Campaigning for justice

I've written before about the sheer cruelly of the welfare reform act and its pleasing to see that the Campaign to Defend Council Housing are now co-ordinating a national campaign of opposition. There also a group called Councillors against cuts http://councillorsagainstcuts.org/  which I have supported.

National Campaign for Benefit Justice

Tenants, Disabled People Against Cuts and other campaigners are linking up in a national campaign against attacks on Housing and other Benefits. 40 people from 31 campaigns, tenants and trade union groups met on 19 Jan in London and agreed to build an umbrella campaign to oppose attacks on the poor and to fight for benefit justice. The PCS trade union, with members in Job Centres and Benefit offices, and Unite trade union are among those backing a united campaign.A 7,500-strong facebook group Bedroom Tax...think its unfair...join the fight here were represented, along with pensioner, women's and unemployed groups. Initial plans include a protest in February and a Benefit Justice summit and further protests in March, one month before further devastating benefit cuts including the 'Bedroom Tax' hit in April 2013.The Campaign for Benefit Justice agreed this statement: Cuts in benefits are an unjust attack on the poor. Cuts concentrated on Housing Benefit are already breaking up families, communities and support networks. They will mean poverty, debt and evictions. We oppose all cuts in benefits and tax credits. We did not cause the banking and economic crisis and will not be scapegoated to pay for it. We reject false divisions and stigmatisation of people who are low-paid or unpaid. We will join with local and national campaigns including disabled peoples, tenants, unemployed workers, trade unions, students, pensioner, single mothers and others to oppose benefit cuts. We will support and link up local campaigns. We oppose all evictions and legal action against those hit by benefit cuts and support all actions taken in defence. Sign up to support the Campaign and statement by emailing info@defendcouncilhousing.org.uk As a Children's Social Worker I have already made a number of presentation about the impact of these changes on children and if anyone wants a copy please email me.

Doing all we can (but don't look to hard)

There's obviously a shortage of news in Bolsover as the latest "In-touch" screams once again that the Council is "doing all it can" to make savings. Including, it seems, recycling their own headlines. Obviously they don't fall into the trap of saying "we are all in this together" because that would mean explaining why they ignored the independent panels advice to cut the Councillor's basic allowances.

I thought I'd test the proof of this particularly pudding by looking at some of the biggest cost items. How much savings have they made in managing Council homes and collecting rubbish? Bear with me the figures may not be appetising but they aren't hard to digest.

Back in 2010/11 before the cuts programme started the cost of managing Council homes was £7.56 per week or £393 per year (I don't think this includes repairs). Now the Council has improved its efficiency the costs have of course gone down??????..... No. Actually they've gone up to £9.17 and for the next two years they are "targeted" to increase to £9.50 then £9.80. That means by 2013/14 the costs will have risen by nearly 30% in 4 years, perhaps now you can see why they had to foist a 9% rent increase onto tenants and seek to blame it on the government.

Perhaps the news on refuse will be better?  After all that investment in new bins and the savings with fortnightly collections. Well indeed as a result of this the costs were targeted to fall by about 4.6% from a target of £49.78 per property in 2010/11 to £47.48 in 2011/12. Oh if only wishes could come true.......In reality I'm afraid the costs in 2010/11 were £46.48 and in 2011/12 they also went up, not down, by 4.3% to £48.50 busting their own target.

Now perhaps we can start to see why they see Morrisons as a guardian angel. Unfortunately by the time they realise it is a mirage the financial hole will be quite a bit deeper and that will affect every resident of Bolsover District which is why it is an issue to Whitwell as much as to Bolsover town.

Cluck, cluck

What happens when a Council, assessed by its own auditors as having had an “inconsistent and unsatisfactory approach to performance management” for several years, tries to cut corners?

We all know that times are tough but when last year I challenged the Labour leadership of Bolsover to accept independent advice and save over £400,000 by reducing their basic allowances I was ignored. Instead they made what they like to call “efficiency savings” by declaring a number of posts in the cleansing, grounds maintenance and housing repairs services redundant. Revealing that Labour Bolsover is similar to Coalition Britain in that whilst we may be “all in this together” some are more “in it” than others.

