Barnet offers its youth nothing

As most readers will have noticed, Barnet council plans big cuts. They are going to 'save' £54.4 million over the next three years. Actually, if Future Shape/easyCouncil/One Barnet goes t*** up, they could end up having to 'save' even more. The cuts identified already could be just the start.

 

This is how they intend to achieve the savings:

• One Barnet £12.1m
• Efficiency projects £22.9m
• Increased income £4.2m
• Service reductions £15.2m

As you might imagine, 'efficiency projects' often turns out to be a cut in disguise, and One Barnet is all based on the idea of outsourcing service delivery to the private sector. This often ends in a cut in the quality of service, sometimes through cutting staff, sometimes through cutting corners, often through quibbling over the level of service that is to be provided. 'Increased income' means things like charging residents more to park in front of their own house, aka taking money from residents and giving them nothing in return, aka a cut.

Of the pure 'service reductions' planned, one of the most shocking to me is that for youth services. They plan to cut £1.46 million in 2011/12, £500,000 in 2012/13 and £960,000 in 2013/14. If they do what they plan, in three years' time there will be no youth service in Barnet. The details are in a paper going to the Cabinet meeting next Monday 14 February (yes, Valentine's Day).

Looking at the details of the consultation the council undertook around this proposal, it appears that Barnet's youth service is already very no-frills, but what is there is valuable and valued by the users.

There was widespread support for the work of youth support services. A number of young people highlighted the role that youth support services had played in increasing their confidence and the positive impact this had on their education, employment and social development. Respondents to the overall questionnaire and at consultation events expressed the view that all young people needed support, not just the vulnerable, and that young people from different backgrounds need to mix with peers in order to increase inclusion and understanding. Concerns were raised over who would be identified as vulnerable, as needs often weren’t identified until young people had accessed services, and whether those who didn’t qualify for support would become vulnerable without the support. Young people suggested that targeting specific groups of young people could lead to labelling and bullying.

Risks identified in making these cuts are:

The proposed reductions in youth services, which promote positive activities for young people including education, employment and training, may have an adverse impact on indicators such as school attendance, youth offending and youth unemployment, as well as the Corporate Plan educational attainment targets.

The language of the proposed cuts is highly euphemistic. We must be used now to the idea that every cut can be excused with the promise that Big Society will step in to close the gap in the social fabric. One of the most offensive things that Cameron and Co. are doing is belittling the work that armies of volunteers are already doing up and down the country.

Rhetoric about Big Society can't disguise the fact that in many areas of life, social need will only be met by the state. If Society were Big enough to provide youth services on Grahame Park, for example, don't you think it would be being done already? The simple fact is that in some places, not enough people do have the time or resources voluntarily to lay on activities for young people. That's why the council needs to.

Barnet council continue to talk about their 'youth offer'. The fact is, with their planned cuts to the youth service of £3 million, they intend at the end of three years to offer the youth of Barnet - nothing.

Flash communities good, flash mobs bad

Rumour reaches us (an email, actually) that the planned Arts Depot flash mob was shut out of North London Business Park this afternoon. Nope, they couldn't even get near the Barnet council offices to demonstrate their opposition to proposed cuts in their council grant.

Barnet council, who have recently embraced a new adventure in social media called the Pledge Bank (PledgeBank, probably) went all humourless on the artistic types from the Arts Depot. That, I suspect, is only going to make them more determined - and Barnet Council more ridiculous.

I can't find PledgeBank on the web yet, but there is an interesting article on Conservative Home quoting council leader Lynne Hillan on how the PledgeBank fits with promoting the Big Society (BigSociety, surely). The comments are entertaining, as you might expect.

Hillan says:

Increasingly local government will be a deal: “We will provide a half a ton of grit if you agree to spread it”. There is a real engagement challenge here - often these groups will not be the usual suspects. They will be “flash communities” of short duration, forming to complete an activity - such as clearing snow or tackling local environmental damage.

Flash communities good, flash mobs bad. You read it here first.

Neither Big Society nor rural idiocy!

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx's paean of praise to the achievements of capitalism (no, really, in part it is), he says:

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

In trying to get my head around David Cameron's Big Society idea (or is it just a soundbite?) I have this image of Olde England, Britain as it used to be, in short: village life.

