floating support

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.