Rage against the Cuts
Join us in Woking for the first Surrey-wide Protest against the Cuts, Sat 11th Dec
Meet outside Redhill Rail Station at 10:30am
Or why not join us on the train at…
· East Croydon 10:59am
· Clapham Junction 11:22am
We’ll be in the last carriage of each train
CONFIRM YOUR ATTENDANCE NOW TO GET 50% OFF YOUR RAIL FARE*
Reply to this email redhillcutscoalition@gmail.com with your name, contact details and how many tickets you require (provisional price of £5 each rather than £9.50). *Deadline to take part in the cost saving scheme will be Dec 9th
FEEDER MARCH
Or if you would prefer to make your own way to Woking, why not meet us outside Woking Rail Station (High Street Exit) at 11.40am for the feeder march to the main rally and protest
Showing posts with label Cuts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuts. Show all posts
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Friday, 12 November 2010
Marches, protests and demonstrations change history
History shows that protest works, say Lindsey German, national convenor of Stop the War Coalition, and Independent journalist Johann Hari. With a government determined to destroy public services and the welfare state, while still justifying billions spent every year on the war in Afghanistan and on weapons of mass destruction, we need a lot more marching and direct action.
On the evening of 10 November, following that day's huge demonstration against education cuts, Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes declared MP Simon Hughes that change only came about by the power of reason and debate.
"Rational debate wins arguments, not protest," said Hughes.
It was, of course, his forebears in the Liberal party before the First World War who refused point blank to grant women the vote.
After a period of sweet reason, women decided they had had enough and began to take action. They marched, disrupted ministers' public meetings, rushed the House of Commons, broke windows using neat little hammers they kept in their handbags.
The suffragettes understood that appeals to the better nature of politicians simply would not get them very far. They stand in a long tradition.
All the major gains achieved in Britain - from the vote for workers and women, the right to join trade unions, the right to demonstrate, the welfare state itself - were only granted as a result of protest, campaigning and struggles until they were won. Many of those involved made great sacrifices, from the Tolpuddle martyrs transported to Australia for trying to form a union, to the suffragettes who went on hunger strike for their cause.
We should remember this when listening to the outrage about the broken windows of the Conservative Party headquarters on Millbank, when it was occupied by students on the anti-cuts demonstration.
We should also remember that in the past people also used tactics to draw attention to their cause which were widely criticised.
There are two points that we can draw from the November 10 protests. The first is that there is a great deal of hypocrisy about the violence on demonstrations. The proposed cuts by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government will create misery for many people.
Young people will not be able to go to university, those forced to move will suffer real stress sometimes resulting in illness or family break up, the sick and disabled will face benefit cuts. Surely this should be condemned much more strongly than the breaking of a few windows in central London?
Protest works
The second is that protest works. Not because the students have won their demands, although they have created a mass movement which certainly creates the potential for them to win. But because by going on the streets the students have asserted that there is an alternative to simply sitting back and accepting the hideous consensus which passes for political debate in most quarters. They have in one day pushed their views onto the political agenda.
Demonstrations also help to build confidence and solidarity among those who demonstrate – they establish that the protesters are not isolated but part of a bigger movement. This has been one of the most important aspects of the anti war movement. It has created a culture of protest and a network of activists who have helped to spread the movement.
The mantra 'what's the point of protesting' is a counsel of despair, a refusal to acknowledge that we can change the world for the better. The anti-war demonstrations have helped build a mass consciousness in Britain, have got rid of Tony Blair, who was forced to agree to stand down as prime minister just days after the demonstration against Israel's barbaric Lebanon demo in 2005. They have helped fight Islamophobia and attacks on civil liberties. They have made future wars harder to justify.
With a government determined to destroy the welfare state while still justifying billions spent every year on the war in Afghanistan and on weapons of mass destruction, surely the anti-war demonstrators should be making links with the students, demanding to cut the war not education.
On Saturday 20 November, we'll be marching again, to get the troops out of Afghanistan and in protest at the Nato summit which will meet the same weekend. We expect many students and school students, as well as peace activists and trade unionists, to be there.
We need a lot more marching, as well as direct action, if we are to win a world that prioritises welfare provision and public services for all, rather than wars that bring nothing but mass slaughter and destruction.
