Red Pepper » Cuts

Workfare: a policy on the brink

admin — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:00:47 +0000

‘Three people start today on this “work experience”. They are to help us for up to 30 hours a week for eight weeks over the Christmas period. I am terrified by the idea that head office think they don’t need to pay their staff. I myself am on part-time minimum wage and if they can have workers for free now, what is to stop them making my position redundant and using job centre people to run the store at no cost to themselves?’ – Shoezone employee, November 2012.
At the end of 2012, stores such as Argos, Asda, Superdrug and Shoezone made use of the government’s workfare schemes to meet their seasonal demand, instead of hiring extra staff or offering overtime. This is part of an increasing trend to replace paid employees with workfare participants. In September the 2 Sisters Food Group sacked 350 workers at its plant in Leicester. It moved the production of its pizza toppings to Nottingham, claiming that the move was ‘as a result of several recent strikes’. However, instead of employing people, the company has taken on 100 workfare placements, ‘to give them an idea of what it’s like to work in the food sector’.
It’s not just companies using workfare. It has an increasing presence in the public sector too, plugging the gaps left by redundancies and cuts. Hospitals, public transport and councils have all used workfare participants to provide services. Halton Council has shed 10 per cent of jobs since 2010, and is now using workfare placements. Lewisham has closed some of its libraries. It has now emerged that its new, outsourced ‘community libraries’ use people mandated onto workfare for free labour.
The use of workfare has escalated over the past year and this has had a significant effect on the amount of paid work available. ‘Mandatory work activity’, which compels people to work without pay for 30 hours a week for four weeks, has been expanded to 70,000 placements a year, despite Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) research showing that it had ‘zero effect’ on people’s chances of finding work. The so-called ‘work experience scheme’, eight-week placements mainly in the private sector, is expected to put 250,000 people to work without pay over the next three years. The government refuses to say how many of the 850,000 people sent on the ‘work programme’ have also been forced to work for free. With five other workfare schemes also in operation, it all adds up to workfare replacing paid jobs and driving down wages.
Yet despite the expansion in workfare, the first statistics published on the work programme show it has been a resounding failure: it did not even reach its own minimum target for the number of people the schemes were supposed to get into work. People on the work programme are twice as likely to have their benefits sanctioned as to find work.
Challenging workfare
Until recently the reality of mass forced labour in the UK was yet to reach public consciousness. Unless you, or a friend, had been made to work for free for the likes of Asda, or your work hours were cut when your employer took on placements, you probably wouldn’t have known about the policy. Red Pepper (Oct/Nov 2011) was among the first to report on the government’s plans to rapidly increase the number of people on workfare and raise concerns about how the scheme would undermine work conditions, undercut the minimum wage and attempt to rewrite the social contract.
The success of the campaign against workfare is ensuring that it is both widely known and widely criticised. Workfare’s viability is now genuinely in question. Tens of big high street brands and charities have been compelled by public pressure to end their use of workfare, including Sainsbury’s, HMV and Oxfam. Two of the workfare schemes (work experience and some placements on the work programme) no longer threaten to punish those who fail to participate by stopping their benefit payments (though claimants are often given the impression that they will be, or are threatened with a compulsory scheme if they don’t comply).
There have been promising stories of grassroots union activists seeing off the threat of workfare at the Home Office and in Brighton and Hove City Council, while Norwich City Council was the first local authority to pass a motion boycotting workfare. The future of workfare is uncertain and this central plank of the government’s attack on welfare could be overturned.
Building a movement
In February 2012, Tesco made the mistake of posting an advert for a workfare position online: nightshifts for jobseeker’s allowance. Within hours, the advert was all over Twitter and Facebook and the mainstream media were forced to pay attention, with even the Daily Mail leading with headlines such as ‘Tesco makes u-turn over “slave labour” jobs scheme’ (22 February 2012).
Once people knew about workfare, they responded. Days of action have taken place in 43 towns across the UK – from cheeky post-it notes left throughout stores to occupations and pickets of key offenders. Very rapidly brands including TK Maxx, Burger King and Marie Curie, which had been quietly profiting from thousands of hours of unpaid work, withdrew to save their reputations.
Boycott Workfare also targeted pro-workfare think tanks, whose undemocratic lobbying has pushed the workfare agenda. Persistent campaigning has ensured they no longer advertise the venues of their conferences, fearing the events will be disrupted by direct actions.
The campaign and ensuing media coverage has challenged the political climate. Far too many people of all political hues bought into the narrative of ‘strivers and skivers’. It was Labour, after all, that introduced workfare into the UK, dividing benefit recipients into deserving and undeserving poor.
As grassroots action picks off some of the largest workfare users, the schemes’ futures begin to look less certain. Until coordinated UK-wide action forced a climbdown (though not a complete withdrawal), the British Heart Foundation’s website boasted that at any one time it had 1,600 workfare placements in its stores. A recent DWP report on mandatory work activity has noted a sharp reduction in placements since charities have been persuaded by the campaign to withdraw. Since December 2012 the willingness to profit from forced unpaid work has become even more unpalatable as people on sickness and disability benefits who have been found ‘unfit for work’ can also be sent on unlimited periods of workfare. Lord Bichard, in a Commons select committee, even mooted mandatory work for pensioners. In recent months, by taking on the target others have baulked at, namely charities, Boycott Workfare has prompted even more to announce that they will be pulling out. Workfare is wobbling.
These victories have presented new challenges. Despite mainstream media commentators, politicians and some campaign groups claiming that Tesco had pulled out of workfare when the company announced an additional new scheme it was introducing, in reality it was still participating. Superdrug and Scope suspended involvement, then later sneaked back in.
A campaign led by the unemployed
From the start the Boycott Workfare campaign has involved and taken its lead from people directly affected by workfare, people who are often ignored by many sections of the left.
Where traditional politics has left a vacuum, the space for grassroots, creative and agile campaigning has opened up. Working with other groups, a key feature of the way Boycott Workfare campaigns is that it seeks to enable as much action as possible – welcoming every tactic and strategy deployed against workfare and publicising actions wherever they are and whoever has organised them. It means empowering individuals to resist being subject to workfare, providing information to people receiving social security or who have been sanctioned. It’s about trying to help, with no strings attached.
People understand that it is their actions that can make the difference. It’s their movement. Much of the knowledge about who is using workfare is ‘crowd-sourced’; people’s real stories and experiences are used to challenge those who claim they are not using workfare. Every day, people take their own actions against workfare, writing letters, sending emails or haranguing those involved in the schemes on social media.
Slowly but surely a campaign network has established itself across the UK. People take action when and how they want to, liaising to share information and inspiration and to coordinate for key targets. Collectively the grassroots are punching way above their weight.
Workfare and the unions
As is often the case, how unions have responded varies enormously. Union leaderships have been slow to react to workfare as a workplace issue. The TUC occupies the uncomfortable position of officially condemning workfare, while supporting Labour’s intended scheme, the so-called ‘job guarantee’. This scheme advocates compulsory work at far below a living wage with a similar harsh sanctions regime to that operated by the current coalition government.
Grassroots members of Unite’s new community branches are taking direct action against workfare. Yet Unite still asked the Boycott Workfare campaign to do free casework for its new community union members who had been unemployed and recently sanctioned, despite charging these members a £26 annual fee. Boycott Workfare declined. It seems Unite is yet to use its resources to offer the kind of individual case support we try to provide for free.
The PCS has been supportive, agreeing to sit down with the campaign to see what can be achieved by working together. However, the CWU agreed to help implement a workfare scheme at the Royal Mail. It belatedly exited the scheme, after being embarrassed into doing so.
Despite this mixed picture, local branches have passed motions opposing workfare and brought the issue to national conferences. Many unions, including the BFAWU, NUT, Unison, Unite and PCS now have policy against workfare. In 2013, the campaign hopes to work in genuine dialogue with unions to devise strategies to counter workfare at a local, regional and national level – essential since workfare’s implementation is so diffuse.
The year ahead
The campaign to stop workfare faces some big challenges in 2013. Since October 2012, people who refuse workfare or fall foul of the system in other ways now risk losing their subsistence benefit for up to three years. Universal credit looms on the horizon and with it will come a new deluge of conditionality. Low paid and part-time workers will be drawn into the same boat as jobseekers – forced to do jobsearch and workfare until they are earning the equivalent of full-time work at minimum wage. Whitehall intends to make using the disastrous Universal Jobmatch website compulsory, sentencing those claiming social security to hours of demoralising searching on an ineffective database, while also making surveillance of every click possible.
There is, however, a realistic prospect of success. A DWP legal submission attempting to block information about who is using workfare argues that the schemes risk collapse if that information is published. Since we are continually discovering this information through word of mouth anyway, the campaign can take heart from this admission of its effectiveness.
More people will be introduced to workfare in 2013. But as we step up our outreach, they will also be introduced to us, and we still have a few tricks up our sleeves. Potential workfare users be warned: if you exploit us we will shut you down.
Warren Clark is a member of the Boycott Workfare campaign, with personal experience of workfare. He writes here in a personal capacity. Illustration by Malcolm Currie