Just that, villages, hundreds of them, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, who knows. An even blanket of villages across the whole country, none of them very big, all having, with the odd minor variation, the same social structure: a church with its clergy, a manor house with its gentry, shops with their tradespeople, cottages with their rural labourers, and a few professionals living in desirable multistorey houses on the high street.

In this map of just a small part of Hertfordshire, even today, many village names survive, although some of the original settlements have grown a lot bigger, and some have shrunk, and most of them have got joined up somehow.

In village society, which British society was for hundreds, even thousands of years, you could hope that if you were old and infirm someone would come and dig you out if your cottage got snowed in in the winter. Yes, life was shit for most people, and everyone knew their place, but at least you had the obligations of a small society to fall back on.

Jump to the 18th and 19th centuries. Huge numbers had been driven or drawn to the burgeoning cities; the old social patterns, ties and obligations were gone; the working classes did their own thing away from the prying eyes of their betters, and built their own "big society" to help them get by.

Jump to the 21st century. We still have the welfare state, which the majority of people voted to establish and the majority still support today, even though the media and political classes are doing their best to make it seem unfashionable.

Unless Cameron has some Maoist plan to drive us all back to the villages (I think mine is in Kent), we will continue to need the welfare state. Elderly people in Barnet will continue to need to ring the local authorities when there is cold weather and they need their path clearing so that they can get to the shops. Neither Big Society nor rural idiocy but democratically accountable, high quality public services!

Dear Dave, where's our Big Society?

Dear Mr Cameron (or, if you prefer, Dave),

In Barnet the Conservative-led council wants to hand over delivery of most council services to a big private sector contractor, such as Centrica, where's our Big Society? And it stops residents asking the questions they want to ask councillors at their own forum (Chipping Barnet residents' forum, 20 July), where's our Big Society? And it has granted responsibility for the Brent Cross/Cricklewood regeneration (£4.5bn scheme) to one big company, Hammerson, where's our Big Society?

I could go on but I think you get the picture. This Barnet resident for one remains to be convinced that the Big Society you have just launched is anything more than a load of rhetoric to prettify public sector cuts. Am I wrong?

Yours sincerely,
Vicki Morris

What hope for Liverpool and any of us? Bring back the working classes

Three of my grandparents are buried within spitting distance of the Mersey, and my dad grew up there, so I claim a tenuous connection with Liverpool. When I first started visiting it regularly in the late 1980s it was a dreary place, suffering high unemployment and reeling from deep cuts to public services. I would say it's only just bobbing along now. How is it going to emerge from the coming age of austerity? Back to square one?

David Cameron launched his Big Society agenda there on Monday. Did he have a more valid reason for choosing Liverpool than the corny symbolism of holding his press conference at Liverpool Hope University? Yes, Liverpool, apparently, has volunteered to be one of four "vanguard communities", although someone might have told them:

Some of the local partners in the "vanguard communities" that David Cameron said will lead his "big society" revolution were uncertain about what being in the vanguard will involve.

Many involved in the voluntary sector had been given limited information, and some were warning that voluntary organisations hit by funding cuts will be hard pushed to deliver more.

"We don't know how it's going to work," a spokesman for Liverpool city council said. "We have been given no information about this."

[Rachel Williams and Rajeev Syal, Guardian, 19 July]

Who are these vanguard communities and what is planned for them?

Liverpool, the Eden Valley in Cumbria, Windsor and Maidenhead in Berkshire and Sutton in south-west London will become "vanguard communities". All four authorities approached the government to experiment with running the parts of their public services they think they can administer better.

They may have central government budgets handed over to them to administer at street level, attempt to improve local transport links themselves, take over command of local assets such as pubs and community services, have a greater say over planning permission or local transport and, in the case of Liverpool, allow volunteers to keep a popular local museum open for longer hours.

...The government will also announce the creation of a "Big Society Bank" to help finance social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups. The money will come from dormant bank and building society accounts – the amount is thought to be as much as £400m.

[Allegra Stratton, Guardian, 19 July]

Personally, I find the whole idea of Big Society unconvincing and deeply patronising. This is Cameron from his launch speech:

For years there was the basic assumption at the heart of government that the way to improve things in society was to micromanage from the centre, from Westminster. But this just doesn't work. It has turned able, capable, individuals into passive recipients of state help with little hope for a better future. It has turned lively communities into dull, soulless clones of one another.

