Brent Budget Scrutiny Panel recommend Council Tax rise to protect the most vulnerable

In a report to be discussed at the Scrutiny Committee meeting on January 6th 2016, Brent Budget Scrutiny Panel recommend that the Council raise Council Tax by the maximum of 2% which is allowed without a referendum as well as the 2% ring-fenced rise for adult social care.  Last year there was much controversey when Cllr John Duffy proposed an increase in Council Tax. LINK

The Panel  also call for the proposed 10% cut in road and pavement repairs to be abandoned.

On Council Tax their reasoning is set out as follows:

.        7.1  The minimum legal requirement on the Council this year is to set a balanced budget 
and a level of Council Tax for the forthcoming financial year. As noted above, we are satisfied that they will do the former, but we anticipate much further debate around setting the level of the latter. 


.        7.2  During the last Parliament, the government offered a freeze grant to local authorities who froze or reduced their basic level of Council Tax. This was the equivalent to a 1 per cent increase in Council Tax in each financial year. Along with most local authorities, Brent accepted this grant in every year of the last Parliament and never increased its level of Council Tax. 


.        7.3  The advantage of this policy was that the Council were able to receive some additional funds without asking local people to contribute any more through the Council Tax system. 


.        7.4  This disadvantage was that the Council’s overall tax base would decline each year, as the additional funds provided could not increase cumulatively. Accordingly, The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) has estimated that had Council Tax risen in line with the Retail Prices Index measure of inflation of the course of the last Parliament, average council tax bills would be £168 higher next year, yielding an extra £2.8bn in funding for local authorities. This amount is equivalent to the entire road maintenance budget for the UK or the public health grant for local authorities. 


.        7.5  In their Local Government Settlement announced before Christmas, the government announced both that the freeze grant would henceforth be abolished, and that Councils would continue to only be able to raise Council Tax up to 2 per cent without having a run a referendum. 


.        7.6  We feel that these dual announcements leave the Council with little option but to increase Council Tax by the maximum allowed in this budget. It is understandable that the Council has decided not to increase Council Tax in previous years to protect residents, but in accepting the freeze grant, Brent has left its Council Tax base at a level several years out of date, and if action is not taken soon this baseline will be far behind what is required to run services in the future. 


.        7.7  We also understand that this will have an impact on our residents. We therefore recommend that the Council reviews its Council Tax support scheme including any potential increase which might need to be made to protect the most vulnerable in the borough. 


.        7.8  Likewise, the government have also announced that they will allow Councils to increase Council Tax by a further 2 per cent if the money is ring fenced to spend on social care. We feel that this option should also be carefully considered by the Council as a way to prevent the most drastic of cuts in this area. 
 


The recommendation on road and pavement repairs states:

.        6.4 ….we are very concerned about proposal MGF002, which proposes to cut the core budget for core highways maintenance by 10 per cent. It was noted that the list of potential risks associated with this item was longer than many others, something particularly alarming in light of the overall saving being relatively low at £50,000. 


.        6.4  The report notes openly that this cut will lead to fewer active repairs, something which could be dangerous for residents, but also severely damage the reputation of 
the Council, particularly at a time when Council charges and taxes may be set to increase. It also risks additional costs in litigation arising from possible accidents arising as a result of poorly maintained roads and pavements.

.        6.5  We recommend that this proposal be dropped and that instead the Council examines if alternative ways to repair the street scene will decrease the need for reactive action in the long term. 


.        6.6  For example, it was noted that tarmacking or concreting pavements leads to more even surface than paving slabs and does not give space for plants to grow upwards and damage the surface. Prioritising such alternatives may help to save the authority in the long term rather than always replacing paving stones on a like-for-like basis. 


.        6.7  Another idea raised was to seek an outside partner to doggedly pursue illegal rubbish dumpers in the borough. The partner would be incentivised by being able to keep a large percentage of fines generated but the Council would realise long term savings as levels of illegal rubbish dumping – and associated clean-up costs – decrease. A similar approach could also be taken to people who drop litter or who do not clean up after their dogs. 


The Panel  calls for Scrutiny Committee involvement to be much earlier in the budget making process and makes an overall critique of the package:

.        4.4 Our main broad critique of the package is that it lacks a common thread or philosophical story. The package instead appears to be a collection of disparate ideas brought together in order to reach the final figure required. 


