Camden Budget Cuts – Pensioners are told services will be lost...
Published: 3rd March, 2011
by JOSIE HINTON
THE Town Hall’s social services bosses have come face to face with elderly people in the south of borough whose day centres they are proposing to close.
Labour councillor Pat Callaghan and her chief officers held consultation meetings at Millman Street and Great Croft resource centres on Thursday to hear views on the proposed closure of facilities.
They told elderly users they had been given no choice but to drastically cut a department that currently spends twice as much as any other London council on services for the elderly.
Camden Council funds six resource centres which offer hot meals and activities including dementia care, exercise, massage, Tai Chi, English language classes and gardening.
But only the council-run Charlie Ratchford in Chalk Farm and Kingsgate in Kilburn have escaped the axe.
Of the four centres to lose funding, three are located in the south of the borough. Millman Street, which has 139 users, costs the council just £144,000 every year to run. The two centres which will stay open cost the council a combined total of £957,000, and each has an average of 75 users per day.
Cllr Callaghan said two centres in the north of the borough were being kept open as they have the capacity to take on more users.
But angry pensioners say it will take at least an hour on Camden’s buses to travel to the nearest centre in Chalk Farm. Holborn Labour councillor Julian Fulbrook said it was unrealistic to send people to the “new frontier” at Kingsgate or Charlie Ratchford.
“We sometimes joke down here that you need a passport to go across the Euston Road,” he told the meeting.
“My three children travelled on the bus to Chalk Farm to go to school every day. They were young and fit but it usually took them more than an hour. It is frankly a waste of money to have these buses chugging away.”
Abul Choudhury, manager of Great Croft, added that years spent uniting a diverse community south of Euston Road would be wasted. He said: “People used to say Bengali people don’t mix or come to the centre. We have worked really hard to welcome them over the last 10 years and now the community is one family.”
Pensioners were assured those with critical or substantial need will have a ”personal budget”, which they can chose to spend on any services they wish. But with assessments not due to be complete until 2012, members fear they will not be able to spend their budgets in their day centres, which will already have closed.
Rebecca Harrington, assistant director of adult social care, told said: “I recognise it is ironic that people have a personal choice of where to spend their budgets but are unable to spend it in the centre they want.
“We have no choice but to cut some of the discretionary services we have funded in the past. We think these services are important and that is why we have supported them over the years, but the fact is they are not essential services.”
A petition against the closures has reached almost 5,000 signatures.
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