Lindsey German will be speaking at the launch meeting of Redhill Coalition against Cuts on Wednesday 24th November at 7pm in the Harlequin Theatre, Redhill
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
"We are going to take power from government and hand it to people, families and communities," - Yeah Right!
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| "Propaganda worthy of Joseph Goebbels." |
He claimed that the millions who will suffer deeply from Con-Dem cuts would now be given control over government policies.
Mr Cameron, flanked by Lib Dem sidekick Nick Clegg, announced the launching of specific "business plans" for every government department, with monthly progress reports accessible to the public on a special website.
"We are going to take power from government and hand it to people, families and communities," proclaimed Mr Cameron.
But almost in the same breath he insisted that more private "independent providers" would be running public services.
Left Labour MP John Cryer angrily accused Mr Cameron of indulging in "propaganda worthy of Joseph Goebbels."
Mr Cryer added: "This is turning truth on its head. Cameron is trying to propagate a con on the British people.
"If people respond to this and ask for cuts to be reversed, are the Con-Dems really going to come along and make sure that hospitals, schools, libraries and old people's centres threatened with closure are not going to close after all? Of course they're not."
Labour shadow cabinet office minister Jon Trickett denounced a government "stunt" which was simply "a mask for what is really happening."
Mr Trickett added: "The truth is that, rather than a power shift to the people, this is actually a power shift to big business."
Mr Cameron got off to a shambolic start when he refused to take any questions from the press at the Whitehall event. He took just a few tame questions from senior civil servants, and then whisked off.
He claimed that the previous system of bureaucratic centrally controlled targets would be abandoned and government would be "turned on its head."
Reform would be driven "by the consistent, long-term pressure of what people want and choose in their public services."
He went on: "In one of the biggest blows for people power, we're shining a bright light of transparency on everything government does."
Each department's business plan would set out actions to be taken and info on the progress of reforms and the results they were achieving "so that people can hold us to account."
If monthly progress is poor at a particular government department then meetings will be convened with Lib Dem Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander.
For serious lapses Mr Cameron or even Mr Clegg will be wheeled in to crack the whip.
Public service union PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: "The idea that this represents any kind of shift in power away from the millionaires in the coalition Cabinet to the people would be laughable if it wasn't such a distortion of the truth."
He pledged: "We cannot and will not allow their plans to go unchallenged and PCS is committed to helping to organise popular opposition in communities the length and breadth of the UK."
Labour MP Michael Meacher predicted that the new government website would "expose the government to a huge amount of flak" and that MPs would put down large numbers of questions about progress of government policies.
Article from the Morning Star
maito:rogerbagley@peoples-press.com
Thursday, 4 November 2010
MPs voice 'grave concerns' over spending cuts
Spending committee warns of 'serious risk' that government will have to cut frontline services to beat deficit
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| The public accounts committee says frontline services are at risk. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian |
MPs on a powerful spending committee today warn that there is a "serious risk" that the government will struggle to find efficiencies and end up slashing frontline services to beat the deficit.
There are now "grave concerns" about the government's ability to reduce public spending by £81bn by 2014-15, after a review of the last cost-cutting programme was found to have stalled and many of the savings did not actually transpire, the public accounts committee (PAC) warns today.
Even relatively modest savings of 3% over the spending review period from 2007 – made as budgets were rising overall – have not transpired.
Two years into the three-year budgets, only £15bn of the £35bn target had been met and only 38% of those savings were considered "legitimate".
The MPs warn that the coalition's plans to reduce spending by £81bn by 2014 – an average cut of 20% for each department – could be unrealistic as only £1 in every £7 of savings promised had been delivered.
Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the public accounts committee, said: "Departments were in general unable to make real value-for-money savings of 3% a year following the 2007 comprehensive spending review – and that was at a time of increasing budgets.
"Now that much more radical cost-cutting measures are required across government, my committee is gravely concerned about the ability of government to make efficiency improvements on the scale needed. There is a serious risk that, to reduce costs, departments will rely solely on cutting frontline services."
Hodge told the BBC Today programme that some departments were accused of "double counting". The then Department for Children, Schools and Families, for example, had no evidence to back up its claim to have saved money on IT procurement.
"What it demonstrated to us is the problem the present government will face if the machinery of government, this big tanker, doesn't have a focus on the efficiency savings," she said. "Clearly what is at risk is that the frontline services will be cut with profound effects for communities."