.        4.5  A clear example of this would be in the DOE001 proposal to increase the take up of direct payments for home care and community support. This is simply presented as a savings proposal rather than as part of the Council’s long-term vision of how to deliver care. 


.        4.6  We feel that setting out the Council’s concrete vision at the start of the process, and ensuring that each proposal made aids progress towards that vision, rather than stalling it, would be an approach which would better ensure this continuity of purpose in future years. 


There is much else of interest in the full report that can be found below:

Brent Council may join Judicial Review bid on Shaping a Healthier Future

I thought this posting on the Brent Council website LINK by Cllr Kruoesh Hiran, Cabinet member for Adults, Health and Wellbeing,  deserved a wider audience. It sets out Brent Council's response to the Mansfield report.

Following a year long investigation into health service changes across five London boroughs the Independent Healthcare Commission for North West London reported its findings earlier this month.
The Commission, which was chaired by one of the UK’s leading lawyers Mr Michael Mansfield QC, was jointly commissioned by the boroughs of Brent, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Harrow and Hounslow. Naturally, as the democratically elected representatives of local people, we shared serious concerns about how A&E and other health services were changed across our boroughs.

However, it is important to also note that our concerns are not solely focused on A&E. One of the main issues here in Brent is the outdated population estimates underpinning the original plans. Yes A&E is a barometer of how the NHS is performing but it is clear that there is a wider system problem.

The Mansfield report highlights social care funding cuts and the significant cuts to local government. A good NHS needs a properly funded social care system. But the funding cuts to councils have reduced local authorities’ ability to provide more preventative services. It is the same problem emerging with Public Health funding.

Naturally when you are looking at a report, which affects two million people across North West London, there will be some issues more relevant than others to Brent’s 320,000 population.
First let’s turn to the main findings in the report:

• there is still no completed, up to date business plan in place that sets out the case for delivering the Shaping a Healthier Future programme (SaHF), demonstrating that the programme is affordable and deliverable
• there was limited and inadequate public consultation on the original SaHF proposals and those proposals themselves did not provide an accurate view of the final costs and risks to the people affected
• the escalating costs of the programme do not represent value for money and is a waste of precious public resources
• NHS facilities, delivering important public healthcare services, have been closed without adequate alternative provision being put in place
• the original business case seriously underestimates the increasing size of the population in North West London and fails to address the increasing need for services.

The report also makes it clear that we are now looking at a £1.3 billion project while the original proposals were predicating a saving of over £200 million a year. A continued lack of investment in the out of hospitals strategy, while still implementing the A&E closures programme has led to unacceptable standards and low performance within A&E.

We are supportive of a good out of hospital strategy. It is in all our interests as it is generally better to have good health services closer to home. However, those services need to be in place before hospitals are reconfigured.

This is combined with a lack of bed capacity at Northwick Park and the delays in resolving this situation have been ongoing for the past year. Residents still consistently report problems with accessing GP appointments in a timely way and this inevitably leads to people presenting at A&E, while the use of urgent care centres is below capacity.

What was truly shocking to me in the report was the statistics on Northwick Park hospital where performance has been consistently poor since September 2014. A key graph in the report shows London Ambulance Service ‘black breaches’. These are where an ambulance has taken more than an hour to take a patient to A&E. In Northwick Park there were 633 such breaches compared to 106 at Hillingdon. Especially relevant is the fact that the London Ambulance Service has just been placed into special measures as, if you close A&Es, you are clearly more reliant on this service.

In summary, the SaHF plans really need to go back to the drawing board. We want greater local authority involvement in the actual decision making process and designing of services. While it is clear that mistakes have been made Brent Council wants to take this forward in a positive way.
Co-production is a good example where there is potential. There has been a recent decision to involve a Health and Wellbeing Board representative in local primary care. I am now Brent’s representative and although it has been a slow process to get here, I think we are now moving in the right direction.

In the meantime, we will thoroughly explore all of the recommendations in the Mansfield report
including the possibility of joining a Judicial Review after careful consideration and assessing the impact on Brent residents.

Finally, it does not give me any pleasure to write about the findings in this report but please do be reassured that Brent Council will continue to do our very best to help support our local NHS partners to learn the lessons from it and ultimately to deliver a good and more fully integrated NHS for all Brent residents.

