Tory and New Labour cuts bite deep in Coventry and Canterbury
About this time last year, I reported local news regarding the Scrine homeless charity here in Canterbury. The City Council had announced a massive cut in subsidies from an average of £177 per housed individual to around £66 per individual. Canterbury is possessed of the only night shelter in Kent and, I presume, the money for individuals at the previous rate was able to meet overhead as well as direct provision costs and thereby coincidentally provide services for others as well. The Council was not amused.
In fact, the Council had been struggling for a few years to cut the money being given to the Scrine. This year, the cuts having been made, the Council are now planning to withdraw a further £600,000 by cancelling three contracts for provision on the grounds that care is not up to standards. Obviously there was something of a vicious circle at work here: the Council cut funds, Scrine provision slips a little, so the Council cuts more funds. This July, all sixty-six employees of Scrine were put on notice, because the situation is quite dire.
For any reasonable person, it should be concluded that the amount being paid to the Scrine is not enough to cater for all the homeless people in Canterbury, which is why a little is being stretched a longer way. Violence against the homeless is not uncommon (see the bottom of this article for a ridiculous police attitude) and getting them off the street at night is a priority. The Tory-dominated City Council doesn’t seem to be concerned all that much; their criticism last was that service provision was determined by Scrine and that there was too much of it.
Shamefully, in a discussion at the Canterbury branch of the Labour Party, a former leader of the Labour group on Canterbury City Council backed the legalistic Tory arguments. Despite an employee of the Scrine Foundation turning up to the meeting, no decision was reached and no campaign was mounted against the Council. I turned up to the subsequent demonstrations in Canterbury against the cuts, but since then I haven’t heard much beyond these further rumblings from the Council, which wants to have matters both ways – up-to-scratch provision for a hundred and fifty homeless, whilst not paying the sort of money which would secure it.
Voltaire’s Priest (of Shiraz Socialist fame) has been in touch to highlight a similar situation emerging in Coventry. Coventry homeless services are under attack by the Tory city council. Out of a budget of £2.2 million, for example, Coventry Cyrenians – which had contracts to provide 2000 single people with beds and an outreach service to help the homeless get back on their feet – will lose £750,000. The council has cancelled the contracts. This is at a time when homelessness is increasing due to housing repossessions, spiralling unemployment and so on.
The Coventry Telegraph records that out of 1700 reports of homelessness from families last year, risen from 1000, only a third were granted assistance – and only 300 were offered temporary shelter while their applications were processed. Again, as in Canterbury, the attack on funding is resulting in harsher application of the legal criteria upon which aid is based. Yet Coventry City Council is (rather cynically) focussing on the need for ‘reorganization’ of services, and the need to move people on who have been living in sheltered accommodation ‘for 40 years’.
That an additional 700 applications have been made for the year 2008/9, in conditions of economic hardship, is just plainly ignored lest it be admitted that such people are part of the ‘deserving poor’, making it hard for the council to dismiss them like people who have needed support long-term and who the council now wants to force out.
This rhetoric also disguises the effect that marketization of the voluntary sector is having on services; groups are being played off against each other to secure lower costs for homelessness provision, but as can be seen in Canterbury, it is driving down ‘standards’, though whether or not ‘standards’ are being used as a political football is an open question.
Secondly, it takes no account of the number of people being turned away as ‘ineligible’ or the number of people who meet the ‘vulnerable’ criteria, but who aren’t offered beds whilst their application is processed – e.g. relative provision for sufferers from domestic violence nationwide is a quarter of what it was four years ago. This is an assessment backed by Mike Fowler, chief executive of the Coventry Cyrenians.
Various councils have attempted to explain away their cuts in the gradual reduction of the Supporting People grants. In the case of Coventry, the government have cut the SP grant by £3.3m since 2004, to around £13 million. It has never been the case that Councils rely only on this grant – they are expected to cough up their own funds as well. Having sifted through the Council’s accounts [1][2][3], gross income for housing increased by £24 million for the same period as the SP grant – gross expenditure didn’t keep pace, only expanding by £22 million. The cost cutting is not purely related to the decreased Supporting People grant, contra Steve Rudge.
What New Labour can be smacked about for is their failure as of April 1st this year to maintain the ring-fence around the Supporting People grants, in preparation for their folding into Area Based Grants. It is the worry of charities and other organizations that this will result in the diverting of money away from Housing Related Support to other local priorities, since the homeless are not an electorally powerful group. I think that this diversion is precisely the gambit we now see opening on the part of Conservative councils. It seems the spirit of Shirley Porter lives on in Tory Britain.
Something Tory hopefuls around the country should remember, when they’re lambasting unchristian Labour for paying more attention to the Guardian than the Bible.
Hi Dave,
Good article. One question:
“What New Labour can be smacked about for is their failure as of April 1st this year to maintain the ring-fence around the Supporting People grants, in preparation for their folding into Area Based Grants.”