This year the chickens have come home to roost and residents can see for themselves how “efficient” the Council’s cuts have been. However looking at the length of the Council’s grass at the Jubilee street party in our village however we won’t be able to see any chickens at all. And it’s the same story right across the District of Bolsover. I’m told that one excuse is that it’s rained a lot this year. I think it also rained last year before Bolsover cut its Grounds Maintenance staff.

Long grass is unsightly but other cuts are more dangerous. Just two months ago the Council’s internal auditors looked at the arrangements for ensuring all Council homes with gas appliances have their statutory annual service. They found the service wanting giving it the lowest categorisation of “unsatisfactory” which means it has major risks” requiring “fundamental improvements”. Here’s a flavour of what they found:

“A sample of servicing records for thirty properties was examined. In eleven instances servicing took place over twelve months after the previous service, all were less than a month overdue.  It was explained that the delay in servicing was due to the length of time taken to replace an engineer who left the Council.”

So be warned when they tell you that their “efficiency savings” can cut front-line jobs without affecting services, or that they can make oodles of cash from property deals, if you look up the sky is black with chickens coming over the “horizon” already.

Who benefits from housing benefit cuts?

You may have thought it was a London issue, but there could be much misery for tenants in Bolsover from the coalitions cuts to housing benefit.

If you've not had the time to follow the details, here's an excellent article from Tim Leuen in the Guardian which will put you in the picture:

Imagine two sets of people, both renting from private landlords. One is an Islington couple who have never worked. The other is an Oldham family with four children, where the working parent has just lost his or her job. The Islington couple currently receive £250 a week in housing benefit, while the Oldham family gets only £150.
Times are tough, and the government wants to save money. Which family should have its housing benefit cut? George Osborne has chosen the Oldham family. He is cutting its housing benefit to £96 a week, while allowing the Islington couple to continue to claim £250 a week for as long as they like.
It may sound like odd logic, but that is the reality of the £26,000 benefit cap. It takes no account of your employment history or family size. So a central London couple who have never worked are unaffected, because they currently receive less than £26,000 in benefits. But a large family – even in a cheap house – will be hit. That is not sensible.
The worst hit, of course, are large families in the south-east, where rents are higher. Even in Tolworth, described by the Evening Standard as the "scrag end of Kingston borough", a four bedroom house will give you little change from £400 a week. Cutting housing benefit to £100 a week – which is broadly what the cap means if you have four children – makes life impossible. After rent, council tax and utilities, a family with four children would have 62p per person per day to live on. That is physically impossible.
It is easy to say that people shouldn't have large families if they can't afford them. But most affected families could afford their children when they conceived them, and continued to be able to afford them – until they lost their jobs in what has proven to be the worst recession for more than a century. Should they now follow Greece and give up their children for adoption?
It is the effect on children in large families that has led Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders to take a stand against the government over the weekend, speaking up for the poor in a way entirely consistent with their faiths.
The cap doesn't even hit the families the Daily Mail so dislikes – single parents with many children and many fathers who have never worked. Those families, by and large, are sufficiently dysfunctional to be in social housing, and so will not be hit – at least not much – by the reforms. Instead the people hit hardest are stable families previously in work on low to middle incomes – the really squeezed middle, if you like. They were not rich enough to buy a house, and not poor enough to qualify for social housing. As a result they pay a fortune to rent privately and are vulnerable to the cap.
Civil servants tell me they don't expect rents to fall – quite the reverse, as the market is buoyant. Nor do they expect families to migrate from the south-east to low-cost housing areas such as Merthyr Tydfil or Barrow. These are, in the main, people who want to work and will choose to stay in an area with good job prospects. Instead, they expect families to downsize. Children will end up sharing a room with multiple siblings, and parents will sleep on a sofa bed in the lounge. Clearly people can live like that, but frankly I thought that overcrowded tenements were something that Britain had left behind.
Britain is not poor. In only five years of our history have we ever been richer than we are today. The savings from the cap are very small – £270m. Yet we spend £53bn on welfare payments to people in the top half of the income distribution. Cutting their payments by one half of one per cent would be a much better way to save £270m.
Even better would be to allow more houses to be built in the south-east, over the objections of organisations such as the CPRE and the National Trust. Standard supply and demand tells us that more houses mean lower prices and lower rents. Lower rents mean lower housing benefit bills without making a single poor family suffer. If you crunch the numbers, you find that increasing the number of houses by 1.3% would cut the housing benefit bill by £270m. It would also get people back into work. Surely that is a better option.