• Read the Mansfield Health Commission Report (.pdf)

Brent Connects Forums to discuss council cuts

Brent Council consulting on where to make the cuts, rather than how to fight them.

NHS Consultation on patient transport services in NW London

Thursday 21^th January,  at 2pm to 4pm
Venue: Wembley Centre for Health & Care, 116 Chaplin Road, Wembley, HA0 4UZ

The NHS is reviewing patient transport across North West London. They are looking for the views of patients and carers to understand their experiences of using these services.

In January 2016 they would like to meet with people living in North West London that currently use or care for someone who uses patient transport services. They are holding workshops in Wembley and Hammersmith to share their initial findings and to hear your views on their proposed improvements.

More information is in the introductory letter and flyer – please circulate. If you are interested please contact by Tuesday 5^th January by email travel@nw.london.nhs.uk or phone 020 3350 4734.

Does the People's Assembly motion show us a way of fighting council cuts?

Following the discussion on this blog on local council cuts, after the Corbyn letter to council leaders, arguing that they had not choice but to make cuts LINK , I thought it would be worth publishing the motion passed at the People's Assembly Conference earlier this month.  The motion from Cardiff PA was more contentious that other motions but passed with a clear majority.
 

“No Cuts” Campaign Against Council Cuts

Conference notes

1.  People’s Assembly opposes all cuts. Five more years of council cuts is unsustainable.

2.  Council cuts derive from the Tory government’s austerity policies of making us pay for the financial crisis not of our making.

3.  People, especially younger people, across the UK are under financial pressure from benefit cuts and falling real wages. In these circumstances they increasingly rely on the collective provision of council and other services, only to find that they are being withdrawn whilst at the same time experiencing increased payments for less provision.

4.  Council cuts are transmitted down from the UK Tory government by a combination of withdrawal of finance and requirement to set a legal budget.

5.  Councillors, lacking politics and confidence to challenge this political and bureaucratic process, buckle under and pass ‘their problem’ as they see it, on to us.

6.  Historical examples of councils defying central government: Poplar 1921, Clay Cross & Bedwas and Machen 1972, Rate Capping Rebellion of 80s with 26 Labour councils pledging to defy government with Liverpool and Lambeth going furthest.

7.  Recently examples of Northern Ireland Assembly and House of Lords prepared to risk a constitutional crisis over implementation of Tory welfare reform and tax credits.

8.  A small number of Labour & Green councillors have voted for no cuts.

Conference calls for

People’s Assembly to launch a national campaign for councils to refuse to set cuts budgets this year and instead set ‘needs’ budgets based upon estimating what is actually needed to adequately maintain services and campaigning for the government to provide it.

Conference therefore resolves to

1.  Publicise and develop arguments around ‘needs budgets’ to aid activists

2.  Prepare model motions calling upon councils to set no cuts budgets for use by local anti-cuts groups, trade union branches etc

3.  Give a platform to, and amplify voice of councillors who vote against all cuts 4 In all council areas an electronic petition could be drawn up demanding councillors vote against all cuts, raising directly the issues that we face and the responsibility our elected representatives have to fight back.

5.  Rectify lack of material on PA website supporting local campaigners around council cuts, especially around the political arguments (ie.  responding to ‘cuts have to be made’, ‘we have no choice’, ‘what would you cut instead’)

6.  Organise a national meeting for councillors, trade unionists and anti-austerity campaigners to explore how councils can resist.

7.  Compile and share information on examples of council ‘best practice’ in resisting austerity such as using reserves, no bedroom tax eviction policies, pledges of non-cooperation with the Trade Union Bill, Manchester Council opening up empty buildings to homeless etc.”

This along with the suggestions from  Felicity Dowling LINK and William Quick LINK could provide the basis for a discussion at Brent Fightback and Brent Momentum early in the New Year.

Bennett welcomes Green and anti-austerity progress in Spanish election

The Green Party has welcomed the huge electoral progress made by anti-austerity parties in  yesterday's he Spanish General Election.

In the weekend elections, the new party Podemos, with which the Spanish Green Party (Equo) has a partnership, won 20.7% of the vote, while another new party, Ciudadanos, won 13.9%.
Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, who recorded a Green/Podemos message of support before the vote, said:

I congratulate the three Green MPs Rosa Martinez and Juantxo Uralde in the Basque Country and Jorge Luis in Aragon on their election and also Podemos for the historic level of support it won.

