Barnet Unison

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.

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?