Is the criticism here that it is wrong in principle for central government to let local councils choose how to prioritise spending in their area? Or that central spending should guarantee certain levels of universal public services, with local autonomy as an add on once that has been provided?
New Labour is often criticised for having weakened local government, but this sort of thing does show one of the problems with the new localism.
I agree with Dan – surely if you’re going to cut the grant (which I’ll admit isn’t the most socialist decision the government have ever made), the least you can do is allow councils to fund services it impacts from other sources by no longer ring-fencing it?
No, I don’t think it’s wrong in principle for central government to let local councils choose how to prioritize spending in their area. It is more that Labour should guarantee certain levels of universal public services. Having taken account of that, there’s still plenty of room for the new localism, don’t you think? But this government has mastered centralism: pretty much every body now competes for funds that would be unavailable without structural changes, thereby making funding conditional upon pre-arranged consent to what New Labour wants. It’s one thing to ring-fence money for spending in a particular area – e.g. on homelessness – it’s completely another to be demanding the reshaping the intervention of private companies in services as a condition for funding.
That’s something which the ‘new’ (since when?) localism reacts against – and I don’t see that reaction as compromised by this objection to removing the ring-fencing around a specific service in the full knowledge that right-wing councils are going to use their power to reduce service provision. It’s not like the Labour Party has even made an effort, say by removing the ring-fencing while creating a campaign to fight those councils which use their leeway for reactionary policies.
As for Tim’s objection, I think you’ve missed something, Tim. There is nothing preventing councils funding housing from other sources – as should be clear from the comparative look at Coventry’s expenditures. Indeed, only £13 million of housing provision comes from the formerly ring-fenced Supporting People grant by the government – £122 million is actually spent on it. This includes many other central funds as well as locally raised funds. In regard to housing the vulnerable, the council spent £18m last year, which is £5m more than the Supporting People grant – so as I said in the article, councils have always been expected to contribute themselves. This council is choosing to decrease its contribution rather than make up the deficit.
(Comment edited for clarity, 16.02 – DS)
Good article, Dave. As a Labour councillor for whom a key task is to argue and campaign against savage Tory cuts, it does seem strange to me that a Labour ex-leader in Canterbury should want to argue on narrow grounds in favour of them. The benchmark question in my head when a cut is proposed is ‘how does this impact upon the poorest/most vulnerable?’ Homeless people would seem to me to be in that group.
As for the localism question, I think the most important aspect going forward – if we assume a Tory administration from 2010 for a moment – is how its new hyper localism in the form of the GPC legislation (about which I blogged at length a while back)will have a massive impact upon service equity, and will make the unringfencing of the SP budgets seem like small beer.
Unfortunately, only Dave and I seem to be aware of the dangers coming fast to a Tory town hall near us, whereby the Tory centre gets to get rid of any responsiblity for massive cuts in services. New Local Government Network expressed interest when they realised (cos I told them) what was going on, but it seems to me they are so focused on securing their own future under a likely Tory government that they won’t speak out, just as the MSM won’t (either through lack of understanding or lack of integrity). That leaves the blogosphere for initial awareness raising, and the unions……all contributions gratefully received.
mmm, did I just hijack this comments thread with my own agenda? sorry
Yes, said ex-leader of the Labour group rather irritated me. The argument put forward by the Tory council was that the money was not being spent for its intended purposes – i.e. housing and only housing for those to whom aid was granted. Certain people in Labour supported that argument.
Such a view seems to imply a lack of faith in the probity of the Scrine Foundation – and shies away from acknowledging the reality that money is being stretched to cover other things because the local and national governments would not otherwise meet their responsibility.
The quality of care here was fine, before the Tory cuts – and the outreach services both here and in Thanet were second to none. That a former Labour councillor put legalities above the need to continue provision of service was disagraceful – not least because the matter wasn’t about legalities.
Had it been just about the law or accounting, the council could simply have signed a contract granting Scrine the relevant monies to be subtracted from the person-by-person housing benefit. Of course that was never going to happen. So Labour essentially endorsed the cuts.
One of thie things that infuriates me about a couple of opposition Labour groups I know is that they tend to symathise with the ‘predicament’ in which the controlling group finds itself, and then gets constrained by the controlling group’s view of what services should be delivered and how cheaply. All focus on Labour core values in local govt – equity,equity and more equity – gets lost as ‘cost efficiency’ etc dominates the debate.
Regarding the Government ending ring-fences and the devastating effects this is already starting to have on vulnerable people at local levels:
http://badconscience.com/2009/09/08/spending-cuts-who-suffers/
(In brief: trusts in Southport providing sheltered housing are anticipating funding cuts next year and so are putting the squeeze on elderly pensioners in the most cynical of ways).
It’s not just the homeless who are suffering…
Thanks Paul S
Have taken the opp to do a link to this (good) article at my latest LibCon piece. hope it generates a few hits.
I used to work for a homelessness charity in Southport, btw.