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 →

Lambeth council occupation 23 February 2011

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A large group of community members, council workers and anticuts protestors occupied the Lambeth Town Hall tonight as councillors tried to vote through a controversial cuts budget.

Lambeth councillors left the council chambers when the crowd poured in. Protestors set up their own council.

Here are some videos from the occupation. Haven’t edited them, so they’re a bit rough.

First: protestors refused to go into a side room that had been set up for the public, and pushed past security to get to the public gallery of the council chambers:


Protestors had been told the public gallery was full, but that wasn’t right. The gallery was empty until they arrived.

Then, protestors and the mayor started to yell at each other:


Protestors started to file into the chambers as councillors started to leave it:


Kids talked about the adventure playgrounds in Lambeth that the council plans to cut.

The No Recording recording

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In December last year, the Tory administration at West Lancashire borough council tried to stop me recording and tweeting a council meeting at which they were discussing an expensive council-buildings refurbishment.

Town hall refurbishments are controversial at the moment, as you can imagine. People do not think councils should be spending money on their own digs while they’re telling everybody else to put up with service cuts, etc. Proposed town hall refurbishments generate plenty of heated chat.

Anyway – this week, at a full council meeting, West Lancs council will hear a report called “Recording council, cabinet and committee meetings and use of mobile phones and other social media devices.” This report recommends that the council bans the informal recording of meetings unless a formal request to record is made and the meeting in question agrees.

Getting back to me – the report says that this all came about because:

…” at a meeting of the Council on 15 December 2010, an incident occurred when a member of the public at the back of the council chamber was holding her mobile phone up in the air, which led several councillors to raise the issue with the chief executive as to whether she was recording the meeting. As the smooth running of the meeting was affected, the chief executive asked her to refrain from texting, phoning or recording, but it was agreed to report back on these issues.”

The buggers. I’d sue their rightwing butts off, except that such an action would waste public time and money. I, at least, have standards. For the record (ho ho), I waved nothing in the air at that meeting. It was a council meeting, not a Bieber gig. I had no reason to hold my phone up in the air – not least because I didn’t use my phone to record the meeting.

The truth is that the smooth running of the meeting was affected by the opposition’s anger at the council’s plan to refurbish council buildings while the rest of the world endures austerity. Now, these appalling people want to add a rule to the council constitution that will make publicising service cuts even harder. Can’t understand the paranoia, myself – either at West Lancs, or at other councils that take this closed-doors approach. It’s not like recordings would reflect a different reality from meeting minutes, or anything awful like that. Councillors are entirely trustworthy, always. Everything’s completely above board.

I particularly liked this line in the report: “the constitution currently does not permit the recording of meetings and the ability to do this is in the gift of the council.” Says it all, really. Recording and sharing council business and decisions with other members of the public is not a right, but a “gift” that the council may or may not favour you with. Bollocks to that. Big Society indeed.

The full council agenda is here. The recordings report is Item 21.

Notts county union members to strike

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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)

So council services go

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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 →

Year one done

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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.