Co-operating with cuts in Lambeth

admin — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:00:58 +0000

As former Lambeth council leader Steve Reed makes his foray into national politics, following his Croydon North by-election win for Labour, it is a good time to look at the flagship project on which he launched his rise to parliament. Lambeth Council declared itself a ‘co-operative council’ under his leadership back in 2010, claiming to revolutionise the way public services are delivered. This new model of governance, Labour claimed, would empower communities by allowing them to make decisions about how their services are run.
This rhetoric of shifting power to the people has proven popular, with more than 20 Labour councils piloting approaches in co-operative public services through the Co-operative Councils Network founded by Reed. Other fans include the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, who has written about the ‘constructive changes’ by Lambeth and other councils as ‘heartening’. Reed has declared that his project ‘offers a model that can be extended right across public services nationally’. But what has been the residents’ experience in Lambeth?
One o’clock clubs – open access play centres for under-fives – were declared to be an ‘early adopter’ of the ‘co-operative model’ by Lambeth Council in 2011. The council’s plan was for the clubs to be run by ‘new co-operative entities’ by April 2012. This transfer of management has come under great criticism by users, who highlight the undemocratic nature of the process.
Fenton Forsyth, who takes his son to his local one o’clock club, declares his ‘disillusionment’ with the entire process: ‘There’s a feeling of helplessness amongst people that it’s not done properly, they don’t have their say. People are anxious about what’s been done and how it’s done.’ He describes a consultation meeting he attended. After hearing bids from organisations looking to run the service, ballot papers were distributed to the attendees. When Forsyth asked if he could have one for his wife, who was at work, he was told that only the people present could vote. He dismisses this as ‘snapshot democracy’, when the decision should involve the whole community. In any case, he adds that only 30 per cent of votes went to the club users, so that the council could override whatever they voted for regardless.
Lambeth’s libraries were another service that the council decided to restructure along supposedly ‘co-operative’ principles. A libraries consultation was set up encouraging residents to ‘have your say’. But as with the one o’clock clubs, users felt frustrated and ignored by the process and the outcome.
Lisa Sheldon is a student who grew up using Lambeth libraries. ‘We didn’t have much money, so the library was a really important resource. I did the summer reading trails as a child and used the computers and books for my homework.’ She took part in the consultation process but has little faith that Lambeth took her views into account. ‘The documents we were supposed to fill out were huge. It took me two hours to plough through, and even then it was clear from the wording of the questions that the council had already made up their mind as to what would happen.’
She says the results of the consultation revealed that a majority did not want or were undecided about the ‘co-operative library’ proposals, but the council went ahead anyway. ‘When Lambeth talk about shifting power to local people, it is obviously disingenuous. Handing people reduced library budgets and making them decide between books and staff is not empowering – to tell people to enforce their own cuts on their library service is unforgivable.’
‘The consultation spoke of creating “community hubs” in libraries,’ Sheldon continues. ‘But as anyone who has visited a Lambeth library knows, these places already serve the function of a community hub where all members of the community visit to access the great range of services provided. Lambeth council’s plans are so far away from the true meaning and practice of the word co-operative they are bringing the term into disrepute.’
A further aspect of current council policy, the sale of co-operative housing and the removal of residents who have occupied it for more than 30 years, was covered in the previous issue of Red Pepper (‘Short-life sell off’, RP Dec-Jan 2013). Along with the changes to libraries and children’s services, it demonstrates how Steve Reed’s ‘co-operative council’ has failed to live up to its rhetoric. Instead, a top-down power structure continues to drive forward the outsourcing, privatisation and sell-off of public resources in the name of empowerment.
A comment by Lambeth councillor Florence Nosegbe is revealing: ‘The key driving force behind [the co-operative council] is to get more local people involved in the vision that we as councillors are making.’ The vision is very much of the councillors’ making with local people’s participation limited to flawed consultations. As Lisa Sheldon puts it, ‘The only co-operation going on here is with the national government’s cuts.’

Labour and the cuts: beyond the ‘dented shield’

