Is it Our NHS or Their NHS?

I'll start with a little celebration. A senior finance officer from our local NHS presented to Bradford's Health and Wellbeing Board. Now if you'd made a habit of reading Twitter or The Guardian you'd be very worried at the content of this presentation - the pain, the stress, the cuts....AUSTERITY!

The officer opened with this (I paraphrase from my notes but it's close enough):

"The NHS has £800 million to spend across the three CCGs. This number is not going down but is rising. However, it's not growing at the pace we think we need to meet demand."

This, dear reader, is the truth about the NHS. When you see parades of nurses waving banners about 'saving the NHS', you're led to believe - it's implicit in the protest - that the health service is suffering draconian cuts when the truth is that the rate of growth for the NHS simply doesn't keep up with the growing pressures. And every report, each presentation we see from the officials of the NHS repeats the need for system change - words like co-production, self-care and prevention dominate the pages of PowerPoint flashing up on the screens. And this is great.

There is, however, another theme and it is this that explains the 'Save Our NHS' campaigns and the heartrending tales of cuts and awful austerity. It cropped up in today's presentation - the first three lines in the list of economies to be made were all about workforce efficiency, pay restraint and savings in administrative staff. It's not 'Our NHS' we're saving, it's 'Their NHS' - the anger about cuts and austerity is mostly a response to the NHS applying the same cost management practices that private business and, latterly, local government have used.

This isn't to say that all is rosy in the NHS or even that it is grossly overmanned but rather that a system predicated on annual increases in costs significantly above inflation is simply unsustainable. It's not a solution - as some seem to think - to create a hypothecated tax unless you plan on making the rate of that tax increase by 5% each and every year. The solution lies in stabilising the cost base and this, whatever those banner-waving NHS employees may say, means cost controls. And the NHS's biggest cost is wages.

What we're seeing with the NHS Action Party, with the doctors' strikes and with the sanctifying of all NHS employees, is an endeavour aimed at drawing the public into defending the interests of the health service's employees. For many this is right - these are deeply caring, highly skilled people - but it covers up the truth. The reality is that, without different ways of working including those involving fewer staff, the NHS is not sustainable. None of this is about privatisation, market forces or some sort of dark and evil Tory conspiracy to destroy 'Our NHS' - it's simply a necessary process aimed at ensuring that, so far is practical and possible, we retain that central idea of a health service free to all without favour at the time they need that service.

Here in Bradford the forward look at NHS finances tell us that, without changes to the way we work, there will be a deficit of over £200m by 2022/23 - this scales up to a national deficit of £20 billion. It doesn't require much analysis to conclude that this simply can't be met. So the result is that we have to make these cost savings and since over 75% of NHS costs are wage related, the biggest chunk of those savings has to come from staffing. The impact of strikes, protests and campaigns won't be that these reductions don't take place but rather - as with almost every campaign of this sort in recent history - with the resultant cuts being more extensive, more painful and more damaging.

If you want it to really be Our NHS then you need to start by rejecting the militant 'Save the NHS' campaigns and instead support a considered, rational and planned approach to reforming the NHS. This means better use of technology, it means partnership with the private, charitable and voluntary sector, it mean promoting the idea of healthy ageing and it means working with local councils to improve case - at home and in the community - for the elderly and disabled. It cannot mean supporting current structures, systems and staffing levels - if we do that we will be the losers as the NHS fails to meet our needs and the needs of our neighbours.

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We already have a 'progressive consumption tax'...

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Bill Gates has responded to the Thomas Piketty wealth tax proposal by moaning that it's not fair. By which he means not fair on entrepreneurs and the like who invest their money in the betterment of the business or society:

Bill Gates frames his argument like this — if you have three wealthy people, one spending money on new businesses, one spending money on charity, and one spending money on luxury items for him or herself, the last one should be taxed more because the first two are contributing more to society.

Now I may be wrong here but Bill's idea already applies (at least in the UK where we have a value-added tax). And, even though there are fewer consumption taxes in the USA, that country gives generous tax breaks for charitable giving and exemptions for capital investment in new or existing businesses.

So, whatever we think of Piketty's policy solution (and I think it mad, bad and dangerous to know), it does have the merit of being an attempt to resolve what that economist sees as an essential challenge to our society and economy. Bill Gates proposal is one that favours 'charity' over consumption and investment over spending. And, this might be fine for very rich folk like Bill but for the rest of us it's a proposal for a tax on the pleasures of life.

