Barnet Council

Barnet's elderly sheltered housing residents will take their concerns about losing their live-in wardens to parliament tomorrow. They'll be in parliament square at 12.30pm.

Have done a lot of writing and talking to residents on this one, here and at Liberal Conspiracy here and here.

Residents tell me that Panorama is following the story now. I hope they make a real splash with it. It ain't the best when public services are eroded to the point where very elderly people are forced to picket parliament in the rain to try and get back a service they should never have lost. Wish Gordon had made Fred Goodwin picket a lunch hour in the rain for his pension. That would almost have been worth the price of the ticket.

Almost. Was quite a pricey ticket.

Barnet council expects to save just £400,000 by cutting the onsite sheltered housing warden service - absolute peanuts compared to the hundreds of thousands of pounds the council is paying consultants to prepare council services for the massive privatisation exercise described in the post below. It's very small beer compared to the £27m the council lost last year on banking adventures in Iceland. It's certainly not much compared to the pile Barnet mayor Brian Coleman has thus far managed to quarry out of his apparently bottomless expense account.

Go figure. 

Sigh.

Updated 21 July 2009:

The Tories are decimating local services, even as David Cameron tells us he's a great fan of local power: here's more on local Tories who are using the public spending squeeze as a justification to keep flogging public services off to the voracious private sector:

Another windy night in the Tory borough of Barnet, and your reporter is snuggled in with the crowd at yet another Barnet council cabinet meeting, watching and listening as this council's rightist zealots pour forth another torrent of pro-privatisation, efficiencies horseshit.

As many good burghers of Barnet already know, Barnet Tories are working up a mad, massive and massively unpopular scheme (tweely dubbed Future Shape) for future public service delivery in lucky North London.

The council's aim is to turn itself into a focal point called a strategic commissioning hub. Heaps of councils have fantasised about turning themselves into strategic commissioning hubs over the years - setting themselves up as organisations (sometimes as joint ventures with private companies) that commission public services such as care services, housing maintenance, school dinners, building works, IT, etc) from private companies, rather than provide those services themselves. In the modern council management mind, hubs are, if you will, places where great local government brains meet and think from time to time, breaking occasionally to dole large cheques out to the likes of Capita, BT, BUPA and the rest.

Some, like Barnet, also fondly imagine that their hub might ultimately manage services across a range of public sector organisations - for example, run HR, finance and IT for the local council, police and PCT, etc.

The problem is that this concept has yielded thin results elsewhere in the country (and indeed the world), particularly when councils have tried to form service-providing companies with the private sector: in recent times, for instance, dreadful results saw Bedfordshire county council and West Berkshire pull out of shared services partnerships (at quite a cost, I gather), and Redcar and Cleveland council and Swansea city council reduced the scope of theirs. Perhaps aware of this dubious history, Barnet is shying away from the single joint venture company idea, but remains keen for private partners to either provide or help manage swathes of council work.*

Barnet also plans to stop providing some services altogether ('scaling down to a size which would mean delivering only what the local authority must deliver to achieve efficiencies' as the cabinet's originating Future Shape report has it) and to outsource whatever's left to external providers. It claims that the squeeze on public spending makes this approach necessary: 'a Times article noted that any public servant not preparing for smaller budgets is living in cloud cuckoo land,' one officer intones darkly at this evening's cabinet meeting. 'That's clearly a call to arms for public servants to readdress the nature of their provision...' No other options are presented: no there's talk of keeping services in house, or of working with councils that have successfully done so. There is only one show in town as far as the Tories are concerned, and it is thus that they plan to keep lining private sector pockets during the recession.

More on sheltered housing warden cuts in Barnet - an example of the sort of Tory public service cuts we'll see more and more:

We go now to a tall, brutalist council building in Barnet's Totteridge and Whetstone, where yours truly is holed up at a cabinet meeting in a large committee room, watching Cllr Mike Freer, the spiritual void who runs Barnet council, brush aside the concerns of elderly sheltered housing residents who are about lose their cherished onsite warden service in Freer's latest cost-cutting wheeze.  

As reported here recently, Barnet council and its financial team - that group of fiscal legends best known for investing (riskily) £27m in Icelandic banks, where the whole pile tanked - claim they need to find £12m in savings to balance books compromised by inadequate central government settlements (ie, it's Labour's fault - a point that Labour rubbishes, for what it's worth), inflation, and a desire to keep council tax increases below three percent as local and national elections loom.

The council believes it can save £950,000 (re-forecast to £400,000 in a rapidly revised proposal for this evening's meeting) by removing onsite residential wardens (whose tasks include dealing with health and security emergencies, organising GP visits, organising social activities, and checking on residents at least once a day) from sheltered housing scheme. They'd be replaced with a ‘floating’ support service where support workers based at hubs would visit elderly people who met eligibility criteria.