admin — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:55:37 +0000

The revelation that local councils would face an average cut of 28 per cent in central government funding by 2014/15 was shocking enough. It was especially so since the burden of increasing social care needs means that, according to the Local Government Association (LGA), the funds available for spending on other key services such as repairing roads or running libraries and leisure centres would effectively fall by 90 per cent in cash terms.
But averaging out the impact of the cuts ignores the dramatic political imbalance in exactly how communities and local government secretary Eric Pickles’ plans are being implemented. The Guardian reported that ‘councils in northern, urban and London boroughs with high rates of deprivation predominantly run by Labour have seen their budgets cut by almost 10 times the amount lost by Tory-administered authorities in rural southern England’. And whereas the average loss per head resulting from the cuts stands at £61 nationally, in the 50 worst affected areas (42 of which are run by Labour, and where one in three children is in poverty) the loss stands at a massive £160 per head.
This isn’t even the end of it. George Osborne’s autumn statement revealed that the cuts will now have to continue until 2018, such has been the failure of the chancellor’s economic strategy. Not surprisingly, the dawning realisation of what this means for some of the most hard-pressed families in the country has brought howls of outrage. The leaders of Newcastle, Liverpool and Sheffield city councils wrote a stark letter to Pickles warning that the cuts were creating ‘dire economic consequences’ and could lead to ‘the break-up of civil society’ with increasing ‘tension’ and ‘social unrest’. A similar view was expressed by Sir Albert Bore, the leader of Britain’s single largest authority, Birmingham, who said the cuts would mean ‘the end of local government as we know it’.
Contrary to government claims, such reactions can’t be put down to Labour exaggerating the problem for political gain. The independent Audit Commission found that ‘councils in most deprived areas were worst affected’ in the two years of spending cuts witnessed so far. The LGA’s Conservative chairman, Sir Merrick Cockell, has described the cuts as ‘unsustainable’ and accepted that it’s ‘unrealistic’ to pretend they won’t hit services, while Kent’s Tory leader, Paul Carter, says his county ‘can’t cope’ with further cuts and ‘is running on empty’.
Labour’s approach
But the situation facing Labour councillors is especially acute, since not only are the funding cuts political, but the burden of current and projected needs in working class communities are enormously greater. People elected Labour councillors not merely to administer plans determined by central government but to represent their interests at the local level. Howls of outrage about the cuts from these councillors are one thing but voters are increasingly beginning to ask what they are planning to do to protect the hard-pressed people they represent. Is there an alternative vision for local government in the areas with high levels of economic deprivation, and if so, what practical steps can the Labour Party take where it is in power locally?
Labour’s approach thus far has been to identify central government as responsible for the painful choices facing Labour councils, but to accept that these savage cumulative cuts are effectively a fact of political life, at least this side of a general election. The priority, therefore, has been to protect levels of spending on essential social care, on which the most vulnerable depend, and then identify the ‘least worst’ options for reducing other costs. This inevitably means a reduced level of ‘non-essential’ services once all scope for ‘efficiency savings’ has been exhausted.
The responsibility of power, we are told, means taking ‘tough choices’ to avoid still worse consequences. However, such an approach – described by Neil Kinnock in 1980s as the ‘dented shield’ – assumes that, for now at least, Labour councillors have no choice but to become the instruments through which Pickles will deliver cuts to deprived communities. Blairite ‘modernisers’ such as Lambeth’s Steve Reed, who have successfully pushed the ‘co-operative council’ agenda (see page 13), openly admit that this new policy model recognises the need to ‘deliver better with less’. They have used the language of mutualisation to pursue the fragmentation of service provision in order to create the basis for competitive markets with social enterprise and voluntary/third sector involvement in the initial stages.
While the language of empowerment, community and decentralisation has provided an ostensibly attractive agenda – with historic echoes of the genuinely grassroots co-operative tradition – the underlying logic promotes the aim of remodelling local government to allow for a much diminished role in the direct delivery of services. Those expecting a Labour government to restore local government structures and finances to the status quo ante are likely to be disappointed. As with so much else, Labour may oppose the scale and pace of the cuts today, but will not make promises to reverse those cuts the Tories have already implemented or set in train.
Hapless accomplices
Of course, many councillors want to demonstrate that they are more than hapless accomplices of Eric Pickles’ cash‑grab from local services. They have been seeking ways of implementing any progressive measures still possible given the ‘inevitability’ of working within financial parameters determined by Whitehall. So, for example, a dozen or so Labour authorities have committed themselves to becoming living wage employers, by stipulating minimum pay standards in the course of procurement from contractors. Islington has been commended for its creation of a ‘Fairness Commission’, bringing together academics and social policy experts with councillors in open public deliberation to take evidence on inequality in the borough and make practical recommendations for directing what limited resources are available to tackle the problem. Critics have dismissed such measures as ‘window-dressing’.
A number of Labour councils have also been actively exploring co-operative initiatives around renewable energy. In Preston the local authority has suggested that erecting wind turbines on council-owned land would put £1.5 million a year into the council coffers. Worthwhile though it may be, however, the anticipated revenue does not avoid the immediate budget crisis, which has seen the council decide in principle to demolish the city’s architecturally significant and well-used bus station because it says it cannot afford to maintain it.
The stock response to the argument that Labour councils could refuse point-blank to deliver the coalition cuts is that any alternative, deficit-based ‘needs budget’ would lead directly to Eric Pickles assuming direct control over local budgets and implementing cuts with no thought for those most in need. It is true that no course of locally-determined resistance can ultimately succeed without direct confrontation with central government based on a mobilisation of local communities nationwide. But were Labour to spearhead a national campaign of militant resistance involving local communities in determining their collective needs, the secretary of state wouldn’t find it easy to suspend the entire apparatus of local democracy. And unlike during the epic rate-setting disputes of the 1980s, individual councillors no longer face personal financial ruin, since – although they can be debarred from office – the power to surcharge expelled councillors no longer exists in law.
Of course, the Labour left is significantly weaker today. Even those advocating a militant ‘no cuts’ stance recognise that it would require a strategy for building confidence and extending community support. But there can be no excuse for councillors failing to exhaust every option in their power to delay and contest the implementation of cuts – in the first instance by drawing on reserves and making full use of prudential borrowing powers – to buy time in which the forces of resistance in the community can be consolidated. Bold and determined resistance could inspire levels of popular support that could transform calculations of what is politically possible.
The full scale of the cumulative devastation to be wreaked at local level is only now beginning to hit home, despite the fact that, according to figures from the GMB union, there are already 236,900 fewer people employed by councils in England and Wales than in 2010. And the public resistance thus far has not shifted Labour councillors from passing cuts budgets.
Anti-cuts councillors
There have been some limited local exceptions, such as the two Southampton Labour councillors who refused to vote with the ruling Labour group to close a leisure centre they had explicitly promised to save at elections a few months earlier. Following their decision to form a rival group on the council, Labour Councillors Against the Cuts, they have been formally expelled from the party. Councillor Don Thomas, one of the two rebels, told Red Pepper, ‘We have had hundreds of well wishers, over 300 emails locally and across Britain, plus loads of telephone messages and many letters of support. Our relationship with the unions is very good and there’s now a tense but working relationship with the Labour group. We are going through the budget proposals with the city’s chief financial officer with a view to developing alternatives.’
A similar story lies behind the emergence of a small group of anti-cuts councillors in Broxtowe, near Nottingham. Here, this hung council is run by a joint Lab-Lib ruling group. Councillor Greg Marshall explains how, at the 2011 borough elections, he was one of two councillors who successfully sought selection, and was subsequently elected, on a clear anti-cuts basis: ‘The first real test was the budget in February 2012. Three councillors opposed the budget, which among other measures increased council house rents by approximately 8.5 per cent.’ Since then, ‘there has been some support from other Labour councillors who say they have sympathised with the position some of us are taking. This has over time seen a change in positions on issues around council house rents and social care, and hopefully these changes will be reflected as we develop budgets for 2013/14.’
Although such instances of resistance are relatively isolated and fragmented, the Labour Representation Committee is attempting to build a strategic network of anti-cuts Labour councillors.
Grassroots resistance has failed to grab any national headlines thus far. But things may be beginning to change. The decision of Newcastle Labour leader Nick Forbes to announce the total axing of the city’s arts and cultural funding, for example, has brought together a coalition of incensed workers, community activists and high-profile arts figures. Birmingham, meanwhile, is facing the complete destruction of its youth services, with more than 1,000 job losses and further areas of council provision threatened with being ‘decommissioned’ in the future.
The stakes are also about to be raised significantly. Labour councils are going to have to make specific choices as people are thrown into extreme financial hardship due to the latest benefit ‘reforms’. The circumstances might be the result of central government policy, but will they employ bailiffs to evict families who have fallen behind on their rents due to the new benefit cap? Will they prosecute people who fall into arrears due to the removal of council tax benefit?
Anti-cuts councillors could be more imaginative about forms of practical resistance. For example, they could consider technical measures beyond options presented by council officers – such as drawing up a charter of immediate defensive measures to which Labour councils could sign up, in dialogue with tenants and residents associations, unions, community activists, charities, faith groups and others with experience of working with real social needs. This might consist of working with the unions to ensure that services are kept in-house, not privatised; protecting council tenants through a moratorium on all evictions; developing long-term debt repayment schemes for council tax bills or social housing rents; implementing licensing standards, including de facto local rent controls on privately-rented accommodation; and so on.
Town Halls under Labour control could be transformed into local centres of community resistance, turning themselves into smaller-scale versions of the type of resistance the Greater London Council presented to Thatcher in the 1980s. Unless Labour can actively demonstrate that it is on the side of working people in actions and not just words, then its councillors will be treated with the same contempt as representatives of the other mainstream parties. And local government might never recover.

