among them. This is an amusing little update on the “West Lancashire tries to stop me from recording a council meeting” story:

As reported last week, (Tory) West Lancashire borough council planned to hear (and very likely agree) a new constitution item to ban members of the public from recording council meetings. The item was due to be heard at the council’s 23 February meeting.

This all came about because in December last year, I recorded the selfsame rotters at a council meeting when they were trying to justify an expensive council-buildings refurbishment project. They took a very dim view of my committing that item to MP3.

“The constitution does not permit the recording of meetings and the ability to do this is in the gift of the council,” the council intoned in reports released before the 23 February meeting.

By the time the meeting rolled around, though, the council had been forced into a squealing u-turn by its very own government – and us, I like to think. Continue reading →