The committee's report, based on an inquiry by the National Audit Office and evidence from the permanent secretary at the Treasury, finds that some departments struggled to make hardly any saving at all. The Communities and Local Government (CLG) department had reported only £40m of savings at the half-way point, against a target of £987m.
The report says: "Departments reported savings which did not stand up to external scrutiny, and there were no consequences for senior officials in those departments that failed to deliver savings."
The report says that CLG had particular problems – the bulk of its budget is devolved to local authorities – but that senior civil servants should be held responsible when savings are not made, and the Treasury should be more hands-on in its monitoring. It says that there was will from the Labour government to make real savings but that the civil service struggled to deliver meaningful efficiencies and that Labour's reliance on targets distracted officials from considering more profound reforms.
"We are concerned at the implication from Treasury that it will simply reduce departments' budgets and then walk away from responsibility for the delivery of the level of savings required across government," it says. "Bearing in mind the disappointing performance of this programme, we believe the Treasury will need to take a very different approach to value-for-money improvement in the next spending period."
Savings were not considered "legitimate" because departments could not account for the saved money in their budgets each year.
Labour conducted two rounds of efficiencies, the first after a review by Sir Peter Gershon in 2004 and the second setting 3% reductions a year, achieved by improving the value for money of departments' programmes, by 2010-11.
Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said: "We said that our priority would be to take the cost out of the centre of government we could protect the frontline and, in just a few months, that is exactly what we have done. Already, actions led by the efficiency and reform group have resulted in hundreds of millions of pounds of demonstrable efficiency savings – and this is just the beginning. These are savings we invite the PAC to hold us to account for.
"As we move forward with our ambitious efficiency programme, we expect to build significantly on the £402m already saved following a review of the government's largest projects, the £18m already saved in rent alone by vacating empty buildings and the estimated £800m we expect to save this year from renegotiating contracts with some of the government's largest suppliers.
"These are just some of the examples of savings already made, but the hunt for more will continue. As I have said before, this government will leave no stone unturned in its search to cut waste and inefficiency in Whitehall."
Friday, 29 October 2010
Johann Hari: Protest works. Just look at the proof
Yes, you can choose to do nothing. But you will be choosing to let yourself and your family and your country be ripped off
There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.
This mood is wrong. It doesn’t have to be this way – if enough of us act to stop it. To explain how, I want to start with a small scandal, a small response – and a big lesson from history.
In my column last week, I mentioned in passing something remarkable and almost unnoticed. For years now, Vodafone has been refusing to pay billions of pounds of taxes to the British people that are outstanding. The company – which has doubled its profits during this recession – engaged in all kinds of accounting twists and turns, but it was eventually ruled this refusal breached anti-tax avoidance rules. They looked set to pay a sum Private Eye calculates to be more than £6bn.
Then, suddenly, the exchequer – run by George Osborne – cancelled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in Revenues and Customs says is “an unbelievable cave-in.” A few days after the decision, Osborne was promoting Vodafone on a tax-payer funded trip to India. He then appointed Andy Halford, the finance director of Vodafone, to the government’s Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates, apparently because he thinks this is a model of how the Tories think it should be done.
By contrast, the Indian government chose to pursue Vodafone through the courts for the billions in tax they have failed to pay there. Yes, the British state is less functional than the Indian state when it comes to collecting revenues from the wealthy. This is not an isolated incident. Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, calculates that UK corporations fail to pay a further £12bn a year in taxes they legally owe, while the rich avoid or evade up to £120bn.
Many people emailed me saying they were outraged that while they pay their fair share for running the country, Vodafone doesn’t pay theirs. One of them named Thom Costello decided he wanted to organize a protest, so he appealed on Twitter – and this Wednesday seventy enraged citizens shut down the flagship Vodafone store on Oxford Street in protest. “Vodafone won’t pay as they go,” said one banner. “Make Vodafone pay, not the poor,” said another.
The reaction from members of the public – who were handed leaflets explaining the situation – was startling. Again and again, people said “I’m so glad somebody is doing this” and “there needs to be much more of this.” Lots of them stopped to talk about how frightened they were about the cuts and for their own homes and jobs. The protest became the third most discussed topic in the country on Twitter, meaning millions of people now know about what Vodafone and the government have done. The protesters believe this is just the start of a movement to make the rich pay a much fairer share of taxation, and they urge people to join them: go to ukuncut.wordpress.com to find out what you can do this Saturday.