So once more let's remind ourselves that we don't live to hoard resources, to invest in business or to have 'charitable' consumption put on a special pedestal. We live to consume.

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Subsidising union officials - time for Bradford Council to stop

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New stats show cutting back on trade union facility time will save £400,000-a-year of taxpayers’ money.

This is at the Department for Communities and Local Government. We know that Bradford spends £500,000 of local taxpayers hard earned cash on full time union officials yet bleat and mithers about "the cuts".

Time to take that cut and stop paying the wages of full-time union activists.

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Labour's plan - tax the poor to pay for the care of the wealthy.

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Fresh from championing recipients of housing benefit earning over fifty grand, Labour is now planning to be the hero of the relatively wealthy. Apparently, the proposals on social care - where how much we might have to cough up is capped at £75,000 and people with £125,000 or less in assets will receive state help - still mean that people will have to sell their home.

I'm fine with this. What possesses people like Andy Burnham to believe that the taxes paid by people on minimum wage should go to pay to care for someone sitting in a house worth hundreds of thousands? Does he really think it justifiable - I mean morally - for a struggling family to pay taxes so someone else can inherit mum's house? Is it really OK that government borrowong climbs through the roof - taxing future generations of children - so someone can leave their "life savings" fructifying in some investment fund?

If there's one thing that makes me cross it's the assumption that these assets, these savings are simply there so people can inherit the cash. Surely those assets and savings are precisely there to look after mum or dad in their lifetime - to provide comfort, to secure care and to provide a little pleasure.

So rather than talking rubbish about family homes and nonsense about life savings, sit down with your parents and talk about how to use that money to make the last years of their lives less or a worry, more of a comfort. And stop counting the money in their bank and expecting the poor to pay higher taxes so you can inherit that cash.

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Labour - the party for the wealthy

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Or so it seems.

Andy Burnham MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, said the Government had “fallen far short” of a fair solution to the care crisis. “A cap on care bills of £75,000 per person, or £150,000 per couple, will not protect the home and life savings of an average family,” Mr Burnham said. 

Read that carefully. What Burnham is saying is that the government should pay rather than have people spend those "life savings" or realise the capital value in their home. Labour is arguing for the wealthy to be allowed to keep their wealth rather than use it to provide care for themselves.

So who pays. Burnham doesn't mention this but it's the taxpayer - thousands of people on incomes below the "poverty line" that Labour folk keep harping on about will be coughing up cash so these people don't have to touch their life savings or sell their valuable house. Lots of low paid workers paying taxes so well-off elderly home-owners - or rather their children - can keep those "life savings" and have (the money from) that "family home".

Just as we saw over child benefit, we're seeing Labour championing middle-class welfare benefits that will be paid for by higher taxes on those hard-working families - those strivers - that the party is always gibbering on about.

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Why I'm confused about those cuts...

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"Major cuts," is the cry. And I wonder. Mostly where the money is all going. For in the aggregate there are no cuts:

What’s more, the evidence indicates that U.K. has, at best, slowed down the growth of spending, but it has not engaged in actual spending cuts. I documented the trend in British spending earlier this year:

A look at the data in Her Majesty’s Fiscal Year 2012 Budget shows (see table 2.3) that total managed expenditures will increase from £696.4 billion in 2011–2012 to £733.5 billion in 2014–2015, and further to £756.3 billion in 2016–2017. Adjusted for population growth, this is slow growth, but not a savage cut. That table also shows a “projected” drop in Public Sector Gross Investment between 2012–2013, but if it ever materializes, it will be contained to that year alone.

And we're paying through the nose too:

Spending cuts in the UK can’t be blamed for the weak growth path the country is on. On the other hand, tax increases can. Here is a list:

• a VAT hike from 17.5 percent to 20 percent (probably the main culprit of the U.K.’s current problems)
• a new 50 percent tax bracket on incomes over £150,000, which will drop to 45 percent next year
• an increase in air-passenger duty to 8 percent
• “temporary” payroll tax of 50 percent on bonuses over £25,000
• a capital-gains tax hike
• a 0.088 percent levy on banks
• an increase to 7 percent in the stamp duty on the sale of properties worth more than £2 million and on properties bought through “non-natural persons.”