This is a powerful boost to the anti-austerity battle across Europe, and a further sign that politics is changing fast.

Podemos and Greens are offering a new open, democratic politics, one that offers the prospect of self-determination for Catalonia, support for grassroots campaigns and organisations, and a vision of a ‘social’ Europe that works for common good, not for the 1%.

Bennett also noted, 

Women now make up nearly 40% of the Spanish parliament – helped by half of the elected Podemos candidates being female. That puts a further spotlight on the scant progress made in Britain, where only 29% of Westminster MPs are female.

UPDATE: Sudbury School situation raises wider issues

Unions at Sudbury Primary School report that there was standing room only when they held a meeting last week for parents to discuss the way forward for the school after the suspension of its headteacher. They say that Sudbury teachers attended despite the threat of disciplinary action if they did so.

The unions said:

Several staff made it clear that, through all of this, their priority was the education and care of the children. Parent and union speakers said that without the staff the children would not be doing as well as they are.

The meeting was reminded by an emotional parent that it was the children who were the reason there was a school and we had to get to the bottom of what was going on for them. It was pointed out that if the school had still been with the local authority instead of being an academy, Brent would have stepped in and taken prompt action to deal with the situation.

Parents were angry that it had to be down to the unions to call such a meeting and felt the governors had kept them in the dark. It was revealed that a new Chair of Governors Ian Phillips, had just been put in place. The Ofsted report is due imminently after the inspection which took place after the Headteacher was suspended. The section on management of the school should make interesting reading.

The headteacher remains suspended while an independent investigation takes place. As stated in earlier coverage suspension this a neutral act to allow the investigation of allegations to proceed. 

However, the unions say that a petition for parents calling on the headteacher to 'do the right thing and resign' has been started: 'Staff remain united and determined but if this does not happen they will be taking action in the Spring term.'

 The situation is complicated by the fact that the Sudbury Primary School Academy Trust is a company limited by guarantee under the Companies Act 2006.  A large school with a budget of £9m plus it comes under the Education Funding Agency/DfE rather than the local authority, Brent Council. The Regional Schools Commissioner acts for the Secretary of State regarding academies and free schools but he does not appear to have intervened in this case so far, although there are provisions for intervention in the funding agreement LINK and the powers of the RSC.

The headteacher of Sudbury Primary School is the company's Chief Executive Officer and it appears from the last company report that all the governors are also Trustees of the company. The company secretary is Irfan Khan. LINK

At the time of the last annual report that I can find (for the period ending August 2014) in addition to the headteacher, chair and vice chair, there were 8 parent governors, 4 community governors and 3 staff governors on the Board of Trustees.

The case clearly raises wider issues regarding academies (and free schools) of accountability, local democratic representation, powers of intervention and governance.

UPDATE


The Kilburn Times LINK is reporting that Ian Phillips, Chair of Govers at Finchley's Woodhouse College has been appointed to the Sudbury governors on the recoemmndation of the DfE.

Chair of Governors, Bob Wharton, a former Lead Member for Children and Schools when Lib Dems formed a coalition with Brent Tories to run Brent Council, welcomed the appointment and said Phillips had made a good impression on staff.

The DfE said, 'We take very seriously any allegationb that children's education is being put at risk. We are continuing to work with the academy trust to strengthem governance. We recommended they (the school)  request support from other experienced governors.'

Jean Roberts, NUT, pointed out that if Sudbury had been an LA school they would have come in and taken control of the situation. It had only got to ths stage because it was an academy and being dealt with by the DfE. She added that this was why the education unions are against academies.
 

The need for a 'Needs Budget'

Mural to celebrate the Poplar rate rebels who used the powers of local government to stand up to a Conservative and Liberal coalition government in the aftermath of the First World War

Guest blog by William Quick, a Green Party member in Bristol. This posting was orginally published on his blog A Green Trade Unionist - In Bristol

I’ve just been selected by the Bristol Green Party to be their candidate for Bedminster in next May’s Council elections.  I’m really excited and want to thank all our local members who voted for me; we came second to Labour in Bedminster by only 3% this year and we have a really good chance of getting atleast one of the two seat in the ward.  I intend to do a longer post on my priorities for the ward, but for now I thought I’d dwell on something that came up in the hustings, my opposition to any and all cuts budgets and the need for a ‘needs budget’.

