Norfolk County Council has announced its cuts to try to meet government demands for cuts:
Proposed cuts in council services include:
£6m a year on spending on prevention services for older people;
£1.2m by cutting subsidies to the meals on wheels service;
£4m scrapping funding for youth services which supports up to 20,000 children;
£2.4m a year cuts to look after children in care;
£2m by scrapping subsidy for school and college transport for over 16s — leaving parents and carers to pick up £784 a year bill;
£1.3m cuts to family support work including help to reduce teenage pregnancies;
£2m from the park and ride budget, which could see some sites closed;
£2m by reducing the size of the core bus network and relying on more “dial-a-ride” services particularly in rural areas.
Let’s be realistic about what these cuts means:
- Children suffer
- The old suffer
- The vulnerable suffer
- Transport for those who cannot drive wherever they wish suffer
But let’s also be clear:
1) These cuts will increase crime amongst young people — who will have less to do — but there won’t be police3 to deal with it
2) These cuts will massively increase demand on the NHS — which has no extra funding to deal with that demand and will have many fewer GP appointments as significant amounts of GP time is diverted into running the NHS and its budget — which can only happen by hour to hour, one to one cuts in patient facing time (most GPs already work 11 hour days already — there is no ‘spare time’ to give to their new responsibilities).
So what chance that these cuts will work? Very little, I think?
But there’s more to it than that. The people who run these services — lowly paid by and large — want to work with the young, the old, in caring for fellow human beings. The private sector is not going to provide these people with those jobs — because the state is not going to pay them to provide them — and nor is The Big Society — let’s be realistic.
So what are these employees — some 3,000 of them — who are to lose their jobs going to do? What private sector activity is going to give them the work they want — or the work they can do? I' can’t imagine what it is.
So this is a potential disaster for all involved — the young, the old, the employees who will lose and those who will face an impossible burden in the remaining jobs.
The result will be devastating for Norfolk as a whole and a tragedy for the particular people involved. But worse — when many of those who will be unemployed as a result of these changes will themselves be claiming benefit in future when they could be providing invaluable services — this is an unnecessary disaster.
And what we have to do is work out how the money can be found — as it must be found — to facilitate the needs of society as it apparently can be to meet the needs of banks.
I believe this will be possible — but I admit that’s an act of faith at present because the model does not exist right now. But for the young, the old, the employees and people of Norfolk we need it. Or these people will be living diminished lives. And I find that unacceptable.
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Much the same is due to happen here in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, Richard. But there’s absolutely no way that this is not going to go ahead, particularly now we have: a. above expected growth, b. polls showing the Tories back in front of Labour, c. polls also showing that a good percentage of the public think cuts are the only way out of our (alleged)’mess’. In short the ConDems can claim support and’legitimacy’ for their policies.
The situation will change next year of course, and deteriorate from thereon as the impact of the cuts feeds through into society in the ways you highlight here, and have done previously. But of course the full social cost (to community cohesion, health, the elderly, youth, etc) will not become fully evident for many years. And if that happens to coincide with continued economic growth and the private sector creating jobs – even if not on the scale that the ConDems and CBI claim will happen – then it won’t matter because the ConDems will simply claim it’s a ‘price worth paying’ for sorting out the underlying ills of the country.
And let’s be honest, the majority of the media and press are already – and will continue – to play a leading role in reporting all this in such a way as to mask the true significance of what’s going on. And despite pre election claims from Cameron and co we will see a marked increase in spin and less and less transparency as the ConDems seek to manipulate the policy agenda. In fact, I’ll confidently predict that by the year of the next election the degree of spin and media management will far outstrip anything we saw under New Labour – and that’s saying something!
Paul Mason recently presented a talk on the economy that is pretty gloomy. He argues that the old model is bust and we have no obvious replacement.
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=7023
“Finally, Britain’s social democratic model. What we developed after 1989, once the recovery phase began in the late 1990s, was a strong financial centre paying for a large state and voluntary sector, with manufacturing, innovation squeezed; and this massive geographical imbalance between cities and small towns, the Southeast and the rest. This can’t survive in the world that is emerging — irrespective of policy.
The right knows what its response to that is: an experiment where the action is known but the outcome is not certain. The weakness of the Coalition’s argument is that it does not prove short-term destruction of the state “crowds in” private sector growth, investment, employment — nor where the demand comes from for a 0.7% gdp positive trade balance by 2014 (still less a 0.9% contribution next year). The assertion that lower long-term interest rates drive growth is also only true in a global re-balancing scenario according to the IMF. For the Policy Exchange view, and the government, it is seen as true historically — and because of “psychological crowding out” — ie entrepreneurs will invest now because they see the government being tough on tax, public spending, welfare etc. Either way, boom or slump, the outcome is a smaller public sector, a less generous welfare state. The “Big Society” — seen as peripheral by some Conservatives — might be very crucial in creating the capacity for this new model to work. Either way, the scale of the uncertainties justify calling SR2010 — as the FT and Economist have also called it — an experiment.
The left seems bereft — clinging to the idea of the large, paternalistic state plus a government-funded third sector — without accepting that the 20-year conditions for its existence have disappeared (ie what Gordon Brown called “the golden age of British banking”). Social democracy as the conveyor belt for ever-increasing benefits to a permanent class of low-skilled workers in blighted areas, of lucrative private contracts to the service companies, higher employment to the public service unions and the defence industry, favours and deregulation to the bankers… is that a sustainable model? After the 5 years of austerity indicated in SR2010 might be impossible to go back to this economic programme even if you wanted to. I expect the debate about rebalancing to cross over to all parts of politics.”
Not quite, the savings on the elderly are means testing of support services – telling the rich to buy their own handrails and stairlifts rather than providing them for free. The “vulnerable” (and I use that term warily because some Labour MPs think it includes people living in houses that cost £20,000 a year to tent) will still be protected. In fact the Norfolk cuts amount to less than 3% a year of the total County Council budget. That would not be hard to find at most councils.
What will these people do?
Suffer
@Alex
As ever, you are utterly indifferent and wrong at the same time
Norfolk says there will be 30% cuts
How is that 3%
And making the old pay for such products may sound so good to you – but who organises it? And if they don’t, who picks up the bill? The NHS
Get real
And as for 3% – I note Barnet has failed to find it and it’s an enthusiast
Norfolk has an annual budget of £1.5 billion. The cuts are no more than £0.05 billion a year. That is not beyond the ability of any council. I note that Norfolk plan to cut mobile library vists from every three weeks to every four. We manage perfectly well with monthly library visits here.
@Alex
So that’s why 30% of staff will be affected and at lest 15% are likely to be sacked?
Get your facts right
A large number of staff will be transferred to external service providers including other public sector agencies such as other councils sharing IT services. That doesn’t mean they will lose their jobs or be paid less, just transferred under TUPE, providing the same services at lower cost.
@Alex
I reported exactly accurately
15% are likely to be sacked
15% to commercial bodies on worse terms
And with massive uncertainty attached
Get your facts right
And reconcile this with 3% cuts