Care in crisis

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:00:20 +0000

Illustration: Hey Monkey Riot – www.eddbaldry.co.uk
In many ways, the elderly care sector is an example of what Conservative policy-making aims towards. Dominated by private companies with no financial regulation (and many links to the Tories), what is left of state provision is rapidly dwindling. Those with the means to pay for their own care do so – often with a lifetime of savings and their home – while receiving no state support. Local authorities are continuing to freeze the amount of support given to those who can’t, even though current rates are far below most independent care homes’ fees. This means families must meet the shortfall.
Inconveniently for the Tories, the result of privatisation is not efficiency and innovation, nor choice and value for service users. It’s chaos, blighted by inadequate care provision and instability.
The estimated £1 billion in cuts to adult social care that have occurred since Osborne full-throttled his austerity programme, along with the further £1 billion expected over the next two years, have inevitably worsened services. Demographic changes mean elderly care will be an increasingly important, and expensive, issue. Last year’s report from the Dilnot Commission on drastic funding changes, which was intended to create a more sustainable and fairer system for service users, was recently dismissed by the coalition in its social care white paper as too expensive. The government, like others before it, refuses to engage with the chronic funding crisis, while the care system fails and impoverishes vulnerable elderly people.
Cuts passed on to local authorities by central government since the last spending review have caused a raft of closures, and outsourcing of the remaining council-run homes and day centres. Local authorities are shouldering the burden of austerity, and with it the backlash from unpopular decisions.
Loneliness and isolation
A Unison survey on day centre provision carried out earlier this year found that 57 per cent of respondents reported closures to services and over two-thirds saw an increase in charges for attendance, transport and meals. This is compounded by a fall in pensioners’ incomes through other factors such as fuel payment cuts and the withdrawal of the age-related tax code. In addition, over half of day centre staff said their pay and conditions had changed for the worse.
Matthew Egan, Unison’s assistant national officer on local government, says the impact on vulnerable older people is severe. Access to council-run centres is being restricted to those with the greatest need, and social isolation is no longer enough: ‘It’s loneliness and isolation that people are going to be suffering from more and more in our communities as a consequence.’ While some councils have said the savings will be passed over to individuals’ personal budgets, and will therefore give more ‘choice’ to people, the result is that voluntary sector services cannot continue because they rely on local authority grants to pay for costs such as rent and wages.
Marie*, a senior support worker in a charity-run day centre, explains that the service she works for had to raise thousands of pounds to keep going after local authority grants were drastically reduced. To achieve it, the staff worked evenings and weekends doing unpaid fundraising. At the same time, charges were raised, which meant many people could not afford to attend. Marie describes how staff have been overstretched and elderly people excluded from the service. ‘A lot of older people generally live alone and have no contact with anyone, other than say family or carers, and their health both mentally and physically can deteriorate rapidly. I believe day services for older people to be essential for their welfare . . . I have personally seen many successful stories of older people coming to our service, scared, alone and timid, only to blossom and become the life and soul of the party!’
The misnomer of choice
In Bristol, the Lib Dem city council recently passed a motion to close all but two council-run homes, with those being retained for dementia sufferers, and seven day centres. Local resistance fronted by the Bristol and District Anti-Cuts Alliance (BADACA) has gained momentum. More than 100 people lobbied the council meeting at which the final decisions were passed – after a laughable ‘consultation’ process in which the choices given were closure, closure or closure.
Jeremy Clarke, BADACA’s organising secretary, describes the mood in the care homes: ‘People who live in the council care homes like to live there, they feel that they paid for it through their taxes and the welfare state.’ Campaigners are suspicious of the council’s arguments that the process is simply a modernisation of the service, and that not-for-profit organisations and charities will tender for the new, independent contracts. In a context of scarce resources, it’s the large organisations that are likely to win such contracts.
The government buzzwords of ‘personalisation’ and ‘empowerment’ are used to argue that home care is always preferable to residential. In reality, it’s about economics: home care is cheaper. Yet, as Matthew Egan stresses, the home care sector is in no position to pick up the slack. ‘It puts more pressure on the workforce and the workforce is getting the blame, the people delivering the care, even though they’re getting stretched and stretched, on really bad pay and really bad terms and conditions.’ Time and wages have been cut to the bone, and some staff are reporting that they will stay for extra time with clients, past the allotted 15 minutes, without pay just to ensure they are receiving adequate care – while they themselves are on minimum wage.
Policies aimed at enabling people to remain at home, such as training courses to help them live independently, have benefited some. But they are being used in a blanket fashion to the detriment of many of the most vulnerable. As such, any talk of ‘choice’ is a misnomer. Lynne*, an elderly people’s social worker in the south‑east, says: ‘Yes, they talk about empowerment but we have to fight to get people into homes now – really, really fight. There’s actually a limit on how many people we can place in residential homes a month, I think 25 in each area. Even if people have extreme dementia and are wandering the streets, it’s not guaranteed we’d get them into a home.’
Care for profit
As council-run homes close their doors, the people made to relocate find themselves in the private sector. The landscape of the £10 billion independent care sector, and the character of organisations that make up its patchwork coverage, are complex. Inherent problems in the sector are far wider than the rare horror stories of institutional abuse that have featured in recent investigations, such as that by Panorama.
The common thread is the means by which they achieve cost-effectiveness: they pay less. The staff work longer hours with fewer benefits, and skeleton staffing means carers can struggle to find time to provide the individualised care they’d like to. Cuts in the rates of support given to local authority‑funded residents have exacerbated these issues.
Lynne emphasises that the problem stems from our cultural attitudes towards caring: ‘There needs to be a drastic rethink . . . The majority of carers are not valued. They’re not valued by their peers, by society, and they’re not valued by the staff.’ She suggests raising the wage level and the qualifications needed to work in the sector. Unison is running a campaign to recruit care workers into the union, believing low levels of unionisation are reflected in the poor terms and conditions the workforce endures.
The impact of funding freezes from local authorities has also manifested in poorer quality food and other provisions and equipment. Lynne says she’s seen residents suffering from discomfort and skin flare-ups because homes are buying poor quality incontinence pads.
Driven by profit, many – but not all – homes have a money-grabbing ethos. While fees for home places vary enormously (from several hundred pounds per week to thousands), this doesn’t necessarily mean the more costly care is of better quality than more affordable homes. ‘To be honest if I drive up to a home and it’s expensive-looking, and it’s got flower beds and grounds and things, my heart sinks because they’re putting the majority of the money into how it looks, not how it works,’ Lynne explains. ‘One home is run by a national charity and it’s charging £3,000 a week and the care is bog standard . . . if I want to be generous.’
The practice of kicking people out when they run out of money is surprisingly widespread. Self-funders, having sold their homes, fund their place until their assets drop below £23,000 and they become eligible for state support. At this point, they are evicted. These evictions were happening so often, causing distress to old and infirm people and landing them on the doorstep of the local authority, that one county employed a social worker specifically to work with self-funders and their families to advise on how to avoid it.
Private equity
Across the care sector another shadowy presence looms: private equity firms, which are moving into the sector and now own a large proportion of homes. In 2011, the Guardian reported that 135,000 people were being cared for by private equity-backed operators. New players on the block include Terra Firma, which took over 500 Four Seasons care homes earlier in the year. Another entrant into social care is Acromas, which through its acquisition of Allied Healthcare has become a lead player in the home care sector, along with Sovereign Capital.
Private equity firms are not accountable to the public. Known as predators due to their profit-maximising and asset-stripping, they have little interest in the markets in which they operate – which is particularly worrying in social care. They run on huge debts used to finance takeovers (Acromas has recorded debts of £6.6 billion) and are known for tax avoidance through offshore accounts. As many residents are receiving local authority support, tax money is once again being funnelled towards private interests.
Given the importance of social care, shouldn’t there be government regulation of such companies’ finances to ensure there is no repeat of the Southern Cross collapse, which affected 31,000 residents? It’s not on the cards, and the reason is ideological. As Egan puts it, ‘They refuse to entertain the idea because it doesn’t fit in with their world view of the private market and the role of the state.’ Tellingly, managing partner of Sovereign Capital Ryan Robson is a big-time Tory donor (giving over £250,000) and put himself up for selection as the Conservative election candidate in Bracknell.
Overall the picture is bleak – but workforce organising, community opposition and a national Right to Care Campaign backed by numerous organisations are trying to stop the issue from being pushed into the long grass. There are ample examples of quality care in the sector. But it shows the dangers of privatising a crucial aspect of the welfare state, and serves as an example of why it must be resisted.
* Names have been changed

