Council

And so we're back, and all set to go with more tales of the realities of public sector cuts...

We begin with the charming Hammersmith and Fulham council - the Tory flagship borough that keeps council tax down by raising charges on services used by the borough's poorest citizens.

Readers of this site will know that we've followed Hammersmith and Fulham council over the last couple of years as it has slashed services and funds, and looked to screw the shortfall out of people who can least afford it.    

The story we bring you today is of three disabled citizens who brought a case against the council for its decision to start charging for previously free home care.

The courts found in favour of the council, which had not technically broken the law by introducing homecare charges. That decision was upheld in a recent appeal. 

The justice who did the upholding didn't care much for his decision, or the council, though: he stated that the council had ‘sacrificed free home care on the altar of a council tax reduction for which there was no legal requirement,’ and observed that the good people of Hammersmith and Fulham might be surprised to hear that their council tax reductions were being paid for by people with disabilities.  

Plenty more to come on all of this - for now, below is the Hammersmith & Fulham Coalition against Community Care Cuts' press release on the decision. This is what a council tax cut really looks like. It ain't about saving money, or even making money, if the figures quoted in the release below are anything to go by. It's about shifting the tax burden from potential (upper and middle income) voters to the poor.

'Whilst endorsing the concerns expressed by two senior members of the Court of Appeal, “HAFCAC, was deeply disappointed by the outcome of the recent Judicial Review appeal, heard in the High Court regarding Hammersmith & Fulham Council’s decision in June 2008 to introduce charging for essential home care services for disabled and older people from January 1st 2009.

The judgment

'Although the Court of Appeal ruled that the Council’s decision was
lawful, two of the Lord Justice’s expressed concern: one Lord Justice Sedley stated that he had ‘very considerable misgivings’ which were shared by the other, Lord Clarke, Master of the Rolls, an inaugural member of the Supreme Court.

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?

Introduction:

Hammersmith and Fulham's Conservative council is planning to cut funding to a mighty range of longstanding local voluntary groups. That’s no big surprise from a Conservative council, although it was certainly delivered as one. Some groups have only just heard that they’re about to lose their funding, and mostly, they’ve heard it from each other. The council has not been too quick to let these applicants know that their money has gone.

The worst hit by far is the Hammersmith Law Centre – a longstanding charitable organisation that has been providing Hammersmith’s community and voluntary sectors with advantageous legal advice since 1979, and tormenting various council kaisers for about as long. The Law Centre is staffed by 12 lawyers - 12 experienced persons who know the law, continue to set national legal precedents with their work, give free legal advice to charities, unions, right-minded council officers and anybody else who suspects that the council or government office that they’re having to deal with is talking neocon garbage. It is perhaps needless to say that the Law Centre poses a problem for the council.

And so it is that the Law Centre is due to lose 60% of its funding. The Tories will try to point out (as their officer report on voluntary sector funding to the council’s Cabinet on Monday 16 April does, all over the place) that they are not cutting funding to the voluntary sector as such – they are merely redistributing it. Alas for council leader Stephen Greenhalgh, it is hard to mask this sort of surgery. The truth is that if you get rid of the Hammersmith Law Centre, you lobotomise the community and voluntary sector in Hammersmith and Fulham. You don’t need a lot of brain to get it around that one.

We will be looking at this issue in more depth over the coming weeks and talking to more of the people who are affected. This first story begins the discussion.

Note: voluntary groups affected by the proposed funding cuts will hold a protest at a Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting on Monday 16 April at 7pm in the Assembly Hall in the Town Hall on Kings Street in Hammersmith. This is a public meeting, and the affected voluntary groups would welcome support.

Hammersmith Law Centre

The Hammersmith Law Centre discovered that it was about to lose 60% of its funding not long before Easter. Staff there appear to have found out about on the day that long-time centre lawyer Tony Pullen just happened to see the council report that recommended the cut.

The centre is on the mailing list for Hammersmith and Fulham council agendas, and the agenda for the April 16 2007 cabinet meeting had come through the door, as the council agendas usually do. Pullen decided to thumb through the agenda - mostly, it seems, for the hell of it. He noticed that there was a report in the agenda called 'Voluntary Sector Funding, 2007 to 2009.' 'I thought 'that looks interesting,' Pullen says, raising his eyebrows.

Indeed it was. The report, which is still due to go before the Monday 16 April Cabinet meeting, recommended a £159,000 cut to the Centre's annual £261,000 grant – the most substantial in a list of very substantial hits. Pullen found himself a little flustered. 'We hadn't had any warning, and we hadn't heard anything from the council. This report was saying that we were going to lose 60% of our funding, and the cabinet meeting (where a vote would be taken on that recommendation) was only a few days away when I saw that report. I don't know how we would have found out if I hadn't seen that report.'

Brief snapshot

A typical scene in the borough at this point:

'Look at that guy!' one of the People's Party's female councillors shrieked, pointing a pale and shaking finger across the negotiating table at one of the many union representatives who'd turned up to this meeting to fight with her about the council's plans to cut jobs and funding at an important local welfare and benefits advice centre.

The advice centre was much utilised by a very large number of the borough's underprivileged residents - they needed the centre's help to negotiate the nation's complex welfare systems and they needed the face-to-face service that the centre provided if they were ever to figure out their entitlements. People came to the centre in their thousands. And they weren't all losers, as the People's Party would have the people believe. Many were abused wives, or people from war-torn countries, or people who'd been sick, or injured through no fault of their own and needed help getting back to the point where they could provide for themselves.

The councillor was trying to convince the union reps at the meeting that the best way to save the advice centre from People's Party plans to cut funding to it was to find something else to talk about and let her head down to her favourite local.