Underestimating Pickles’ cuts

Published: 17th March, 2011

• DON Williams’s piece (Forum, March 10) was as astonishing as when he moved the Tories’ alternative budget at the council meeting on February 28. 

At that time, the Liberal Democrats joined the Labour group on the council to vote against Councillor Williams’s budget. The Tories stand alone in believing that a Wisconsin-style attack on the terms and conditions of Camden’s staff can provide the services which Camden residents deserve. 

Moreover Cllr Williams believes that advertising and sponsorship revenue can make a significant contribution to bridge the shortfall in funding. Perhaps he underestimates the scale of the budget reduction which Eric Pickles has imposed on Camden – £35million in 2011-2012 alone, close to £100million over the three-years to 2014. 

Cllr Williams also fails to acknowledge the substantial reduction in senior officers’ remuneration negotiated by the cabinet – 17 per cent during the next year – and the work going into shared services and bulk procurement with a number of other councils. The budget which was passed by the council on February 28 involves £23million in efficiency savings. 

It is also noteworthy that he had nothing to say about the huge gap in capital funding for Camden, largely caused by Michael Gove’s cuts in funds for Better Schools for the Future. As a result of Camden’s new budget the bulk of the £100million capital budget will be invested in schools’ improvement.

We are all working to reduce the impact of the Tory government’s cuts to local authority budgets. 

The proposals out forward by Cllr Williams have been roundly rejected. 
Cllr Valerie Leach
Labour, Highgate ward

False hope 

• LIKE many people, I’m rapidly tiring of the coalition myth, peddled again on your pages by Camden Tories councillors Andrew Mennear and Don Williams, that somehow the government’s cuts can be accommodated by some back-office efficiencies (Letters & Forum, March 10).

It’s escaped their attention that the speed and scale of the cuts has left us without the luxury of time needed to pass the begging bowl around big corporates, as Cllr Williams rather fancifully suggests. Here’s a fact: £23million of the £35million Labour has cut from Camden’s budget for 2011/12 is in back-office efficiencies, but the remaining £12million will hit front-line services. The Tory “efficiencies will do it” lie cruelly offers false hope where there is none. 

Camden’s Tories ought to come clean: this is an all-out assault on our public services in tune with true blue thinking. Why don’t they embrace this and admit they think fewer public services in Camden is a worthy aim in itself?  

We saw a glimpse of Thatcherite leg in their alternative budget which attacked so radically the terms and conditions of hard-working front-line public servants that even their partners-in-crime the Lib Dems couldn’t support it. 

And if they believe in Camden’s support for council services, why have they sat on their hands? As a member of Cllr Williams’s scrutiny committee, I joined colleagues just after the election in calling for all Camden’s parties to lobby the government to spare the axe.

As I challenged them at the budget meeting, what have the Tories and Lib Dems done to fight Camden’s corner with their ministerial pals in government? The answer was deafening. 
Cllr Mike Katz
Labour, Kilburn ward

Meeting up

• WHEN looking for a common denominator of council cuts, they all are against “the right to assemble”. 

Closing and/or limiting the services of libraries, day centres, youth centres, play centres, and cutting discretionary Freedom Passes funnily enough is against people meeting each other, socialising, integrating, mixing, to do what? Stay at home and be isolated?

The “Big Society”… that doesn’t meet?

When somebody “above” wants to deny you books, mingling with your peers for learning, fun, and developing interaction,  remember that Eton (the college for “donkey” leaders) has nothing good to say to us, whether its via David Cameron or Boris Johnson. Or through lackeys like Nick Clegg or Camden Council.
CLARENCE JACKMAN
Loveridge Road, NW6

Bad adverts

• TWO Camden Conservatives (New Journal, March 10) both reckoning the answer to council cuts is more advertising! 

Far from even more advertising, we need the present amount to be reduced.

We are inundated with adverts – on buses and the Tube, in cinemas and on the television, in newspapers, magazines, on hoardings. 

All of it is designed to make us buy more and more, regardless of whether we need it. Adverts simply create “wants”.

Councillors Andrew Mennear and Don Williams are like so many others in the main political parties. They will suggest anything rather than campaign to get the government to close the tax avoidance loopholes.
P Wagland
Brecknock Road, N19

Police bill

• WELL, if the amount of money being given to the police service is being cut, which we are assured it is, then, surely there will be a reduction in the police rate precept at levels currently levied. 

Any failure in this area to pass on this reduction can only mean that local authorities are taking the money and using it for a purpose other than that for which it is legal to do. Some already do this by using monies from parking for other purposes.  

Far too many blind eyes are turned to offences of this kind.
Norman Speight
Camden Street, NW1

Big Society?

• IT was heartbreaking to be at the council meeting which agreed to slash spending on services by 22 per cent.

Into the heart of the passion and chaos went representatives of many of Camden’s green groups to beseech the council not to forget the future in this difficult present. 

Among things we asked for were:

• an inquiry into the threats to Camden as oil production peaks and prices for fossil fuels increase dramatically;
• Camden not Tesco to carry out government’s Green Deal under which loans will be made to residents to install energy efficiency measures;
• a 20mph speed limit on all council-controlled roads; and
• an environmental sustainability strategy that is much more focused on public understanding – one that talks in terms of pollution and energy saving and puts food at the very centre of its thinking.

Hopefully there’s enough of a political consensus in Camden to keep action on sustainability and resilience to the fore. 

Swingeing budget cuts are being imposed throughout the voluntary sector. And meaningless Big Society rhetoric is being deployed to cover an unprecedented rollback of the public sector. How right the Transition Towns movement was to keep the Big Society at arm’s length.

Still they will try to use us as a cover. A low point of our evening came when the leader of Camden’s Tory group, Cllr Andrew Mennear, said: “We over here will not argue that there should not be public services, but we may argue that there should be alternative providers of services like private companies or maybe Transition Belsize…”    

Transition Belsize is already providing draughtbusting services on behalf of Camden Council, is working to take over public sites in the borough for food growing and briefly considered taking over Belsize Library and turning it into a multi-service community asset including book lending. 

There are now eight Transition Initiatives in Camden, all working to engage residents with fun, useful and social activities that also help to create a sustainable future for our children. 

We simply don’t have the capacity to pick up the slack that’s being created. 

We’re not about to start running childcare services, libraries and care homes in the five minutes available to us to take the decision.  
SARAH NICHOLL
Transition Belsize
MARIETTA BIRKHOLTZ
Transition Bloomsbury