You might ask – so what? What has been changed? To understand how and why protest like this can work, you need some concrete and proven examples from the past. Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.
Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.
If that cause can be achieved, through persistent democratic pressure, anything can. But let’s look at a group of protesters who thought they had failed. The protests within the United States against the Vietnam War couldn’t prevent it killing three million Vietnamese and 80,000 Americans. But even in the years it was “failing”, it was achieving more than the protestors could possibly have known. In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US President Lyndon Johnson – a thug prone to threatening to “crush” entire elected governments – with a plan to end the Vietnam War: nuke the country. They “proved”, using their computer modeling, that a nuclear attack would “save lives.”
It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said: “I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President?” He knew that there would be a cost – in protest and democratic revolt – that made that cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon – and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn’t do it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they had failed – but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war. They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do – but they really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.
Protest raises the political price for governments making bad decisions. It stopped LBJ and Nixon making the most catastrophic decision of all. The same principle can apply to the Conservative desire to kneecap the welfare state while handing out massive baubles to their rich friends. The next time George Osborne has to decide whether to cancel the tax bill of a super-rich corporation and make us all pick up the tab, he will know there is a price. People will find out, and they will be angry. The more protests there are, the higher the price. If enough of us demand it, we can make the rich pay their share for the running of our country, rather than the poor and the middle – to name just one urgent cause that deserves protest.
And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.
Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.
You don’t know what the amazing ripple-effect of your protest will be – but wouldn’t Britain be a better place if it replaced the ripple of impotent anger so many of us are feeling? Yes, you can sit back and let yourself be ripped off by the bankers and the corporations and their political lackeys if you want. But it’s an indulgent fiction to believe that is all you can do. You can act in your own self-defence. As Margaret Mead, the great democratic campaigner, said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
For updates on this issue and others, you can follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101 or you can email him at j.hari@independent.co.uk
To watch Johann on US TV discussing Britain's austerity cuts, click here.
 |
| Johann Hari |
This mood is wrong. It doesn’t have to be this way – if enough of us act to stop it. To explain how, I want to start with a small scandal, a small response – and a big lesson from history.
In my column last week, I mentioned in passing something remarkable and almost unnoticed. For years now, Vodafone has been refusing to pay billions of pounds of taxes to the British people that are outstanding. The company – which has doubled its profits during this recession – engaged in all kinds of accounting twists and turns, but it was eventually ruled this refusal breached anti-tax avoidance rules. They looked set to pay a sum Private Eye calculates to be more than £6bn.
Then, suddenly, the exchequer – run by George Osborne – cancelled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in Revenues and Customs says is “an unbelievable cave-in.” A few days after the decision, Osborne was promoting Vodafone on a tax-payer funded trip to India. He then appointed Andy Halford, the finance director of Vodafone, to the government’s Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates, apparently because he thinks this is a model of how the Tories think it should be done.
By contrast, the Indian government chose to pursue Vodafone through the courts for the billions in tax they have failed to pay there. Yes, the British state is less functional than the Indian state when it comes to collecting revenues from the wealthy. This is not an isolated incident. Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, calculates that UK corporations fail to pay a further £12bn a year in taxes they legally owe, while the rich avoid or evade up to £120bn.
Many people emailed me saying they were outraged that while they pay their fair share for running the country, Vodafone doesn’t pay theirs. One of them named Thom Costello decided he wanted to organize a protest, so he appealed on Twitter – and this Wednesday seventy enraged citizens shut down the flagship Vodafone store on Oxford Street in protest. “Vodafone won’t pay as they go,” said one banner. “Make Vodafone pay, not the poor,” said another.
The reaction from members of the public – who were handed leaflets explaining the situation – was startling. Again and again, people said “I’m so glad somebody is doing this” and “there needs to be much more of this.” Lots of them stopped to talk about how frightened they were about the cuts and for their own homes and jobs. The protest became the third most discussed topic in the country on Twitter, meaning millions of people now know about what Vodafone and the government have done. The protesters believe this is just the start of a movement to make the rich pay a much fairer share of taxation, and they urge people to join them: go to ukuncut.wordpress.com to find out what you can do this Saturday.
You might ask – so what? What has been changed? To understand how and why protest like this can work, you need some concrete and proven examples from the past. Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.
Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.
