Mike Freer

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.

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.