Able to fight: How disabled people are taking on the Tories

admin — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:52:03 +0000

Disabled people stopped London traffic by chaining their wheelchairs together earlier this year. Photo: Pete Riches
‘We feel that these are violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We haven’t striven for 70 years to have all these rights taken away from us in one parliament.’ John McArdle, co-founder of the Scotland-based Black Triangle Campaign, doesn’t mince his words when he talks about the need to fight the government’s cuts agenda.
All the activists interviewed for this piece shared the same anger and passion. As far as anti-austerity activism goes, the disability movement has remained mobilised, vocal and determined when other sectors of the population appear tet to have fully awakened, or in the case of students, have lost momentum after initial dramatic revolts. As John McDonnell MP warned the House of Commons in June, ‘We now have a disability movement in this country of which we have not seen the equal before … These people are not going to go away.’
That movement has been building for some time. ‘Miss Dennis Queen’ is a blogger and longtime disability rights activist with the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN), who’s been involved in campaigning for more than 12 years. She acknowledges the recent ‘explosion’ of campaigning but emphasises the coalition’s policies aren’t entirely new – and neither is resistance. Labour had devised cuts that were taken on and set in stone by the current government: ‘We were talking about this before but protests at that time weren’t being reported.’
Likewise the most high profile campaigns, such as DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts), already existed within the disability rights movement, which had been working for years to further equality, inclusion and recognition for the disabled population. The cuts put years of hard-won progress into reverse gear with such velocity that suffering was filtering from boardrooms to bedrooms with brutal speed. By the time the protest movement surged with students and other anti-cuts groups, thousands of disabled people were ready for a call to arms.
Bold action
The blockade of Oxford Circus with wheelchairs tied together with chain on 28 January demonstrated the readiness for civil disobedience – along with the ability to grab headlines. Andy Greene, a member of DPAC’s national steering committee, explains that the action came about as the welfare reform bill was going through parliament and was high on the agenda of both DPAC and their partners-in-protest UK Uncut. He says: ‘It kick-started consciousness more than anything … It showed we had the power within the movement to reignite the militant actions that hadn’t been seen since the late eighties and early nineties.’
Miss Dennis Queen thinks there’s an inherent power in taking direct action as a disabled person. For observers, she says, ‘being aware of us doing it contradicts the prejudice around us. It’s so opposite to what is expected of us that it educates everyone.’ And the sight of wheelchairs outnumbered by police, she adds, further proves their points.
Bold and creative actions and demonstrations have become a hallmark of the campaigns. Further London roadblocks – in Trafalgar Square, outside the Houses of Parliament – and occupations such as that of the Glasgow Atos office all involve the physical taking of space. They assert disabled people’s existence in a policy climate that seems bent on erasure, while the blocking of traffic symbolises the blocking of bills. In occupying the head office of Deloitte in Scotland, Black Triangle was showing the movement’s alternative narrative, a critique of neoliberalism, finance and tax-dodging in particular, to that put forth by the government. The accountancy firm was targeted because of the Deloitte chairman – and ‘tax-dodging guru’ – David Cruickshank’s cosy relationship with David Hartnett at HM Revenue and Customs.
John McArdle is critical of recent media resistance to reporting on demonstrations such as these. He cites the Trafalgar Square action in April: ‘The BBC reported there were traffic problems in their bulletins but there was a blackout basically. Definitely there seems to be a conscious decision not to report on acts of civil disobedience.’
The failure to cover events is not a surprise, though. While Westminster is, in McArdle’s words, ‘coming up with sheer lies and propaganda’ to garner public support for the cuts, the media seem only too happy to act as their cheerleaders. A frequently-cited example is the claim that there are huge levels of fraud in disability living allowance claims. The actual figure, according to the Department of Work and Pensions’ own report, Fraud and Error in the Benefit System, published in February, is 0.5 per cent.
Hate campaign
The government-led misinformation around these figures has underpinned what amounts to a hate campaign from the tabloid press towards disability benefit claimants. This was epitomised by the Sun’s vitriolic editorial against ‘scroungers’ in which it claimed: ‘They cannot be bothered to find a job or they claim to be sick when they are perfectly capable of work because they prefer to sit at home watching widescreen TVs – paid for by YOU.’
At the same time, police figures show the rate of disability hate crime has soared. A total of 1,942 disability hate crimes were recorded by police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2011, up by 14 per cent on 2010 and doubling since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. According to Andy Greene, ‘Everyday on the DPAC website we’re hearing of people being accosted in the street, in their own homes, on public transport.’
In response, disability rights groups and activists have been flooding the internet with their own stories. Blogs – sarcastically named with the labels they aim to repudiate, such as ‘Benefit Scrounging Scum’ and ‘Diary of a Benefit Scrounger’ – have gained huge support, featuring honest accounts of negotiating the benefits system and daily life with a disability or ill health. The Black Triangle campaign website was the eighth top political blog in the ebuzzing rankings in June, while Diary of a Benefit Scrounger was ranked 15th in July.
Miss Dennis Queen comments: ‘People talk about “armchair activists”, the label used to mean people sitting in their house with opinions not necessarily taking action. But in 12–13 years of being an activist I have done most of my work from my bed.’ From resource sharing to petitions, mythbusting and networking, the internet is not just a tool but a realm for protest within the movement, and an ultimately inclusive one: those who can’t get on the streets can act from home.
This is just one example of the movement’s stated aim to use every mean at its disposal to fight back. Equally important are the links made between different campaigns, trade unions and the medical profession. Disability campaigns have reached out to trade unions to work on common goals such as protecting public services and the rights of disabled people in the workplace. One example is the Hardest Hit coalition, particularly active in the north east, where trade unions, campaigners and charities have come together to organise conferences, rallies, protests and written reports about the effects of government policy.
Support from within the medical establishment, particularly with regard to work capability assessments, is also gaining momentum. In May, GPs at the BMA’s local medical committees conference in Liverpool called for the test to be scrapped as it was harming patients. Others have been publicly questioning whether the tests are in violation of medical ethics. At the BMA’s annual conference in June, the doctors’ union passed a motion demanding that work capability assessments be ended ‘with immediate effect and be replaced with a rigorous and safe system that does not cause unavoidable harm to some of the weakest and vulnerable in society’.
Even as the coalition tries to keep bulldozing its policies through, and local authorities keep burying their heads in the sand about the impact of their cuts, the disability movement is showing they won’t get away without a fight.

Atos and the Paralympics: rubbing salt in the wounds

Atos Healthcare’s contract to assess the ‘fitness for work’ of incapacity benefit, ESA and DLA claimants is worth £100 million per year. The company’s boss Thierry Breton was awarded a £1 million bonus this year on top of his annual pay packet of nearly £1 million. The multi-million pound IT company is one of the big winners from the government’s welfare reform programme and its privatisation agenda.
The assessments carried out by the company have become a lynchpin of the coalition’s welfare reforms. They have been criticised by doctors as ‘dominating the whole procedure’ for assigning benefit categories – despite lacking medical expertise and working, it is claimed, to targets rather than seeking an accurate reflection of need. Staff have reportedly used Facebook to refer to claimants as ‘parasitic wankers’ and ‘down and outs’.
Most controversy surrounding the assessments has been around the criteria used and the impact the stress of them has on people’s health. It’s not difficult to see why they have been widely lambasted as fundamentally flawed: Citizens Advice Scotland found that among the claimants deemed fit for work were people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, heart failure, strokes, severe depression and terminal cancer. The tests, based on drop-down box choices on a computer program, are said to be inadequate for complex conditions.
The government has boasted that half of all new ESA claimants are found fit for work. However, between 40-70 per cent of the decisions are being appealed, and so far 40 per cent of appeals have won – costing millions in taxpayer money on top of the distress and financial hardship of wrong assessments. The Daily Mirror recently reported that 32 people a week died last year after being deemed to be well enough to go out and get a job.
The human impact is becoming clearer. Coroners’ reports on suicides have noted the stress of the assessment and appeals process as a contributory factor, while citizens’ advice and welfare advice services are inundated with people seeking help on appealing benefit decisions. Not surprisingly, Atos has become one of the top targets for protesters. People are also using the web to share Atos horror stories, which continue to emerge thick and fast.
Atos’s sponsorship of the Paralympics this year has enraged campaigners as ‘rubbing salt into the wounds’. Demonstrations, including candlelit vigils for Atos victims, are planned in protest.

What the government is doing to disabled people

There are more than 10 million disabled people in the UK, who have been hit from various directions by coalition government policy – particularly through benefit reforms and local authority cuts. Taken together, warns Nick Coyle of Disability Alliance, ‘the combined effect will mean some people are cut adrift from the entire welfare state’.
Overall, the government has planned cuts of £2.17 billion (20 per cent) to disability living allowance (DLA), along with £2 billion of cuts to employment and support allowance (ESA). DLA can be claimed by those in or out of work to cover the extra costs of living with a disability; it is split into mobility and care components. ESA is for those out of work and can be claimed either by people in the ‘support’ group, who face the biggest barriers to working, or those in the ‘work-related activity’ group, who are expected to get back into work in the future.
ESA has been limited to one year for the latter group, while claimants must undergo ‘fitness for work’ assessments by the private firm Atos – these have been one of the most controversial, and damaging, aspects of the government’s reforms (see RP Feb/Mar 2011). Many are pushed off ESA and onto jobseekers’ allowance, ignoring the fact that the major barriers to work for disabled people remain transport and the workplace itself rather than lack of will. Activist John McArdle says this amounts to disability ‘being systematically denied in order to deprive us of the social security to which we’re entitled in a civilised society’.
Next year, the DLA will be scrapped in favour of a new benefit, the personal independence payment (PIP). In the process it is predicted that half a million people will lose their entitlement. The government has declared in advance that the switch will result in a 20 per cent cut to the benefit bill – leading campaigners to argue that this is proof that the cost reductions are determining how the eligibility criteria will be set, rather than reflecting people’s needs. Because the government claims it is focusing support on people ‘who need it most’, disability groups fear those with lesser needs could lose benefits, hitting their independence, wellbeing and quality of life. The phasing out of the independent living fund – a benefit that was specifically aimed at those with the greatest support needs – also contradicts the government rhetoric.
Local authority cuts to the adult social care budget have reached nearly £900 million this year, on top of the £1 billion cut last year, according to the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. Councils are raising eligibility criteria for social care, in many cases restricting it to those with ‘critical’ or ‘substantial’ needs, increasing its cost and closing down services. Reductions in care packages have in several cases led individuals to take councils to court; legal aid cuts will make this recourse increasingly difficult in the future. Disabled services such as day centres have already lost significant funding. One in three local authorities have closed day services, while the costs of attending centres, including transport, have risen on average by 70 per cent. Mencap’s recent ‘Stuck at Home’ report found that one in four people with a learning disability now spend less than one hour outside their home every day.
True to style, the government has been willfully blind to damning evidence about its programme’s impacts on disabled people’s poverty, quality of life and mental health. In May, calls were dismissed for an assessment of the cumulative effect of the policy changes on the UK’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The minister for disabled people, Maria Miller, claimed the exercise, called for by a joint committee on human rights, disabled people and their organisations, would be too ‘complex’.