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It's a proposal that sheltered housing residents hate and have complained bitterly about since it was announced. Many feel that tonight's their last shot at putting cabinet members off. That's why hundreds of residents and their family members have turned up to this cabinet meeting to fight the mighty Freer.

Alas - Freer is unmoved before the hordes.

In a 'prearranged answers to questions from residents' session - with unarranged audience cries of 'have you got a mother?' and 'what about all the money you threw away in Iceland?' and 'I'm going to hold you personally responsible for my mother's health' ringing round the room - the disdainful Freer lays out the council's case for forcing residents to give up the wardens they trust and depend on.

And now over at LC with the sheltered housing story.

There will be another protest in Barnet at the council's plans to cut the sheltered housing warden service soon. Will post location details, etc, as soon as I have them.

Updated 28 May 2009

A bit more about the realities of Tories on the ground:

Parked high outside Hendon Town Hall is one of those wretchedly dated, revolving billboards that councils use to spam the masses with unsubstantiated PR bilge: at various turns of the loop, this one proclaims that the Tory Barnet council is 'working for a healthy community,' and 'supporting the vulnerable to live independent and active lives,' and screeds of other modernisation tripe.

All is not lost, though. There is this evening a nice, large protest group under the billboard - a protest group that is made up of exactly the vulnerable Barnet residents that the council purports to so fervidly support.

These protestors are very pissed off. They are Barnet sheltered housing residents, and they're picketing this evening's Barnet council AGM to protest at a council proposal to remove on-site wardens (people who help in emergencies, organise GP visits and appointments, and check in with each resident at least once a day) from their sheltered housing blocks and replace the wardens with a 'floating' support service, whatever the hell that is. They're mostly very elderly (in their 80s and even 90s) and at that unlovely point in life where people become too frail to stand. They're huddled in wheelchairs, or clutching walking-frames, or leaning on carers and chairs.

They're not too sure what a 'floating' support service is, either. The cynics among them have a few ideas - they think the council imagines a system where residents telepathically trip some alarm when dropping dead from heart attack, thus alerting a random officer somewhere in the borough to stop by later on with a shovel.

Bill Campbell, Barnet council's unnaturally oily senior press creature, refused point-blank to say what a floating service was when I told him that I didn't quite grasp the concept - Campbell said he couldn't say what a floating service was until the cabinet voted for or against the concept at its 8 June meeting. I said that someone must know what a floating service was, if only to be in a position to put the concept of it before the cabinet. Campbell said again that he couldn't say what the concept would be. I thought probably somebody could. This went on for longer than was strictly fascinating. Suffice to say a floating service is not one the council wants to brag about. Let's return on 8 June.

Back to the protest: long-time (eight years) sheltered housing resident Mary Dorrie, 87, glares across the small lawn at the front of the town hall, where grinning councillors sweep past the wheelchairs and walking-frames, and up the town hall stairs to their meeting. Some avoid the whole scene by driving past it. They pull up at the front door in cabs and fancy cars. The crowd boos each time one arrives.

'You just can't answer for this lot,' says Dorrie furiously, watching councillors disembark from late-model cars and shake hands with various high-vis-dressed coppers as they enter the hall. 'They're just going in that door and they're just smiling, with all old people sitting out here, freezing. I'd love to get inside there.'

Been in Marrakesh for a bit, but here are a few thoughts on G20:

Have been watching - even admiring - the G20 protests, but found it hard to shake the feeling that the whole exercise has missed the point entirely.

The protests might as well be taking place on a set for all that the people at work find them relevant. They glance occasionally at the telly we've got in the staff canteen, watching the coppers, the new and old media, and protestors falling into each others' hands as they chase each other round the square mile.

Everybody at work is worried about their jobs and their finances, but I've yet to hear even one person observe that they believe the G20 protests will protect them and end their mortgage worries, etc. There's not a lot in the protests that suggests the security that not-so-radical people are after.

Pity that the state, the media and the more strident members of rent a mob have singularly failed to bring the passion, commitment, and resources of their various G20 displays to the local protests that have really mattered in the past few years.

What a gala decade we local activists would have had if the mainstream media, professional protestors and even the police had joined us outside town halls round the nation to protest about the loss of council housing to ALMOs, and nursery school and welfare rights unit closures, and voluntary sector funding cuts, and so on.

How helpful it'd be if students, anarchists and the usual SWP suspects found the fight to save Barnet council's public services from elimination as romantic as going for glory at an overchoreographed irrelevance like G20.

At a town hall or local issue protest, you get to talk to everyday working people who can't absorb another pay cut or service loss, have never considered revolution, and spend most of their time on the picket line desperately - if misguidedly - hoping a person of press or political influence will notice and take up their cause and win it. At the likes of the G20 protests, you get to talk to coppers, cameras, and each other. Go figure.