If that cause can be achieved, through persistent democratic pressure, anything can. But let’s look at a group of protesters who thought they had failed. The protests within the United States against the Vietnam War couldn’t prevent it killing three million Vietnamese and 80,000 Americans. But even in the years it was “failing”, it was achieving more than the protestors could possibly have known. In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US President Lyndon Johnson – a thug prone to threatening to “crush” entire elected governments – with a plan to end the Vietnam War: nuke the country. They “proved”, using their computer modeling, that a nuclear attack would “save lives.”
It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said: “I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President?” He knew that there would be a cost – in protest and democratic revolt – that made that cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon – and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn’t do it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they had failed – but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war. They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do – but they really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.
Protest raises the political price for governments making bad decisions. It stopped LBJ and Nixon making the most catastrophic decision of all. The same principle can apply to the Conservative desire to kneecap the welfare state while handing out massive baubles to their rich friends. The next time George Osborne has to decide whether to cancel the tax bill of a super-rich corporation and make us all pick up the tab, he will know there is a price. People will find out, and they will be angry. The more protests there are, the higher the price. If enough of us demand it, we can make the rich pay their share for the running of our country, rather than the poor and the middle – to name just one urgent cause that deserves protest.
And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.
Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.
You don’t know what the amazing ripple-effect of your protest will be – but wouldn’t Britain be a better place if it replaced the ripple of impotent anger so many of us are feeling? Yes, you can sit back and let yourself be ripped off by the bankers and the corporations and their political lackeys if you want. But it’s an indulgent fiction to believe that is all you can do. You can act in your own self-defence. As Margaret Mead, the great democratic campaigner, said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
For updates on this issue and others, you can follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101 or you can email him at j.hari@independent.co.uk
To watch Johann on US TV discussing Britain's austerity cuts, click here.
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Barnet's 'easyCouncil' finds it hard to cut with £1.5m spent, £1.4m saved
from the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/26/barnet-no-frills-council-overspends
 |
Photograph: Graeme Robertson |
London borough of Barnet's 'no-frills' council spends more than it saves in botched efficiency drive
It was billed as Britain's first "easyCouncil", a flagship for the government's town hall spending cuts and a model of no-frills prudence. But it has emerged that the London borough of Barnet is spending more trying to find efficiencies than it is actually saving.
The Conservative-controlled north London council has committed to spending £1.5m this financial year on a much-hyped reform programme to help close a yawning budget gap, but it is on course to recoup just £1.4m in savings in the year.
The council's funding shortfall is set to hit £15m next year, and the borough has tried to innovate through its "One Barnet" programme. This includes paying to develop a system of "life coaches" to persuade residents to reduce dependence on the state, appointing business consultants to help town hall officials and even opening a library in a branch of Starbucks in a pilot which could result in the closure of some library buildings.
The programme is budgeted to deliver savings of £13m a year by 2014, about a third of the total cuts planned by the council. It had been projected to save £3m by the end of the financial year, but Lynne Hillan, council leader, has now admitted the savings will be less than half of that.
News of the shortfall emerges days after Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, named Barnet as a pilot for the government's "community budget" system to hand councils control of all spending in their area free of conditions from Whitehall.
Pickles claimed the move would "help better protect frontline services and help the most vulnerable", but there are fears that if Barnet's experiment fails residents will suffer deeper cuts in services.
Even if the projected savings from the One Barnet programme are achieved, it is planning to cut £18m from adult social services, £9m from children's services, £4m from environmental services and £6m from its central costs.
Alison Moore, leader of the opposition Labour group in the borough, said: "Barnet claim that easyCouncil is all about a relentless drive for efficiency, so it is absurd that in the first year, they've spent more money than they've saved.
"This bodes ill for their ability to use community budgets efficiently, or to effectively direct government funding."
Caroline Flint, shadow communities secretary, said the loss showed "speed kills" and that rushing into cuts could end up costing more.
"We are in favour of innovation in local government, but what seems to have gone wrong in Barnet is they pushed ahead without thinking through the consequences for local people," she said. "There are echoes of this nationwide with ill-thought out plans that are designed to save money, but could actually cost the taxpayer more."
Thursday, 21 October 2010
SOSiS Launch “A step forward”
Since the beginning of this year, activists across Surrey have been working hard to bring together a real grass-roots alliance of trade unionists and local communities ready to fight the cuts.
