|
|
 |
| |
People have right to professional advice
•
YOUR articles on Camden Council’s latest budget proposals rightly confirmed the new partnership administration’s plans to deliver our election promise to freeze the council’s part of council tax next year.
As you have highlighted, change is never easy. It is, however, overdue.
The council is a large organisation so making sure we get value for the public’s money in the way we run ourselves is a top priority. Money from government has been good this year, but all the signs suggest future funding won’t keep up with demand – such as the growing population in the borough.
We need to get the council in shape to deliver the quality services residents expect now, and in the future. Through careful planning now we will spend over £10 million more than last year in services for residents. And we’ll continue to invest in the long term in clean streets, excellent schools, and services to make Camden a borough of opportunity for both young and old.
This means we’re meeting the needs of our aging population – spending £5 million to keep up with demand in adult social care. A further £300,000 will be spent on equipment – such as stair lifts and shower supports – to help older people in Camden live as long as possible in their own home. And for young people, resources for schools and early years will increase by nearly £8 million next year. We’ll also be spending more than £5.5 million on youth and play services.
So how are we keeping council tax the same while investing more? For a start, we’re taking money out of the way the council is run and always looking for better service. This includes reducing employment costs by five per cent (saving just under £8 million) including fewer management jobs and less duplication.
So, for example, we’re joining together the youth service with the youth offending team. Making decisions to stop running services that don’t give value for money is also important. Where we have taken the difficult decision to close, for example, Kilburn Grange Park play project, it is for very good reason.
It cost 80 per cent more than other play services to run, the building is old and falling apart, a new centre has opened 100 yards away and there are spaces for the 24 children who use it at play centres nearby. We can’t keep things going just because they’ve always been there and we will always support – in this case, the children, parents and staff – to move to a better and more cost-effective solution.
Camden residents work hard to pay their council tax and deserve to know it is being spent wisely and well. With these budget proposals, we are putting money in to the services people need without expecting residents to pay more than they absolutely have to.
CLLR JANET GRAUBERG
Executive Member for Resources
• CAMDEN Law Centre has been presented as a champion of the vulnerable, but what has been overlooked is the role of the community law centre as a left-wing pressure group pursuing its aims with dubious results.
An example of this was its opposition, along with Shelter, to the proposal to give people who have grown up in Camden, and whose families may have lived here for generations, priority on the council housing list – known as the sons and daughters policy.
As a consequence of its rejection, many disadvantaged and vulnerable Camden people have missed out on housing.
Shelter and Camden Community Law Centre have argued that the policy is “divisive and racist”. This is just one example of how dogmatic and prescriptive the law centre can be, this had its mirror image in the council Labour group, putting questionable ideology before the realities of working-class peoples’ lives and leading to the break-up of social cohesion they so often bemoan.
NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED
• 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 elder 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 Citizens Advice Bureaus.
To cut funding by 40 per cent would be 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.
We have already seen the Tory Party running local councils envisaging slashing funding to the voluntary sector by 33 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 Keith Moffitt and Andrew 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.
CLLR ROGER ROBINSON
Opposition Lead on Housing, Adult Social Care and Community Safety
• I AM writing in my capacity as Chair of Camden Local Medical Committee, the body which represents all doctors working in general practice throughout Camden. These doctors are responsible for providing day to day medical care for almost every Camden resident.
We are deeply disturbed at Camden Council’s reported proposal to cut the grants to advice agencies by up to 43 per cent. We believe this will have a huge impact on the ability of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, Camden Community Law Centre, Disability in Camden, Camden Tribunal Service, The Mary Ward Centre and Central London Law Centre to provide frontline services to our most vulnerable and disadvantaged patients.
If these cuts are carried through, we believe the impact on the health, well being and safety of many of our patients will be immediate and severe.
Many of us use these advice services on a daily basis to help our patients access information, support and resources, which in some cases may literally be life-saving. They enable frail elderly, disabled and many other vulnerable patients to maintain their independence and dignity within the community.
We urge Camden Council to reject this callous and short-sighted proposal.
DR STEPHEN AMIEL
Tavistock Square, WC1
• THANKS to the CNJ for the thoughtful editorial, discussing how a freeze on council tax will inevitably lead to cuts in services, because we live in a world where cost inflation is a fact of life (These cuts will sting in the end, Dec 7).
There is one point on which I would take issue with you. You say that “the world will not come to an end by cutting back on pavement repairs, ‘gully-cleansing’ teams, even perhaps on recycling collections.”
From my own experience, I know that failures in pavement repairs can indeed “seriously hurt people” just as much as cutting back children’s services can. As a former councillor, I was concerned with the case of an elderly lady who tripped on an unrepaired pavement.
This resulted in cracked bones, massive bruising and a three-month physiotherapy course, before she regained her mobility. This trip may not have been the “end of the world” for this lady, but it did mean than that she had an extended desperately miserable period towards the end of her life.
AILEEN HAMMOND
Haverstock Hill, NW3
• THE new council administration is testing the water to see whether it can get away with cuts, redundancies and a third attempt at privatising council housing in Camden.
They look confident but politicians always do at the start. It doesn’t mean they can stand up to sustained and united opposition from the people of Camden.
They know they couldn’t win a borough-wide vote on privatisation (after we’ve already rejected stock transfer and Almo) so they are now looking at taking us on, estate by estate (through partial sell-offs, demolition schemes and sale of public land for private housing).
We need to organise meetings on every estate straight after Christmas to tell the new council that we aren’t prepared to see more money wasted on a third consultation that we don’t want.
ALAN WALTER
Chairman Peckwater Estate Tenants and Residents Association
• THE cuts which the Tory-Lib Dem executive have proposed will hurt across Camden.
This isn’t just about closing Kilburn Grange Play Project, or slashing funding to the advice sector almost by half, which will hit services like the Citizen Advice Burueaux in Kilburn and Kentish Town – hard though that will be on the residents and families who rely on those services.
As ever, the devil is in the detail. For instance, £200,000 is to go from planning division – which will mean a slower service, less enforcement and, to quote from the papers, “no additional work… on Sustainable Design”. So much for the Lib Dem’s commitment to green policies.
And just as scandalously, the Tories and Lib Dems are raising charges for service users, including a rise of 20 per cent per meal for meals on wheels, which will hit vulnerable pensioners.
Using weasel words like “rightsizing budgets” won’t fool anyone. Cutting play schemes and ramping up charges for meals on wheels wasn’t what the Tories and Lib Dems promised when they asked people to vote for them.
MIKE KATZ
Chairman, Hampstead and Kilburn Labour Party
|
 |
|
|
|