The impact on women

The paid-work-or-nothing attitude foisted on many disabled people, together with an increasing reliance on informal carers, is having a particular impact on women. Claire Glasman from WinVisible, a grassroots group for women with visible and invisible disabilities, explains:
‘With other groups we’ve opposed the phasing out of income support, which recognises that mothers and other carers are already working unwaged and should not be harassed into a waged job.
As disabled people and disabled women we feel that coping with a disability, and all the discrimination that you face, is an unwaged workload. This deserves to be recognised and to be cut down by adaptations, because in an inaccessible world everything is an enormous effort to do. As women we are also the ones very likely to be looking after children, the ones with time to be visiting elderly relatives in hospital, and so on.
In this culture of working really long hours, there’s less and less time for relationships and caring for people. As disabled women we’re often doing that kind of unwaged work and we want it recognised, and to be able to get money to live on, without having work conditions imposed on us.’

UK Uncut London Street Party

louise — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:30:02 +0000

Nothing to do, nowhere to go – how cuts hit kids

admin — Sat, 26 May 2012 16:42:36 +0000

School will soon be out – but for many children and young people the holidays have a lot less in store, and for many parents a period of anxiety is looming. Last year, hundreds of thousands of young people were affected by the dramatic cuts in youth services, which bit as the summer holidays were approaching. The closures of childcare services and youth centres were the most visible examples, with the latter receiving particular attention in the aftermath of the August riots. The Guardian video of a Haringey teenager lamenting youth club closures and warning ‘There’ll be riots’ seemed eerily prophetic. One year on, the sector is still in turmoil. How are services adapting to cuts and what are the most serious effects?
Jo, an early years worker from inner London*, is eager to explain the severe impact of playscheme closures in the area. Pointing out that children from poorer families often live in cramped housing and have much fewer opportunities for play, she says: ‘Without playschemes and other activities over the holidays, inner city children miss out on a lot of important experiences – trips to the seaside, creative and messy play, interacting with their peers in a less formal environment, running, jumping, dancing.’ She points to the key role of playschemes in emotional well-being and in identifying special educational needs before formal schooling starts, as well as the links made between a lack of play opportunities and a rise in ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)-type difficulties.
With the government’s austerity budgeting, the universal childcare to which parents are entitled – and which is so important to low-income families – is being dismantled. A report from the Daycare Trust last year showed 62 per cent of local authorities had been forced to cut childcare and playscheme funding, and 50 per cent were offering a decreased level of childcare provision. There has also been a sharp reduction in the number of places, which means three and four year olds who are entitled to 15 hours a week of free early learning education may not find a nursery, centre or playscheme to deliver it.
The situation is likely to get worse in the next few years as the bulk of the cuts are yet to come. The ‘big society’, rather than stepping in to fill the gap, is proving instead to be equally vulnerable to funding crises. As Jo explains, ‘There isn’t money in the voluntary sector to fill the gap – there’s less grants and trust money to apply for and greater competition.’
The tough financial choices facing parents have hit disadvantaged families harder too. The average cost of a week’s childcare increased to £96.85 in England last year, up from £58.45 ten years before. Some areas have seen a 50 per cent hike in just one year. For poor families, says Jo, turning to private childcare ‘just isn’t an option in the first place . . . Parents are forced to stay at home to look after their child with all of the complications, headaches and vilification that comes with claiming benefits.’ The result? ‘Probably a widening in the achievement gap between children from different economic backgrounds. We’re likely to see an increase in children deemed to be living in poverty, children growing up in the city with increasingly challenging home lives as families are hit from various directions.’
For workers, the cuts mean increasingly precarious employment. Often employed on casual contracts and paid hourly, early years workers, the vast majority of whom are female, are feeling the pitfalls of casual employment – no sick pay, job insecurity – much more keenly. Against this background, organising in opposition becomes problematic, although small‑scale resistance is happening, with staff refusing the demand to do ‘more for less’ as employers try to avoid paying staff for all the time they put in.
Youth centre closures
The closure of youth centres has received more attention, particularly when union resistance spearheaded by Unite took place last year. In Oxfordshire, where the Conservative local authority’s cuts were some of the most dramatic in the country, youth workers went on strike and protested outside David Cameron’s constituency offices in Witney. The campaign eventually lost momentum, however. ‘They basically ignored us. People felt drained and exhausted after the whole affair,’ says the Unite community and youth workers chair David Ricketts.
Countrywide, 3,000 youth service workers have lost their jobs so far and, in the ‘commissioning’ atmosphere whereby grants are attached to performance targets, universal services such as youth centres have come off worse from spending cuts. Last year 20 per cent of centres closed their doors, and although some have tentatively reopened with volunteers, rafts of others have since had to close too – the most recent being in West Sussex and Somerset. Many local authorities are now targeting their reduced funds at early intervention ‘hubs’, designed to provide support for young people facing problems with crime, truancy, pregnancy or drugs. In this mindset youth clubs as a community resource, a place where young people can gain confidence, experience citizenship and explore non-academic talents, are deemed unnecessary.
This has the most impact on teenagers who could get into trouble, even if they’re not already. According to Bill, an experienced youth worker in the south east*, the non-structured environment of a youth club is especially important for those for whom structured and organised activities don’t appeal, even where they are available. ‘It’s precisely their informality that harder-to-reach young people respond to, and that’s why open youth centres are so often frequented by those people. Youth centres offer a space for a group to operate out of, long-term community relationships, a social network and continuity. If the local youth centre closes, where can a teenager in care hang out with their friends? It’s not the same for the middle classes.’ They are the polar opposite of the flagship Conservative youth policy of national citizen service for 16 year olds, entering its second year this summer, which David Cameron enticingly described as ‘non-military national service’.
The community-wide effect of losing these facilities is as hard to measure as their benefits, but experts have hit the headlines by warning of an increase in gang-related crime and serious impacts on the safety of young people in urban areas. In many isolated rural areas, teenagers are simply left with nothing to do.
Volunteers and charities
So why can’t volunteers and charities step in to protect services? After all, youth work started in the charity sector. In the most part, according to Bill, independent youth centres are only viable with local authority support: ‘You could run something without local authority funding but it would be too expensive for many young people.’ Another factor is who would deliver the services. ‘Some areas have a strong voluntary sector who could do it, others don’t … In some cases, there isn’t money locally to afford it, and if you put nothing in new projects can’t get off the ground.’
This doesn’t mean that people are not demonstrating plenty of passion and creativity to try to enable the sector to weather the storm. A good example of this can be found in Buckinghamshire, where the council pulled funding from 27 youth centres and around 100 youth workers were made redundant. Some of the centres have since reopened with a volunteer workforce. Working with them is a new social enterprise, which aims to reinvigorate clubs with activities as well as a committed group of managers.
Rafe’s Place is named after Rafe Chiles, who died in 2004 aged just 23 but was a huge inspiration in the area for his work organising music nights and other events for young people. It has found a niche that involves local students at Buckinghamshire New University who want work experience managing and running youth activities at clubs in a partnership that focuses on ‘two problems [becoming] resources for each other’. Once it becomes established, the group hopes the model can be replicated in other areas. One of its directors, Georgia Romeril, describes the need to engage young people in her local area of Amersham: ‘They need something they’re interested in and that inspires them. When the youth clubs closed they literally had nowhere to go, and young people get so much stick around here.’
The idea was conceived more than two years ago, before the cuts began to bite, with the aim of running projects that really appeal to teenagers, including street art, DJ lessons, music production and a summer community festival. Since the funding for youth centres was slashed, their work has taken on a new importance, with clubs approaching them to help run activities they can no longer afford.
While Rafe’s Place is an example of a new approach going from strength to strength, mainly thanks to the relentless commitment of the team, it is designed as a parallel project to youth centres and is not involved in running them itself. The inherent problems of expecting a professional and funded service to be run by volunteers and charities remain. Youth clubs in the county are appealing for more volunteers. Georgia Romeril is well aware of the shortfall as her day job involves volunteer recruitment in the charity sector. ‘You can’t necessarily just run on volunteers because people are struggling themselves and just don’t have the time in their day. Everyday volunteers are hard to come by and hard to keep.’
The same sentiment was expressed strongly in Norfolk after a BBC article on the ‘big society’ and youth clubs ended on a cautiously positive note, suggesting that although precarious, youth clubs in the area were being kept going by the passion and commitment of local people. A youth worker featured in the article, who had set up a charity to continue services after being made redundant, responded indignantly. She stated that ‘funding was hard to come by’ and that ‘qualified youth workers are essential to youth centres due to the specific issues young people face and volunteers are not trained to deal with these’. In seeking training for volunteers, she said they had received ‘no support’.
Worse to come
If funding is hard to come by now, it’s going to get worse over the next few years. The National Children’s Bureau warns that children’s and young people’s charities in England face funding cuts over the next five years that will exceed those faced by the voluntary sector as a whole. By 2016, funding is expected to be £400 million down on 2011 levels.
Resistance to the closures of both early years services such as nurseries and youth centres has continued with local campaigns to save certain projects, such as Heatham House in Richmond and Roundabout Nursery in Hackney. One youth worker suggested that whether organising against closures had any effect or not depended on the local authority – while the scattered re-opening of some clubs shows councils being prepared to be responsive, others stick resolutely to their slash-and-burn agendas.
Overall, the attack on youth centres has left patchy provision around the country. And like so many of the public sector cuts, it is economically disadvantaged young people who are most likely to feel the effects.
*Some names have been changed.
Illustration by Cressida Knapp.