(For more, go here.) The bottom line is that the U.K. is another case of private-sector austerity (i.e., tax hikes) without public-sector austerity (i.e., spending cuts).

To paraphrase Ray Davies, I remain, yours truly...

...confused BD13.

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Making cuts doesn't work like that...

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Last February I - along with my Conservative colleague on Bradford Council - voted against the budget proposed by the Labour Party (and their little watermelon pals from Shipley). We lost and, amongst other things, the Council agreed to make savings in the provision of public lavatories.

This evening we discussed a report at (Conservative-controlled) Shipley Area Committee on the vexed matter of those public loo savings. We were asked to "approve" the cuts proposed by officers. Which would have been fine if a majority of the committee hadn't voted against having those cuts in the first place.

If Bradford's Labour Party wants to make cuts to services can't they do their own dirty work?

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At the same meeting, former labour councillor Tony Miller launched into a bizarre criticism of 'snow teams' - a scheme where the council gives some grit and shovels to local folk who want to clear their little bit of road. Tony suggested that it was wrong and people should be paid to clear snow. Only a socialist could find something wrong with the idea of volunteering!

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I wonder what's in Bradford Council's rather secretive "markets review"?

Solly's Fruit & Veg - from John Street Market but here on tour in Haworth

Way back in May 2000 I became Bradford’s Portfolio Holder for Regeneration succeeded the current leader of council in that role. At the time there was a great long wish list of projects – it seemed that hardly a community in the City hadn’t been promised some miraculous regenerative cure.

Amongst all these promises were records of a series of discussions with a large Bradford-based supermarket chain. Some of these discussions related to the relocation of Morrison’s headquarters from Thornton Road to Gain Lane at Thornbury (the land there was in Council ownership). However, some of the remaining discussions related to the “regeneration” of Bradford’s markets – the John Street Market in the City centre and Keighley Market in the centre of that town.

Keighley folk may recall the debate about the possible relocation of the market so as to give Morrison’s a frontage on Low Street (right opposite the shopping centre where the market entrance is located). What Bradford folk don’t appreciate is that the Council had been in a similar conversation regarding John Street Market. And bear in mind that Cllr Green had already presided over the demolition of Rawson Market, Yorkshire’s last specialist municipal fresh food market – ostensibly for reasons of “health and safety”.

By 2000 it was too late to save most of the fishmongers, many of the butchers and most of the greengrocers decamped from the knocked down Rawson and James Street Markets – dozens of long established businesses sacrificed on the altar of “regeneration”. But we could – and did - put a stop to the idea of tucking the markets away behind a supermarket. And we did rebuild John Street market (I remain unsure about the rebranding as the Oastler Centre although this was done for good reasons and with positive intent).

I’m saying all this because I fear that we may be back defending the District’s markets. It has already been reported that the Shipley outdoor market is threatened with relocation – away from the car park, away from the centre of the town. What we don’t know is the full detail and content of the “markets review” ordered by the Council’s regeneration chiefs.

I fear – and I know some traders do too – that the Council fancies the chance to close down John Street Market (they’ll call it consolidation or merger with Kirkgate Market). After all the advocates of shiny regeneration that dominate our local agenda have never liked markets. Untidy places filled with cheap stuff, immigrants and poor people – not the sort of folk we aspire to in our wonderful city centre! A supermarket would be altogether neater and think of the capital receipt from selling the John Street site!

The markets review is being driven by the desire for savings – yet the markets generate a healthy surplus after all their costs are accounted for. The wonder of these places is ignored. The chance to invest, to grow and to improve is not taken. And the fact that markets make a place far better than shopping centres, public art or supermarkets is simply dismissed.

I may be proven wrong about the markets review – although the Council’s leadership is remarkably coy about the very existence of the review, let alone its content. But if Councillor Green returns to his 1990s habits of trying to knock down successful markets, it will make the Odeon debacle seem like a walk in the City Park.

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Hello Chief Constable, gotta new motor?

While the Police Authority has insisted on savings in front line policing - closing down public access to Bradford's police offices, for example, this doesn't extend to looking after the "Command Team". Yesterday I was e-mailed this:

West Yorkshire Police in its efforts to cut spending have just spent £40,000 each on 7 vehicles for its command team. Top cops in West Yorkshire are driving a fleet of flash cars – as the force struggles to save £96m.