As you should know the Green Party completely opposes Austerity as a failed economic model, that has held back the economy, and punished the poor and most vulnerable in our society whilst forcing ordinary people to pay for the bailout of the banks.

Nationally our MP has been fantastic in continually voting against cuts and austerity and has one of the best voting records of any Left wing MP.

However, on the local level, the limited options available to resist the imposition of cuts has seen Green Councillors – most famously in Green controlled Brighton – adopt a ‘dented shield’ approach to try and minimise the worst excesses of local cuts and vote for cuts budgets (so they can amend and tinker with them).

The amount of money in the budget is imposed on local authorities by central government and its austerity agenda.  To set a legal budget within those confines means passing on cuts.

The alternative is setting a ‘needs budget’.  Disregarding the limit set by Whitehall this would set a budget adequate to cover provision for all the services local people need (hence a ‘needs budget’).  Such actions have been made illegal under section 114 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988 which then obligates the councils financial officer to alert Whitehall as to what’s happened.  After that the council would have 21 days to set a legal budget or supposedly civil servants from central government would depose the council and set a cuts budget themselves.  

That being the case many feel they have no option but to pass cuts budgets that have minimised the threat to vital services as much as possible.

However, to me, and many others, this seems a very improbable course of events.  This is a government with a wafer thin majority, and deposing the democratically elected council of one of the largest cities in the UK would be a deeply unpopular move.  The drama would dominate the news and could be a spark that ignites the disparate movements we’ve seen trying to resist austerity these last 5 years.

Should it even get so far as civil servants being sent into the city, they would be met with large scale protests and no doubt a strike from local government workers who would then refuse to help them carry out their dirty work (and many civil servants are PCS members who would be unlikely to cross a picket).  With all that going on, the likelihood of the worst case scenario (the deposition of the council) happening seems very low.

Instead they’d no doubt try and reach a compromise, in which we’d be able to win a better deal for Bristol.

One way this might work has already been laid out by our Mayoral candidate Tony Dyer.  The Conservatives have said councils can keep their business rates (probably from 2020).  Tony has challenged the government to give Bristol its business rates from 2016, which would allow us to reverse the cuts and invest in the many many infrastructural projects Bristol urgently needs (chiefly social and affordable housing).  If we set a needs budget and demanded we be given our business rates early to pay for it, it seems likely central government would, to some extent, give in.

It’s not as far fetched as some might have you believe.  Remember despite the apparent dire state of the nations finances, in the last budget the Conservatives magicked up £12 billion in extra defence spending (the exact same amount they’re cutting from welfare, coincidently), and another £10 million for a private jet for the PM (among many other things).  Last year they found money for an 11% pay rise for every MP, and £15 billion for Osborne’s ‘Road Revolution’.  In short, they’re very good at finding extra money when they need it.  And in the kind of constitutional crisis they’d provoke by trying to depose Bristol Council, they’d no doubt decided they’d need the money.

Furthermore, councils have already had their budgets cut by so much that there simply isn’t that much more they can cut before statutory services start to fail.  The so called ‘low hanging fruits’ of council expenditure have already been picked.  If councils continue to live within the dictates of the law and refuse to try and set ‘needs budgets’, at some point in the next 5 years we’re going to see a significant failure of the basic services many people depend on.

The main argument against ‘needs budgets’ is that civil servants aren’t going to know our communities needs and their cuts will be far worse than the more compassionate cuts our Council will do itself.

As I’ve said this seems unlikely, and if it got to the point where implementing cuts will result in the failure of services how can civil servant driven cuts be any worse?  Also it would focus the blame for these cuts squarely back where it belongs with central government, and would make the Tories do their dirty work themselves.

We’ve already seen massive mobilisations against the government and its austerity program since the election. If unelected civil servants started deposing local authorities to implicate savage cuts; the protests, strikes and civil disobedience it would cause would be a significant challenge to the government.  

If several councils refused to set cuts budgets at the same time, their likelihood of success would be even higher.  The blowback from them attempting to depose multiple authorities at once could likely bring down the government (so they’d probably give in).  For that to happen we need people elected onto those councils making those arguments and willing to make a stand against austerity. 

If elected I will be one of those people.  I pledge to never vote for a budget containing cuts, and to consistently make the case for the alternative whenever possible.