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Free school dinners will offset massive rents rise
• I AND my family live on a council estate. I, along with my neighbours, received a letter from Islington Council telling us that our rents have gone up by a massive £6-plus a week, with no right of appeal despite the recession. What we were told, basically, is that if we don’t like it get out and take your family with you.
A week later Islington councillors were heatedly arguing about whether to freeze council tax or not. The proposed freeze would have saved me and my neighbours about 80p a week, the cost of a 2.5 per cent increase.
The alternative was to guarantee that all nursery and primary-age children would receive a school meal every day. This alone can save many parents just above benefit level £10 a week per child. This may at least go some way to offsetting the massive rent increase.
Many of us have parents and grandparents who are pensioners. The £100 discount will not solve all their problems, including the rent increase, but it is better than the council tax freeze saving of 80p a week. It will help our parents and grandparents, who too often are faced with hard choices of whether to eat or heat their homes.
Many of us living on council or similar estates will as usual in a recession suffer particularly hard. It will not be just a question of no massive bonuses, no massive pay increases, no perks or freebies.
It will be a question of a very bleak future of no jobs and the dole.
KEREN WORKER
Penton Rise, WC1
• I CANNOT believe council tax in Islington is going up thanks to Labour. How can it even think about putting up council tax at a time like this? To add insult to injury, I see that this will be the biggest increase in inner London .
Labour politicians clearly need their heads examined if they think putting up council tax is an election winner.
DR TURHAN OZEN
N7
• I AGREE with the principle of free school meals, but only to residents of Islington. Why should we pay for other boroughs’ children to be fed when they are not contributing to our council tax budget.
Our council tax is high enough as it is without subsidising other boroughs. I have no school-age children, and work in an Islington school.
JANET WOODEN
Address supplied
• I FIND the decision by Labour politicians to put up our council tax incredible.
Residents in neighbouring boroughs like Camden and Hackney will have no council tax increase and Haringey’s rise will be smaller than Islington’s.
Do Labour councillors think we are so much better off in Islington that we can afford to shell out more of our hard-earned cash for their pet projects?
Why are most Islington residents, who won’t benefit from Labour’s plans, being made to suffer? Haven’t Labour councillors noticed people are really struggling in the middle of a recession?
VAMSI VELAGAPUDI
Drayton Park, N5
• IN her letter (Labour cynically exploited a rival lying sick in hospital, March 6) Lib Dem Jyoti Vaja criticised Emily Thornberry for joining Jeremy Corbyn and Jennette Arnold at the council’s budget-setting meeting. She claimed Emily “should have been in Parliament doing her job”.
But the House of Commons stopped sitting at 6.30pm that day – and the council’s budget meeting did not start until 8pm.
Cllr Vaja also mentioned a rent rise of seven per cent for Islington council tenants. But the government has capped rent rises at three per cent this year – thanks to Emily and other MPs lobbying the Housing Minister.
As the Lib Dem council collapses, we will see more of these unfounded personal attacks as the Liberals desperately scrap to save their highly-salaried positions. The people of Islington should remove them from office, along with their failed policies and their trademark nasty politics.
TIM MCLOUGHLIN
Chatterton Mews, N4
• MICHAEL Bull, of Islington Conservatives, claimed that a Tory budget would have copied the Liberal Democrat plan to freeze council tax, while also copying the Labour plan for taxpayer-funded school meals (March 6).
Don’t the Tories have any ideas of their own? Or do they plan to get elected on a promise to copy everyone else? And how do they expect to be taken seriously when they are promising to freeze council tax while simultaneously raising spending by millions of pounds by copying Labour’s wildest schemes?
Labour leader Catherine West claims credit for “£15million of efficiency savings”. That’s nonsense. More than 98 per cent of the savings she claims credit for were in the original Lib Dem budget.
Labour’s extra savings came from making two council workers redundant and trimming councillors’ allowances; these amounted to little more than one per cent of the total savings – merely symbolic tinkering. In fact, almost every time the Liberal Democrats have moved to save serious money for the taxpayer, Labour has opposed us. It has opposed selling off surplus council property to fund investment in schools and new council housing. It has opposed “smart working” for staff (investing in laptops so staff can “hotdesk”, which saved millions of pounds on offices).
It also opposed moving back-office jobs out of London, where the taxpayer gets a better deal on staff and office rental costs.
It’s hard to decide whether Labour or the Tories are the more incompetent, but one thing is certain: Lib Dems have made the tough decisions that have turned Islington Council into a sleek, four-star authority with one of the lowest council tax levels in London.
CLLR JOHN GILLBERT
Lib Dem executive member for finance
• I WOULD like to put on record my thanks to Islington Council communications department for promoting Labour’s first budget in years. The front page of the council’s magazine told the good news that all households where there is a 65-year-old or over will receive a £100 council tax discount.
What the glossy magazine failed to mention is that this measure is thanks to the progressive budget which Labour councillors and the principled Councillor Andrew Cornwell had the courage to fight for.
I look forward to the council’s further promotion of our free meals for all children in Islington nurseries and primary schools and the investment in youth sports and leisure which were also highlights of our first budget in nearly 10 years. The Lib Dems failed to vote for either of these recession-busting measures.
CLLR CATHERINE WEST
Islington Labour leader
• RECENT events at the council gave me the casting vote on the annual budget – a position I naturally used to secure a whole range of Green Party measures.
These included a ground-breaking programme of free sport and leisure for under-18s, an expansion of apprenticeships available to help school leavers into work, more homework clubs, a new repair and re-use service, increased investment in greening our open spaces and neglected corners, creation of new allotments and growing spaces, a range of measures to encourage more walking and cycling, and extending the 20mph limit to all our roads in one go.
All these measures, proposed by me, were adopted by Labour and Lib Dem groups. In addition, I achieved support across the party divide for the £100 rebate for pensioners, proposed by Councillor Andrew Cornwell.
Although I support the idea of free school meals in principle, I felt that a package of measures offering free healthy food options to secondary schools, as well as primaries, was fairer and more financially sustainable in the current climate.
Sadly, the hospitalisation of Councillor Donna Boffa meant this package was not approved, although the raft of Green Party proposals which will benefit all sections of our community was adopted effectively with unanimous support.
This demonstrates the power of rising above party political point-scoring and focusing on the issues that matter.
CLLR KATIE DAWSON
Green, Highbury West
• AS the Labour councillor for a deprived area of the borough, I am delighted that we were able, in our budget which was passed at the recent council meeting, to include some money for homework clubs. The Thursday homework club at Archway Library will now be reinstated, following last year’s cuts by the Liberal Democrats.
This is a positive step to help our young people, and I was proud to be able to vote for it.
CLLR JANET BURGESS
Labour, Junction ward
• IT would be nice to think that the council coup was a matter of local Labour recovering its socialist soul. Or just the social. But there must be a suspicion that Labour councillors had been reading the opinion polls. Nationally, New Labour is heading into a massive loss of seats in Parliament.
This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that Labour councillors were involved in repudiating the Federation of Islington Tenants’ Associations. It is true to say that most other members of the Labour Party locally are appalled by their behaviour. But surely these two councillors are being true to the Blairite philosophy? Which is not so much Thatcherism with a human – so much as a merely male – face.
Those people in the Labour Party disgusted with the behaviour of the party under Blair and Brown and of the anti-socialist behaviour of some of their colleagues (you’d hardly call them “comrades”) locally are invited to join Respect.
SEAN MCGOURAN
Islington Respect
Tollington Way, N7
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