More than £286,000 has been spent on top-of-the range models for the six members of the West Yorkshire Police command team and its counter-terrorism chief – at an average of over £40,000 per car. The motors include a luxury Jaguar XF, two BMW X5s, a BMW 535, two Audis and a Lexus 450H. 

Not bad business being a top copper but surely the men don't begrudge the brass their nice new motors?

The news, which comes as the force seeks to slash £96m from its budget and cut up to 2,000 jobs by 2015, has been met with outrage from frontline police.

So that's a 'no' then!



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Austerity - everywhere but government

aus·ter·i·ty/ôˈsteritē/

Noun:

Sternness or severity of manner or attitude. Extreme plainness and simplicity of style or appearance.

Or as European voters would have it, a monstrous evil loaded upon them by bankers and their cronies in government. But what exactly are we speaking of here – what exactly do we mean by ‘austerity’?

I’m not here to present some sort of economic case as to the existence or otherwise of austerity, of a time when financial reality forces us to adopt – from necessity – that plainness and simplicity of style. The truth is that austerity for most of us is a fact but the austerity isn’t being driven by cuts in public spending – there are, in aggregate, precious few of those cuts. No, the circumstances forcing us to live an austere life are coming from the private sector and from the manner in which governments have responded to the unresponsiveness of the private economy.

Look around you, speak to a few of your neighbours, wander down the food aisles of the supermarket and, above all, spend an hour or two watching television advertisements. All will tell you of two things – the two things that are bringing that unwanted austerity upon us:

1. We have less money in our pockets – for some of us this is because we don’t have any work but for nearly everyone the amount has fallen because employers, struggling for business, aren’t raising wages, are reducing hours, cutting overtime and ending bonuses. Plus, of course, the government, fixed on its own cash flow problems has bunged up taxes
2. What money we have in our pockets doesn’t buy as much – that’s right folks, we’ve never had the deflation we were promised at the start of this crisis. The clever folk in the treasury told us that we needed to keep real interest rates negative because otherwise deflation would destroy value and wealth – we would be doomed. Some of us said this was rubbish and that the government wanted some inflation so as to reduce its (and the banks’) debt problems. And we were right – there’s now been at least four years of above trend inflation. That’s four years where savings have shrunk, four years of price rises. Plus, to cap it all, the government has put up taxes – VAT, excise duties, airport tax

Austerity isn’t a consequence of reduced government spending but of other government actions – taxes that are too high, interest rates that are too low, running the Royal Mint’s printing presses at full whack and failing to cut spending. Yes that’s right – failing to cut spending.

Let’s remind you that over three years Bradford Council will have cut over £100 million from its budget – that’s 25% of what we get in grant from government. And it’s true, jobs have gone, some unnecessary cuts have been imposed, a few facilities have closed but, in the main, the “cuts” have barely inconvenienced the majority of the City’s population.

And look a little further – those financial strictures haven’t been applied to the NHS where budgets have risen not fallen, we’re still spending millions each week maintaining an unwanted armed presence in Afghanistan and the merest of dents has been made in the welfare budget. In truth the government predicts that spending will rise by £50 billion between 2011 and 2015 – what sort of dire austerity is that?

Yet there is austerity – people are struggling out there, we may not have starvation but everywhere you’ll see faces telling you it’s tough. As I said, watch those adverts – not just the offers of loans or the debt scams but the everyday adverts. Look at the styling, consider the way we now see less of the flash, hedonistic and aspiration imagery and instead get and older, solid, calming language.

And that austerity is the fault of government – for they have created the inflation, they have increased the taxes, they have made the jobs more expensive. What they haven’t done is cut their own spending.

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What I'd like to see in the budget...

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Over three years, Bradford Council will reduce it's cost to the taxpayer by around £100 million representing about a 25% reduction (although, dear reader, you should note that it is only around an 8% cut to the Council's £1.3 billion budget). There have been some negative effects on front-line services but these are mostly the result of political choice - our Labour leaders, faced with a slower rate of savings from reducing bureaucracy, made service cuts rather than use reserves.

Central government should set itself the same target over the same time period - a reduction of around £170 billion. I'm not going to set out precise details - that's what that Jeremy Hayward chap is for - merely that, if local councils can successfully reduce spending to this degree, I am absolutely sure central government can do the same.