Why I resigned from the Green Party

Michael — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:40:58 +0000

Joseph Healy, in a Green Party publicity photo.

I joined the Green Party ten years ago as I believed that it had something new and radical to say in British politics. I was also a founder member of Green Left, which was formed in 2006, and I helped draft the Headcorn Declaration, the group’s mission statement. One of my aims in doing so was to ensure that there was a radical left faction in the party constantly pushing it in a progressive direction – and providing a counterbalance to those in the party for whom pragmatism and ‘lifestyle environmentalism’ were the driving forces.

As an Irish person with strong links with some of the founding members of the Irish Green Party, I watched in horror as pragmatism and party centralisation led to both the entry of that party into a right wing coalition government and the resignation of many of those radical members in disgust. I wrote a critical article about this in 2009 entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Irish Greens’, which also predicted their eventual drubbing at the hands of the Irish people in the general election of 2011.

Many in the Green Party of England & Wales (GPEW) watched the story of the Irish Greens with horror, but were also convinced that it would never happen here, because the GPEW was one of the most left wing Green parties in Europe.

But there was always a strong group at the centre of the Green Party, and supported by many of its councillors, who regarded Green Left as too left wing and whose vision was to replace the Lib Dems as the main centre party. The entry of the Lib Dems into government in 2010 strengthened the hand of this group.

The battle lines became obvious over the issue of local government budgets and cuts at the GPEW conference in spring 2011. At that point the Greens had not yet taken control of Brighton, but it was clearly on the mind of the party leadership.

An amendment was put to an anti-cuts policy motion by Green Left and some of the Young Greens. It called for local Green councils to fight the cuts and to defy the government by setting an illegal ‘needs budget’. Councillors were dragooned by the leadership to speak against it and finally it was defeated by just 3 votes.

For many of us this was the writing on the wall and a sign that should the Greens take Brighton, they would implement the cuts. It led to a real fall in morale among many of us on the left of the party.

In May 2011, only three months after the conference, the Greens took Brighton. Almost immediately the debate about the cuts budget began. Green Left organised many internal discussions on the issue and agreed to send a delegation to Brighton to argue the point with the Brighton Green councillors – this was only a few weeks before the budget deadline.

For me it was too little and too late – although I supported the initiative. I was pessimistic about the outcome and was proved right. I drew parallels with the story of the Irish Greens and referred to this in a speech I gave at a meeting of the London regional party in January. I quoted the comments of the new Irish Green Party chair, Roderic O’Gorman, following the defeat of the party in 2011 and the loss of all its parliamentary seats: ‘We became part of the political consensus. Our voters did not want us to be part of that consensus.’

Painfully aware of the impact of any cuts budget in Brighton on the national party’s reputation and on its relationship with the wider anti-cuts movement, as well as the new political movements such as Occupy, I supported a motion calling for a last minute debate with a Green councillor from Brighton on the budget there. The motion fell and the majority abstained, prepared to accept any decision reached by the Brighton councillors.

It was now clear to me that the iceberg was fast approaching the SS Green Brighton, with its consequent impact on the reputation of the Green Party nationally. The collision happened when the cuts budget was passed at the end of February. However, the budget passed was even worse than predicted and was the Labour-Tory version, which the Greens swallowed whole in order to remain in office.

A few days later at the party’s national conference, despite vigorous objections from Green Left, the party voted to support the Brighton decision. Pragmatism had defeated principle, realpolitik triumphed over radicalism.

I resigned on the same day. I saw no indication that those of us opposed to the decision would be able to remain radical opponents of the cuts agenda while our own elected members had sold the pass. I was always determined not to end up as a member of a small internal opposition in a political party which had moved away from its core principles, as happened in the Labour Party post-Blair. Some Green Left members have remained in the party, while others have joined Socialist Resistance or Respect. I have remained as an independent anti-cuts and anti-war activist.

It is certainly true that it was not only the cuts agenda in Brighton which led to my resignation, although that was the major issue. I also found a lack of honesty and consistency in the way that those leading the party were treating both its employees and its activists. This came to a head in the autumn of last year at the party conference in Sheffield. A highly respected and hard working party member, who held the post of head of media relations, was treated appallingly by the party leadership.

This included disciplinary action taken against him while he was ill, no proper consultation with staff and members, and a complete ignoring the of the party’s radical policies on workers rights and trade union support – using the services of a human resources consultant to undermine his position. As a trade unionist and campaigner for workers rights and social justice, I found it intolerable. Myself and other members, many from the Green Party Trade Union Group and Green Left, put a motion to the conference condemning the actions of the executive. Every effort was made by the party leadership to force the motion off the agenda. But despite their efforts, the motion was passed by a significant majority and the executive censured.

This did not go down well with the party’s leadership. Comments were made about the party’s activists and we were referred to in pretty damning terms. The conference decision was also pretty much ignored and the staff member in question was made redundant and forced to sign an agreement (which I was advised was probably illegal) that he could not stand for any office in the party for one year, so worried was the leadership about his popularity and the possibility of him upsetting the apple cart. All of this indicated a worrying hubris at the head of the party and a willingness to ignore the concerns of activists and members.

I believe that the Brighton situation is further evidence of this, with many at the head of the party arguing hysterically at the recent conference for tribalist support for the councillors and condemning criticism as disloyalty.

It does have to be said here that Caroline Lucas did not support the Brighton budgetary decision and said so openly at a fringe meeting at the party conference. I am certain that this indicates her concern at the apparent contradiction between her support for Occupy and calls for a radical anti-cuts politics, and the decision of the council in her own backyard.

When I resigned from the party, one prominent Green told me that I had too many principles. The disconnect in modern British and European politics is rather that there are too few principles. The real battle now underway is whether we can give politics new life and new meaning and to reconnect the millions in this country who no longer vote, and have given up on electoral politics completely, with the political process.

The Greens presented themselves as a party to the left of Labour (not too difficult one would have thought). Their policies are radical and many are worth supporting. But as with the situation in Ireland, consistency and veracity are called for. It is not enough to parrot truisms about being unable to challenge the status quo, no matter how urgent it is to do so. How can the Greens seriously challenge the corporate sector, the global corporations, climate change in the Arctic and the prospect of resource wars and famines, if they fall down at the first puff of wind from Eric Pickles and the Department for Communities and Local Government?

Vision requires courage, and courage requires mounting a challenge. On both, the Greens have been found sadly wanting.

This article is partly a response to a debate on the decisions of the Green-led council in Brighton, published in the latest issue of Red Pepper.

May elections – TUSC: Opposing all the cuts

Michael — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:00:45 +0000

What is TUSC?
It is exactly what the name says. It is a coalition of trade unionists and socialists who want to support a different set of policies from the other parties. There is now a three-party consensus in favour of cuts, privatisation and austerity; that aims to make the working class pay for the current capitalist crisis. TUSC opposes that agenda entirely.

Who is involved?
TUSC has the backing of the RMT national executive and in London it has the backing of the London region of the FBU. TUSC has been endorsed by three trade union general secretaries: Matt Wrack (FBU), Bob Crow (RMT) and Steve Gillan (POA). Alex Gordon, the president of the RMT, is heading our list in London and it includes union executive members from Unison, NUT, UCU and the FBU as well as rank and file activists. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party are both involved along with the Independent Socialist Network, which was set up for the many socialists who are not members of any organisation.
It also has the support of Ken Loach, Paul Laverty, solicitor Imran Khan, Mike Mansfield QC and ex-soldier Joe Glenton amongst others.

