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Think again over the cuts
• I AM very concerned to hear that Camden's Lib Dem/Tory council are planning cuts in their budget for many services that will affect the most vulnerable older people in Camden. I understand there are proposed cuts in a day centre in Kentish Town that cares for many older people with mental Health problems and other needs.
Cuts in the "Care-Line" budget could destroy a lifeline that this service provides, emergency help a advice for the most vulnerable in our community.
A proposal for 20 per cent increase in the cost of meals for home delivery and the day centres, the estim. Cost of 50p a meal on food that is already unsatisfactory and efforts were being made to improve the service. The meal is essential to many older and vulnerable people.
This meal is in many cases their only warm meal of the day. Have all these councillors forgotten the guide "Keep warm, keep well, keep safe"?
BARBARA HUGHES
Brill Place
NW1
• ONE particularly worrying aspect of the new cuts package announced by the council in its budget proposals is its effect upon the safety of people out and about at night times. At present, the council provides a 3am street cleansing service in areas like Camden Town and Covent Garden to clear up the litter and mess from the night time economy.
The key benefit is not just a cleaner borough, but the extra safety and reassurance that comes from having a uniformed presence on the streets late at night.
As a woman who often travels home late and alone from work or nights out, I really value this service and am deeply unimpressed by the council's cut backs, which will mean the last clean-up takes place at 9pm. Not only will this mean Camden residents have to wade through discarded beer cans, burger wrappers and vomit in the morning, it also means that local people are at greater risk when waiting for buses or walking home at night.
It seems that the Lib Dem and Tory alliance at the Town Hall is hell-bent on removing the services that Camden residents used to take for granted. It will be really important in the coming weeks for local people to scrutinise their plans and stand-up against these attacks on our community and quality of life.
KATE PURCELL
Broadfield Lane
NW1
• YOUR recent coverage of the Lib Dem/Tory council's threat to community legal services and advice centres in Camden makes distressing reading, especially as Camden has secured the best government grant for next year of any council in London and does not need to savage the voluntary sector.
What is more disturbing, however, is the probability that this is just a softening up process for even worse later on.
Something as seemingly innocuous, for instance, as moving grant aid for the Gospel Oak City Farm from the regeneration budget to schools or children and families, needs greater scrutiny.
At present, the City Farm is placed with, and prioritised according to, community centres, specialist projects, time limited schemes and the like. The City Farm's funding, while in such a category is reasonably secure.
However, in schools or children and families, the farm would be competing with three teaching or child protection posts.
It is likely this would lead to the removal of funding for the farm which brings in £90,000 per year for Camden in match funding, and it is clearly gravely at risk if the Lib Dems and Tories manage to sneak through more devastating cuts by manipulating the system.
DAVE HORAN
Leighton Grove
NW5
• A PROMINENT theme that emerges from the latest budget proposals announced by the council is that those on low incomes and those that live on estates are expected to bear the brunt of the cuts sought by the Lib Dem/Tory coalition. For example, door-to-door recycling on estates is to be cut, while being maintained for street properties. This echoes one of the council's previous decisions, where clamping was abolished for street properties but kept for estates.
Similarly, cuts are also planned for the council's own welfare rights department, which helps the vulnerable to access services. These cuts are on top of those already agreed for the Camden Law Centre and the borough's Citizen's Advice Bureaux.
The other proposals announced by the council last week range from cut backs at daycentres to increasing charges for meals on wheels to axing play projects for young people. All of these will impact most strongly on low income groups.
It seems that the modus operandi of the council is to prioritise the comfortably-off, who also tend to be the most vocal, while steadily removing and downgrading those services used by the less affluent. This in not in itself illegitimate - it is after all what the Tories have done with Westminster Council.
And such a strategy is inevitable if your main goal is to cut taxes. However, it goes strongly against the grain of how Camden has been run for the past thirty years, and I very much doubt it was what people expected when they cast their votes for the Lib Dems in May.
PHIL JONES
Hawley Road
NW1
• I HAVE to say yet again that the cuts in funding for advice services shows how little the new regime at Camden Town Hall know of how people need support and understanding and advice through these services.
People such as elderly people, people who have not got their own funds to employ the services of lawyers to take up their cases; people who don't know the ways that tribunals such as Benefit Tribunals and Industrial Tribunals work and who need representing; disabled people; people whose first language is not English - they all need the help they get from advice centres such as CAB's , Camden Tribunal Unit or the Camden Law Centre....and indeed cuts in funding are to affect not only advice centres but community centres who provide help, advice, luncheon clubs; Xmas parties, etc to elderly people.
We councillors, although we provide, as we do in St Pancras and Somers Town, a weekly Friday morning advice service and the same on Friday nights and advice services in addition now on the first Saturday of each month, are not qualified as such in the issues surrounding benefits or representing people at such tribunals, nor do we have a skill in certain languages and we need advice services such as CAB etc in addition to our own advice surgeries.
To cut funding by 40 per cent in January 2006 to these advice centres would be frankly appallingly poor governance and is an indication of how the present Majority parties of Lib Dems and Tories are going to take Camden in destroying the advice centres, community centres and ,as we have seen already, the youth facilities which have already had funding cuts.
Ordinary people out there will no longer have anything to assist them or give them happiness.
We have already seen the Tory Party running Local Councils ,as the Association of Local Government is known now, envisaging slashing funding to the voluntary sector by 3 per cent in financial year 2007 onwards.
Thanks to a fight back from the voluntary sector that has been lifted but the threat remains.
Think again, Councillors Moffitt and Marshall. There was a long hard fight over the years to get these advice services and to lose them as we will would be nothing short of criminal neglect of the people who need their services.
ROGER ROBINSON, CLLR
St Pancras and Somers Town Ward
Opposition Lead on Housing, Adult Social Care and Community Safety
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