And half those savings should go straight into tax cuts - raising the point at which income tax starts to minimum wage rates, abolishing the 50p rate of tax, reducing duty on beer, scrapping the tax on holidays and set in train a radical simplification of the entire tax system.

Won't happen...but wouldn't it be nice?

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The BBC - making the case for benefits reform (without meaning to)!

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The words are the regular BBC, soft soap, tear-jerking, sob story:

The family receive a total of £30,284.80 a year in benefits - well over the £26,000 cap proposed by the government. But, says Raymond, "If these proposals go through we will take a massive hit to our finances - and it's not as if we could move into a smaller or cheaper premises.

"I see eight people here having to choose between eating or heating."

Oh dear, this is terrible - how can the wicked coalition government inflict such suffering on this poor family!

Look again - the BBC provide a handy guide to the families expenditure - which includes:

Sky TV subscription - £15 per week
Mobile phones (plural) - £32 per week

...and a weekly shopping bill including 24 cans of lager, 200 cigarettes and a large pouch of tobacco. That's nearly £100 a week on booze and fags alone! And I'm guessing these aren't essentials to life?

After the cap is introduced this family will lose £82.40 per week. Seems to me that just cutting down on booze and fags plus moving to freeview telly would go most of the way to closing that gap - no need to turn the heating off or starve the kids, is there!

Bring on the welfare reform - if this is typical (and the BBC suggests that it is) there's plenty of room for savings without kids going without food or grandma dying of cold.

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Things that are wrong with local government...

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I attended a meeting of Bradford's Corporate Overview & Scrutiny Committee today where we looked at the new "Sustainable Communities Strategy" - incidentally something we no longer have to produce. I asked what I thought was a pretty straightforward question - how much did the strategy cost to produce.

I was informed that this couldn't be answered as it was all officer time and any way we'd probably have to do most of the work regardless. Appalling.

Not only did we have a strategy without quantified objectives, indeed one majoring on generalised wishy-washy 'outcomes', but the extensive process of producing the strategy is uncosted. The whole exercise involved hundreds of meetings, rooms filled with paper and thousands of hours of officer time (and not just from the council but from our 'partners' too), yet no-one thought to keep track of these costs and assess whether the benefit of producing the strategy outweighs the expense of that production.

So when they bleat about cuts in Bradford, perhaps you should ask why this pointless process was undertaken while swimming pools were closed, libraries shut and disabled works made redundant.

This really is typical of local government, not just in Bradford but everywhere,

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It's a thought...do Councils need Chief Executives?

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I'm not yet convinced but Wiltshire County Council might have hit on an idea:

Wiltshire Council will operate without a chief executive after the authority ‘deleted’ the post.

As part of a radical management restructure which will see the departure of current chief Andrew Kerr within weeks, it has also reduced the number of corporate directors from five to three in a bid to save £1.4m by 2015.

Since leadership should come from members (don't all rush), is the Chief Executive role limited to the management and direction of senior officers?  Thoughts welcome!

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...they can't stop wasting your cash can they!

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This time it's Leeds City Council:

Leeds City Council is set to take over the economic research and intelligence unit of axed regional development body Yorkshire Forward. Under a plan to be discussed by the Council’s Executive Board on Wednesday 7th September, the five members of Yorkshire Forward’s Chief Economist’s unit will be transferred to work for the Council at an annual cost of £343,000.

Wow! In these austere times the Council has found all that cash to take on an economic research unit. Presumably Leeds City Council aren't closing any libraries, shutting down any care homes, reducing the hours at any swimming pools or cutting the funding for any community groups?

But then it's a Labour Council - they'll need some help with economics!

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"More in sorrow than anger, guv" - the machismo of cuts or the protection of services?

Many thousands of words have been expended on the “cuts”. On whether they are necessary, on the pain that results from their imposition, as to whether they impact disproportionately on poor people or ethnic minorities or women (and, for all I know, on the fairies living at the bottom of social workers’ gardens).

In all this discussion I worry that little effort is directed to the strategies followed by public bodies – and especially by local councils – in response to the settlement “imposed” by a chubby former Worth Valley councillor. Most of these strategies – at least in the north – seem predicated on delivering the maximum amount of reduction in 2011/12. And this is achieved, in part, through the closing of “front line” services – swimming pools, libraries, resource centres and lollipop ladies.

