Hammersmith and Fulham Tories

This is a nice post on climate camp. The pictures were taken on a pinhole camera.

Have slowed up a bit for 'summer' but will be back on deck soon.

In the meantime, if you're new to this site (lots of people have turned up here since the Guardian started running stories on Barnet council's cheap and cheerful service charging plan), wander around and read all you can about the devastation Tories have wreaked at Hammersmith and Fulham and Barnet.

There are a lot of interviews and photos on this site with service users who have been on the receiving end of Tory cuts and the privatisation agenda at those councils:

For those who have asked, here is the photo essay on Barnet's Fremantle careworkers and their two year dispute on pay cuts. 

The stories on the Barnet cuts to sheltered housing wardens start here.

If you run a search for 'Hammersmith' on this site, you'll find all the interviews with people who have had to deal with massive service cuts at Hammersmith and Fulham council since the Tories took power in 2006. 

Back soon.

I report here, and here, and here, on the bitter fight that Hammersmith and Fulham residents and staff are having with the Hammersmith and Fulham Tory council over staff and service cuts.

Things seem finally to have reached boiling point: at their AGM last week, Hammersmith and Fulham Unison members voted unanimously to ballot for strike action to support contact centre workers who are threatened with compulsory redundancy. I have a report on the contact centre story here.

A few thoughts:

Much has been made by Tory commentators of Hammersmith and Fulham's genius for reducing council tax - but that's only one half of the picture. One can be keen on council tax cuts, but one should as keen to acknowledge the consequences of them, and that's the part that is missing from the H&F tale. We've heard plenty about tax decreases, but less about the service cuts and new charges that low council tax necessitates. We've heard almost nothing about the fury that the service cuts has caused on the ground, or thought about the real social problems that a paucity of public services might cause as the recession worsens.    

There has been fury at the cuts, all right - and that, surely, will only deepen as the recession does.

As I've written before, the council began its tenure by starting - and losing - a war with locals and staff when it tried to close Hurlingham and Chelsea school.

It attacked hostels for the homeless, closed and sold the Castle youth club, and stopped the mobile library service. It also went after housing and sheltered housing caretakers - the people most likely to foster a sense of safety and community in areas most in need. The voluntary sector also made the hit list, and charges have been introduced for recycling, meals on wheels and homecare services. Those charges mean that the much-celebrated council tax savings are not quite the savings for residents that they appear.

Now, staff have signalled that they're going to rise to the fight. It has taken them several years to get to this point - people really don't like to take strike action if they can avoid it. Does the fact they've started mean we've reached a point in the recession where anger trumps fear? 

Photo: Hammersmith and Fulham councillor Harry Phibbs at a protest meeting on cuts to voluntary sector funding. 

As regular visitors to this site will know, yours truly has been following the trail of service destruction left by the Hammersmith and Fulham Tories in that borough since they took the council in 2006.

What a scream it has been. Even as we speak, the H&F Tory circus is descending into farce, as staff and residents organise a protest this week about the service cuts they're having live with and the services they're having to pay more for.

Last week, the H&F Tories delivered the world of a press release (put out, with genius timing, as the Mumbai disaster took over the news) that rattled on about a three percent council tax cut for Hammersmith and Fulham tax residents. Alas, the press release failed to mention the part of the story that so infuriates locals: that the council now charges for services that used to be covered by council tax, and life is even more expensive than it was. The 50p a week the Tories 'tax cut' now 'saves' residents must be spent on increased parking, recycling, childcare, homecare and meals on wheels fees. 

Our friends over at hfconwatch - among others - estimate that the H&F Tories have increased charges on more than 500 services since they took office. If the Tories manage to close down one or other of the comprehensive schools they've been after, locals will doubtless have to stretch their returned 50p a week to cover private education and/or transport out of the borough for their children. What a deal.

The Tories would, of course, argue that shifting costs to services gives residents 'choice' about paying the council, because they can choose whether or not to use charged-for services (although they rarely mention the service charge increases without a prodding).

The problem with the choice argument, of course, is that few people have desirable choice in these matters unless they are millionnaires.

More on Hammersmith and Fulham Tory Council's controversial funding cuts to the Hammersmith voluntary sector:

Here's a useful one: three people who've been helped by the Hammersmith voluntary sector over the years take Hammersmith and Fulham's Tory Council to court this week. The three aim to prove that the council's greatly unpopular plans to cut funding to the voluntary sector are unlawful.

They will argue that the council failed to carry out proper consultation and discussion on the cuts (seems a fair point - those who were present at the council's latest, and most memorable, public voluntary-sector funding question-and-answer session will remember that the council's cabinet ran away and hid in another room when the questions from the floor started to get hairy) and that the council’s decision to reduce the priority given to immigration advice breaches its duties under the Race Relations Act.

The Hammersmith and Fulham Community Law Centre will lose 60% of its funding when the cuts are made next month. The Law Centre only found out about this when one of its solicitors happened across a report in a council agenda that recommended the cuts. Many other voluntary groups only found out they were for the chop when the Law Centre told them that their organisations were on the hit-list in the aforementioned report. It wasn't the best. It seems fair to say that consultation - or indeed, discussion of any kind - is not a strength of Hammersmith and Fulham Tories. Be interesting to see if the judiciary feels the same way.

The case against the council will be heard this week, on Wednesday 26 September. The three complainants are pretty lucky it's being heard at all, says Law Centres Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick - the judge who first received the request for the hearing chucked it out on the grounds that it hadn't been filed quickly enough. Reason prevailed on reapplication, though, and the case will be heard. 'The most that can happen is that the courts will agree that the council didn't consult properly the first time around, and that they need to carry out a race equality impact assessment.' Fitzpatrick says. 'They could make the council go through the whole decision process again, and that could be useful. They would have to ask people in Hammersmith what they thought of cutting this much funding to the voluntary sector.'

Wonder what people would say?

The Hammersmith Law Centre has made a near-30-year career of successfully challenging government and local government on behalf of local people. Now, the Hammersmith Law Centre is facing a 60% cut in the grant that it gets from Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

This isn't the first time that the law centre has found itself threatened with closure. This article continues interviews with people who are interested to know why the law centre is in the firing line again.

There are links to the first reports on the Hammersmith Law Centre and voluntary sector funding cuts issue at Hammersmith and Fulham at the end of this story.

Photo: John Fitzgerald and Sheona York

There are certainly days when founding Hammersmith Law Centre lawyer and Law Centres Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick wonders if the centre's famed habit of confronting political nobilities led to Hammersmith and Fulham council whacking £120,000 from the centre's grant this year.

Fitzgerald, who sits on the centre's management committee and teaches at the University of Kent, isn't particularly keen to gratify anybody's thundering paranoia: on the other hand, he feels that a number of the centre's recent cases may have lost it points with whoever it is out there who keeps tabs on prospective troublemakers.

Chief among these cases was the recent and much-publicised court case of the group of nine Afghan men who hijacked a plane in 2000, and held more than 150 crew and passengers hostage in an airport standoff that went on for some days. The men argued that they took this extreme action because they had no choice and wanted to escape the Taliban. They were jailed, but freed on appeal.