Along the way, SOSiS has managed to get affiliations from around 15 trade union branches (including from the Surrey County Council Trade Unions, SCCTU, which represents the 14 council trade unions) and from students at the two main Surrey Universities.
Before SOSiS was even formally launched, we played a key role in saving the local FE College in Ashford and Shortwood Infant School in Staines from closure and organised a lobby of the council against cuts in the Fire Service.
All this hard work came to fruition on Thursday night when 40 trade unionists, students, young people and pensioners came together to formally launch the alliance at the YMCA in Guidford.
We deliberately did not have a speakers’ panel as we wanted the contributions from the meeting to be the main feature. This worked well – with most of the audience telling us all about the cuts in their workplaces and their fears of the cuts to come.
Jane (a Youth Worker) told us of the savage cuts to Connexions services for out-of-work young people, Ginny and Nina (School Support Workers) spoke of the danger of schools becoming academies, Fiona (A Children’s Social Worker) talked about the already dire situation in children’s social work and the increased need for support which will be necessary when the welfare cuts take effect. Thelma (HMRC Tax Worker) told us of the cuts in the civil service and how much money could be collected from the rich corporations and tax avoidance – if the government were to prioritise this work instead of cutting jobs in the tax service.
Dan (a student from Royal Holloway University) told the meeting how they have set up an anti-cuts group involving students and campus unions, with meetings of 70+. Marcus (A student from the University of Surrey) talked about the attack on tuition fees and how students are fighting back.
Many other workers and trade unionists spoke about the cuts and then we moved on to what we are going to do about it.
After some discussion, a basic constitution was agreed and three officers elected unanimously. A steering group will consist of the three officers and one representative from each affiliated group. We agreed to meet regularly, produce a new banner for taking on demonstrations, to ban members of far-right groups such as the BNP and EDF and to mobilise for every local and national demonstration and lobby against the cuts.
Public meetings are planned at both universities and we will pledged to support any workers or local communities trying to defend their public services, defend jobs and defend pay, terms and conditions of workers.
Chris Leary, who was elected as the Chair of Save Our Services in Surrey at the meeting, said: “The meeting was only a first step but it was probably the first meeting of its kind in Surrey for many years and puts us in a good position to unite and fight the Con Dem cuts to come.”
Along the way, SOSiS has managed to get affiliations from around 15 trade union branches (including from the Surrey County Council Trade Unions, SCCTU, which represents the 14 council trade unions) and from students at the two main Surrey Universities.
Before SOSiS was even formally launched, we played a key role in saving the local FE College in Ashford and Shortwood Infant School in Staines from closure and organised a lobby of the council against cuts in the Fire Service.
All this hard work came to fruition on Thursday night when 40 trade unionists, students, young people and pensioners came together to formally launch the alliance at the YMCA in Guidford.
Jane (a Youth Worker) told us of the savage cuts to Connexions services for out-of-work young people, Ginny and Nina (School Support Workers) spoke of the danger of schools becoming academies, Fiona (A Children’s Social Worker) talked about the already dire situation in children’s social work and the increased need for support which will be necessary when the welfare cuts take effect. Thelma (HMRC Tax Worker) told us of the cuts in the civil service and how much money could be collected from the rich corporations and tax avoidance – if the government were to prioritise this work instead of cutting jobs in the tax service.
Dan (a student from Royal Holloway University) told the meeting how they have set up an anti-cuts group involving students and campus unions, with meetings of 70+. Marcus (A student from the University of Surrey) talked about the attack on tuition fees and how students are fighting back.
Many other workers and trade unionists spoke about the cuts and then we moved on to what we are going to do about it.
After some discussion, a basic constitution was agreed and three officers elected unanimously. A steering group will consist of the three officers and one representative from each affiliated group. We agreed to meet regularly, produce a new banner for taking on demonstrations, to ban members of far-right groups such as the BNP and EDF and to mobilise for every local and national demonstration and lobby against the cuts.
Public meetings are planned at both universities and we will pledged to support any workers or local communities trying to defend their public services, defend jobs and defend pay, terms and conditions of workers.
Chris Leary, who was elected as the Chair of Save Our Services in Surrey at the meeting, said: “The meeting was only a first step but it was probably the first meeting of its kind in Surrey for many years and puts us in a good position to unite and fight the Con Dem cuts to come.”
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