What does it stand for?
TUSC is opposed to all the cuts. We reject the argument that some cuts are necessary.
We are against privatisation and outsourcing. We want the repeal of the anti-union laws. In contrast with Labour, we are not embarrassed to support workers on strike.
We are unashamedly socialist. We call for democratic public ownership of the banks and major industries and the renationalisation of all the industries and services sold off in the past. We want a democratic socialist society run in the interests of the millions, not the millionaires, so that production and services can be planned to meet the needs of all and not just a rich few.

What does it hope to achieve?
This time, TUSC hopes to win a seat on the London assembly. We need just 5 per cent to do that. The result in Bradford West shows that Labour cannot take its working-class voters for granted any longer. We hope to cause an upset in London. Of course, we’d like to win council seats elsewhere but that’s much more difficult for a small party like ours with very little profile, when it’s first past the post.

How does TUSC differ from the Greens?
In lots of ways but, most importantly, TUSC opposes all cuts. The Greens say they’re against cuts but they’ve just voted for a cuts budget in Brighton where they run the council. That’s useless. There is no point saying you’re against cuts, and marching against them, if you then go into the council chamber and vote for them. That’s what puts so many people off politics. Voters want representatives who will do what they promise. TUSC promises to fight and puts forward an alternative.
Secondly, we argue that capitalism cannot solve the problems of the economy. You cannot have a ‘good capitalism’. We argue for a different, socialist society. While some individual Green members might agree with us, that isn’t the position of the Green Party.

Isn’t a vote for TUSC a wasted vote?
No. I think it’s important to vote for the party whose polities you support, not just for the least bad option. The old argument that you must vote Labour to keep out the Tories is wearing very thin.
Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have said they won’t reverse the Tory cuts, that they support the public sector pay freeze and they support privatisation.
Labour was in government for 13 years and continued privatising. The anti-union laws remained intact and the privatisation of the NHS and education began. How can anyone think that they will behave differently next time?
Those who believe we need something different have to start somewhere. We can’t guarantee that TUSC will win, any more than the pioneers of the Labour Party could. But you’ll never win unless you make a start.
There is a real chance under proportional representation that we can get 5 per cent across London and win at least one seat in the assembly on 3 May. That would make a huge difference to the political debate in Britain. By standing and arguing our case we are helping to pull the entire debate to the left.

What does the future hold?
Lots of hard work. At the moment TUSC is a coalition. I would like to see it develop into a new, united socialist party. But that won’t be easy. The left is fragmented. It’s been a great achievement to get this coalition up and running and it will take time to build it. I would like to see TUSC branches all over the country, carrying out activity all the time and not just at elections. I expect more trade unionists and activists to draw the conclusion that we need to build an alternative to Labour. There will be lots of discussions about how best to do that.
We need to build a mass socialist party, which argues and fights for a democratic, socialist society. That requires a party with millions of members and supporters. It won’t happen overnight. But what we’re doing at the moment can be a beginning.

On the warpath: rambling and the cuts

admin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:56:35 +0000

In the prevailing atmosphere of austerity sabre-rattling, trying to defend local authorities’ rights of way (RoW) budgets is quite a tall order. Who would dare argue the case for a few footpaths against school equipment, home helps or the weekly rubbish collection? Of course it shouldn’t be such a simplistic either/or budgetary decision. But it is often portrayed that way, and in the circumstances RoW budgets are some of the softest targets around.
As a result, they are being slashed mercilessly. In some local authorities, RoW spending has been reduced by more than half. Teams with specialist knowledge built up over decades (much needed in such a complicated legal area) are broken up. Maintenance of paths has been scaled back drastically, potentially leaving much of the ancient RoW network overgrown and unwalkable.
In Norfolk, a county with nearly two and a half thousand miles of off-road RoW, the cuts announced have been savage: more than 50 per cent per cent in this year, scaling down to a budget of zero by 2014. Instead of regularly cutting growth as part of the maintenance of the county’s network, path clearing will only be undertaken when complaints are received – in other words when the paths have already become unusable. Other authorities are following suit.
The much-vaunted ‘big society’ cannot mop up the rapidly escalating shortfall. In researching my new book about the British footpath network (The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey along Britain’s Footpaths, Collins 2011), I went out with a couple of the many wonderful volunteer path-clearing groups that pepper the countryside. They are finding their work increasingly hampered by red tape and procedural paranoia.
Perfect combination
The recent resurgence of walking as a low-cost form of recreation has been astonishing. Something has fundamentally shifted in the last 20 years. The level of knowledge of our footpath network – and an understanding of what it means to us all – has become embedded in a quite new way right across our collective identity. It has come about, I believe, due to what might be regarded as a perfect combination of factors.
Around two decades ago, there was a marked increase in the creation and promotion of named long-distance paths, which sparked much interest and a surge in their use. In the run up to the millennium, there were the debates about the ‘right to roam’ and the eventual, and long overdue, measures in the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act of 2000, together, north of the border, with its even bolder twin, the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Act.
Hard on the heels of CROW came the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease, whose blanket bans on walking and access served as a chilling reminder of what we stood to lose without our rights of way network. To lose every path in an instant was a wake-up call. And it wasn’t just the beardy rambler types moaning – it was the folk who liked a nice run out into the country on a Sunday afternoon, the people wanting to walk their dogs or take the kids somewhere that they could charge around and let off steam. Foot and mouth was an apocalyptic vision of what could so easily be, and people didn’t like it at all.
It’s no coincidence either that this swell in knowledge of and enthusiasm for our footpath network developed alongside the steady rise in professional teams employed by local authorities, the very ones now facing the axe. They have helped to shape this ancient network for modern needs and have played a significant part in the phenomenal rise of walking as a leisure pursuit.
Knowing that the dots and dashes on the map will translate into easily-used paths on the ground has underpinned this renaissance, as has the growing enthusiasm for the history of our own backyards, for environmental conservation, for activities that boost health and the trend towards short‑break holidays rather than the factory fortnight of old.
This has all resulted in a far deeper connection to our land and landscape that will not be jettisoned overnight. Nor is it dependent solely on the amount of public money thrown at it. But we run the very real risk of losing many of the gains that have been made since the access battles of the 1930s, and that should concern us all.
Walking is good for you
Paths should be among the most securely funded arms of local government, so neatly do they fulfil the obsessions and orthodoxies of the moment. Walking is good for your health, both physical and mental. It is the ultimate in green and sustainable transport. It gets you out of your little fortress and into a realm where you might bump into a stranger, have a pleasant chat and they might not try to mug or murder you. It is therefore fabulous for combating loneliness and over-exposure to the Daily Mail and for helping to foster community cohesion.
By seeing new places (and familiar places from new angles), moreover, a walk encourages us to learn about our landscape and heritage. In researching my book, I found that walking even changed how I saw familiar landscapes. Places that I was used to looking tired or dull through a moving windscreen took on amazing new hues of subtle beauty as I walked by them.
Leslie Stephen, founder of the Sunday Tramps (see box), put it thus: ‘Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace British scenery. A love of walking not only makes any English county tolerable, but seems to make the charm inexhaustible.’ He’s right. I’ve walked in Hertfordshire, one of my least favourite counties, and even that was lovely. It’s win-win-win with a footpath.
Ironically, cuts to RoW teams could end up costing local authorities more. If they are preparing to maintain paths only when a crisis point has been reached, there could well be repercussions in potential litigation, let alone the drop in tourism spend that such action is likely to produce.
‘Every RoW officer is worth a million pounds to the Welsh economy,’ as my local council leader put it six years ago. And legal challenges over footpath maintenance and related issues will not wither away along with the RoW teams. Well-trained, experienced professionals save authorities a small fortune in legal counsel, and getting rid of them could prove very costly indeed.
So why are there no furious campaigns against these cuts? Only a few months ago, the threatened sale of public forests caused apoplexy and forced a government u-turn. Now, aside from a few grumbling press releases from the Ramblers Association and their cohorts, all is strangely quiet. If anything, though, this is a far bigger issue than the forests, with a great many more potential repercussions. This is not just about a few footpaths; it is about our hard-won access to our own land and identity.
Mike Parker is the author of The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey along Britain’s Footpaths (Collins). Illustrations by Cressida Knapp