What is he on about? Could he give us some concrete examples? I assume he has no plans to stop supermarkets building "soulless" out-of-town and close-to-town shopping developments, that suck the lifeblood out of high streets? When high street shops close and are taken over by charity shops, that's a good thing, right? Is that Big Society? Well, he's hoping that more and more public services will be run by charities...

Who are these able, capable individuals passively receiving state aid? I assume he is talking about the people he wants to drive off benefits (or, in less sensitive Tory tabloid-speak, "benefits-scroungers")? Or is he talking about wider circles of people, those of us who turn up to our local hospital and expect to find it open? He either needs to spell things out more... or drop the hyperbolic rhetoric.

He has claimed that the Big Society agenda is not just an attempt to prettify the cuts. But he brings along Eric Pickles, communities secretary, to play hard cop. Here's Pickles on Radio 4:

Even at a time when money is tight it is still possible to find different ways of delivering. It is unashamedly about getting more for less. But it is about passing power down to folks so you can start to mould your own neighbourhood and put something back in.

Put something back in? What if you don't have anything to start with? Again, Cameron says this is not just a return to patchwork Victorian philanthropy, but if Big Society really takes off - I'm not sure it can, I'm not sure we can turn back the clock that far without major upheaval! - that's what it would be.

The Guardian publishes an excellent set of reasoned objections to Big Society on its letters page today. This is one of the best:

The ability of community and voluntary groups to significantly increase their role in delivering public services is not easy. They will need time and space to grow and develop local delivery options. For this to happen, the government will have to be more interventionist and reform procurement practice away from raw market "efficiencies" toward effectiveness, the local, and less traditional commercial public service providers. If the government does this it will be fettering the speed and scale of contracts given to the private sector. For the government to create its "big society" it will have to intervene in the public sector market.

Some used to say the public sector crowds out the commercial sector. Now the commercial sector is in danger of crowding out civil society and fettering the "big society". Has the government the stomach for this, or will "big society" actually come to mean big business?

Neil McInroy, Chief executive, Centre for Local Economic Strategies

In Barnet the council wants to hand over delivery of most council services to a big private sector contractor, where's our Big Society? And it stops residents asking the questions they want to ask of local government, where's our Big Society?

There is one actor that has not figured in all of Cameron's calculations and it is the working class, I mean the self-conscious working class, understanding its history. Before the advent of the welfare state, sure, there was philanthropy but a lot of it was, frankly, cranky stuff shaped by the preoccupations of the middle- and upper-class people delivering it. Coverage was patchy and it was wholly inadequate. Historians of the lower orders have shown that the working class basically survived through its own support networks, with poor people helping out the poorer as best they could. And you could go out without locking your door... That was community, that was Big Society. But it was class society.

Who were the greatest enthusiasts for the Big State? Who, recalling the horrors of the 30s, clamoured for it after the Second World War? The working clases. They are not anywhere in Cameron's calculations, and it is time they began to assert themselves again. Big Society will not bring hope to Liverpool, the working class might.

Barnet residents banned from discussing what they like at their own forum

Barnet council residents who went along to Chipping Barnet residents' forum this evening hoping they could ask councillors and council officials about anything they like (council related) were disappointed.

The new chair, Barry Evangeli, who has replaced Kate Salinger, removed from her post for abstaining over the now nationally notorious Barnet council leader and cabinet member allowances hike, told residents they could not ask about this topic.

The Barnet Bugle has an early report of this (no, I wasn't there so this is all hearsay!). I'm sure many more details will emerge in the coming days.

What a farce! I wonder whether the same charade will be repeated at the Finchley and Golders Green forum next Monday and Hendon forum next Tuesday.

David Cameron's [I initially typed David Coleman - I wonder why] Big Society won't come to much when this Tory controlled local town hall isn't prepared to explain itself to its own residents on a question of great interest such as this.

In case you can get along, here are the details for those other residents' forums - let's see if our chairs are as brazen as Evangeli:

Finchley and Golders Green - 6.30pm, Monday 26 July, St Michael's Church Hall, Golders Green

Hendon - 6.30pm, Tuesday 27 July, Sangam Centre, Burnt Oak

Big Society lunch... sorry, launch

David Cameron launched his Big Society idea in Liverpool yesterday. I was going to write a blogpost about the true meaning of Big Society being "do something useful, just don't expect paying for it", but this, from Joe Robb on his blog "Brian Coleman (aka Mr Toad) has got to go!", is way funnier: PM launches 'The Big Pariah'.