There is no doubt that councils have to make significant cuts – described by some as a process of “re-basing” rather than mere reduction. The question is how we decide to achieve that new base level of budget – by draconian cuts this year, by a process of reductions during the lifetime (three years) of the recent local government settlement or over a long period of time altogether. For most councils all three of these options are available.

The advantage of cutting this year is that it gets the pain out of the way and allows a drastic pruning of services such as leisure provision and libraries. And most councils have wanted to restructure these services for some while but, because of the political pain involved, have not done so. Bradford’s facilities review in leisure and sport was first commissioned in 2002 and went through assorted iterations without ever being implemented. No council leadership wants to be the one to close swimming pools and sports centres after all!

However, the downside of rapid cuts is that decisions to close or reduce services are inevitably ill-considered. And the requirements for user engagement, consultation with affected employees and the scrutiny-delayed council decision-making process mean that – as we’re discovering in Bradford – it’s actually pretty difficult to deliver the savings needed in just one year. It looks likely that – without further front-line cuts – Bradford’s budget will be overspent in 2011/12. I am sure the same situation applies to many other authorities seeking to deliver reductions amounting to 10% or more of the net revenue budget.

The result of this strategy will be that the scale of cuts in years two and three of the settlement period will need to be greater than anticipated – risking further years of pool closures, higher charges for care and redundancies. The aim of taking a quick hit followed by a smooth, managed reduction to the new base won’t be achieved.

Some councils – Leeds appears to be an example of this – have taken the approach of, in effect, borrowing from future revenues to reduce the need for cuts in 2011/12. The same reductions are made over the same period as we see in Bradford but the smoothed profile allows for greater consideration and planning in service reductions. Closure or service curtailment is less ill-considered.

Under this approach – as is the case for the “cuts now” approach – the council concerned protects its reserves position and its capital programme. So far as long-term developments are concerned it is more-or-less business as usual. Thus Manchester protects its ‘flagship’ Town Hall project and maintains a range of separate funds alongside the core revenue reserve – after three years the reserves position of the city will change little as a result of cuts. There will still be over £200 million in reserve funds – roughly half of which will be available for spending.

My contention is that a council could use a proportion of available reserves to allow for the “re-basing” to take longer – perhaps five years rather than three. This would mean that many of the decisions to close services in 2011/12 are not necessary – we have a far longer period to consult, to plan and to design structures for future service delivery. Rather than witnessing a frantic rush to find community-led solutions to libraries this could be planned and implemented across the library estate – achieving front-line cost savings without the disruption of threatening the closure of the services.

Similarly, the “restructure” programmes many councils are implementing would be less risky and there would be more opportunity to discuss the things that are essential, the things that are nice to have if we can afford them and the things that, frankly, are an extravagance. 

It may be right to close some facilities, to stop providing some services but this shouldn’t simply be to save some cash. It is right for councils, for example, to get out of the business of providing old folks’ homes – we don’t do it very well and it costs a great deal more for us to do it when compared to the best of the private and not-for-profit sectors. But it would still be right if the government had given us a massive increase in grant.

I find it pretty hard to justify closing centres for disabled adults just to effect some savings in this year’s revenue budget – especially when we’ve best part of £100 million sitting in the bank. This money – there for a rainy day – could allow a restructure of the council, the reconfiguration of services and the stripping out of duplication, waste and indulgence over a longer period. And at the end of that period Manningham might still have a swimming pool and Denholme a library.

But the options put before councillors were driven by predetermined departmental spending limits rather than a medium term financial strategy worth the name. Councillors will have spent hundreds of hours trawling through lists of “cuts” prepared by officers and will never have stepped back to look at the whole picture – to ask about income as well as about expenditure, to discuss priorities and to consider what needs to be provided by the council and the size of a ‘re-based’ budget.

Above all, no-one will have asked whether the cash reserves – tens of millions at most top tier councils and hundreds of millions in some cases – might be used to reduce the immediate impact of cuts, to allow replanned services and to ensure that the reduction of unnecessary bureaucracy takes priority over the closing of services to the public.

I might be wrong. I’m happy to be shown how such a strategy would be mad, bad or dangerous. But I’m not happy to see disabled people losing services because the council can’t move quickly enough to get rid of layers of surplus management, to start sharing back office functions with neighbouring authorities and to make better use of the flexibility and innovation in the private and voluntary sectors.