Good stuff from Sunny on the heavy handed police action.

With more than two million people unemployed, house repossessions on the rise and cash hard to find at home and in business, good public services - health, education, housing support, care services, and welfare and job support - become more important to more of us.

Unison notes local authorities already reporting a rise in demand for debt counseling, housing advice, employment guidance, community finance and business support. The DWP has had to take on extra staff to cope with growing demand. 
 
It is hardly the time to again play the private sector lottery with funds meant for the public sector. Nonetheless, the private sector continues to line up for lucrative public services contracts (a market estimated  by union researchers to be worth about £79bn) - and public sector leaders continue to collude by promoting the highly inaccurate argument that private provision of public services is cheaper, more efficient, and inevitable. 

Pity for them that the public isn't buying:
 
In May last year, the Tory-held Barnet council in North London accepted - to the consternation of locals and staff - a cabinet report that proposed, in so many words, that the council consider outsourcing all council services to the private sector and/or external providers.

It was drastic, regressive stuff, even for Tories. On the bright side, I thought the report might turn out to be a suicide note (not to mention one of history's worst-written ones - will get to that shortly). The report failed, dangerously, to address or acknowledge the fact that even last year, the public had serious doubts about the private sector, and the wisdom of permitting the private sector to continue to provide public services (and fair enough, too - who in their right mind would trust the likes of HBOS or Capita to take their cash and meet a public standard with it? Who isn't aware of the catalogue of disasters that is the private sector's record in public service provision?

The report also failed to acknowledge that banks have played key roles in the privatising of the public sector - or of the trouble this could mean. As Paul Gosling observed in his 'Rise of the Public Service Industry' report last year, the banks' vulnerability may yet compromise public services:

'[The banks] provide finance, including by putting together infrastructure funds, may provide short-term and longer-term funding for acquisitions, acting as intermediaries in raising capital, for example in the issuing of bonds and advising clients and contractors in PPP and other contracts involving the public sector,' Gosling said, lining up the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Lloyds TSB, HBOS, Deutsche Bank and Macquarie as key players.

Barnet locals are extremely unhappy at apparent council plans to outsource and privatise most of the services the council provides.

It's getting harder and harder for local government to sell the argument that the market knows best - that your schools, nurseries, housing, roads, etc, would be better provided by the likes of HBOS, anyone lately of the Lehman Brothers, or Tescos.

I'm a capitalist at heart, but even I doubt the market's genius these days. I don't think the private sector is inclined to deliver good public services at reasonable cost. I think it is inclined to tender loss leaders when bidding for public sector contracts, and then to recoup losses by cutting staff salaries and service corners when contracts are won.

I am a capitalist, but I don't think the private sector is capable of providing public services in a way that will simultaneously save tax pounds and shore up communities with the all-important health, education and housing services that keep those communities functional.

People in Barnet aren't convinced either. Hundreds turned up for at a protest about the proposed outsourcing several weeks ago, and an even bigger crowd showed on Wednesday outside a council meeting - on a freezing cold night, too.

I'll be writing more about the Barnet proposals as time goes on.

For now, here are some photos from the event.

Not sure how Santa got into the mix - thought he'd be more of a capitalist...?

For much of 2007, careworkers in Fremantle Trust carehomes in Barnet took strike action in protest against the harsh pay and leave cuts a new Trust contract forced on them in April. The careworkers started striking to try and win back their lost earnings and leave allowances. The dispute is still unresolved:

A year's a long while to fight your employer: Sandra Jones, a careworker at the Fremantle Trust's Rosa Freedman day centre, says there are days now when she wonders if there's much point to it. She will 'keep on with the fight, because you have to keep fighting,' but she doubts very much that Fremantle will budge. 'Fremantle doesn't give a shit about its staff. It's gone on for so long now. They [the careworkers] are so demoralised. Some people have depression and stress.'

One thing everybody is particularly stressed about is Barnet Council's recent announcement that it plans to terminate part of the lease at the Rosa Freedman home - that's the carehome that Jones works at. Fremantle says that it will move residents in that home into residential care elsewhere.

Careworkers say that families of residents in the Rosa Freedman carehome are extremely unhappy about the transfer, because of the effect it is likely to have on their vulnerable elderly relatives - Fremantle management got, apparently, a vinegary response at a recent meeting with the families of Rosa Freedman residents.

The careworkers are worried about the transfer and the job implications of the closure, as well they might be. 'The closure of the residential care part of Rosa Freedman could result in staffing issues,' notes a 6 December 2007 report to Barnet Council's Cabinet Resources Committee. 'Fremantle will be responsible for these issues under the terms of the staff agreement with Fremantle Trust and Catalyst.'

And who be Catalyst, I hear you ask?

A few pics from Saturday's Fremantle careworkers' rally for you to enjoy... report to follow soon.