It seems to me that the machismo of making cuts – "more in sorrow than anger, guv" – has triumphed over a desire to concentrate on making sure the public we serve get the services they deserve for all those taxes they pay.

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About those Charity cuts...

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False Economy has the terrible truth about those cuts to charity income:

Research by trade union-backed campaign group False Economy shows that at least 2,000 charities and community groups have seen funding cuts since last summer.

According to the research, at least £110 million of cuts have been made to charities this year – although it anticipates that the final figures will be higher when local authorities confirm exactly how they will respond to the planned 30 per cent cut to their main grant from central Government.

The figures are based on Freedom of Information responses from 265 councils across England. All charities or voluntary groups receiving a funding cut of at least five per cent are listed in the research.

Dreadful I know.  But, dear reader, do you know how much charities in the UK bring in each year? You don't - let me help.

There are, according to the Charity Commission, some 162,415 charities with a combined income of £53.86 billion.  Yes, you did read that correctly - fifty four BILLION pounds of charity income.  And by my calculation £110 million represents about 0.2% of that charity income.

It's a cut.  It won't be evenly distributed. But....

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Bradford Council prefers front line cuts to back office savings...

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Yesterday we witnessed Cllr Greenwood, our esteemed leader, spluttering and struggling to justify the closing of swimming pools at full council. I guess dear old Ian never expected to get heckled by the public upset at what his leadership is doing - lovely to see a Labour politician revealing his distrust of the public by calling them a "mob" and "here just to make trouble".

And, in serendipitous co-ordination, the Council announced (although by way of a note on the website rather than a debate in the Council Chamber) that it is giving up on securing back office savings through collaborative working with other public sector organisations:

Earlier this year Bradford’s 'Place Based' Collaborative Working Programme closed, which means there is no longer any formal steering of collaborative working between participating partner organisations in the district.

So there you have it - Bradford's Labour leadership prefer cuts to front line services to creating back office savings through collaboration and joint-working.

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Campaign Diary: Day Five - gardening and e-mails

I know, it's Saturday and the sun is shining - should be out there voter bothering! But we took the day off to do so gardening (see results above) - still managed to get some leaflets dropped with deliverers and to get a new deliverer too!

Also I've got off a load of e-mails to people I dealt with over recent times - always careful with this as we all get plenty of spam. However, it's a good idea to send a nice, personal note to people I've helped over the past few years - so I've done so.

As far as the politics is concerned, the good news of the pension changes is swamped by the annoyance among existing pensioners - who, of course, aren't getting the extra money! And it's the pensioners with savings or a second income who are squealing - they don't get all those pension credits.

Back tomorrow - after a day charging round the farms, barns and cottages that fall into the delivery round entitled: "remote".

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When is a saving not a saving? A tale of some libraries

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Readers will know that the Labour leadership of Bradford Council decided – with support from our local Liberal Democrats – that two libraries in Bingley Rural, at Wilsden and Denholme, should be closed as part of the budget “savings”. Along with three other libraries elsewhere, this action was to contribute £70,000 out of the £56,000,000 total saving.

Now, leaving aside the spiteful nature of such a cut, it appears that the saving is rather a fiction. Here’s part of the letter given to “users” of the library:

All the staff who currently work in these libraries will be redeployed to other libraries in the district.

In conjunction with this the Council will consult with local communities about how best to deliver their library service in the light of the reductions to the library service budget. The Council will also carry out a community needs assessment.

So let’s get this right – closing the libraries will not result in any savings in staff costs, there are unlikely to be any economies in the book budget as a result and the Council will also have to introduce new stops in its mobile service to pick up the reduction in service to these villages.

Three out of the five closing libraries are run from Council-owned premises (not specialist libraries but community centres) so there is no saving in rent and the impact on central overheads must be small given these are libraries mostly open just ten hours each week.

In truth – or at least as far I am able to ascertain – closing the two libraries in Bingley Rural will actually save Bradford Council the cost of the rent for space in Wilsden Village Hall (less that £2,000) and a minimal amount in heating and lighting.  It seems to me that closing these libraries merely realises make-believe savings in “full cost recovery” and central overheads that could, in truth, have be achieved without closing a single library.

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