The Tory spin machine: How £22m in cuts became £2.5m ‘protected’
1st paragraph of report to Lancashire County Council Cabinet (9th Sept, agenda item 3b)
As announced as part of the Government’s package to save £6.2 billion in 2010/11, the County Council’s grants will be reduced by £22m as follows…
1st paragraph of press release about the above agenda item
Lancashire County Council’s Cabinet is to consider plans to protect over two and half million pounds worth of funding for children and family services, despite no longer receiving funding from the Government.
How do there come to be such different interpretations of the same cuts?
Well, essentially it’s because the Tory council’s press release is a lie. Here’s how.
1) The reduction in grant awarded by the government in the ‘Education Area-Based Grant’ is £6.6m (see executive summary)
2) Savings identified in the report come to £5.298m. This is a gap of approx £1.3m between the drop in government funding and what will be spent.
3) The report recommends a ‘one-off contribution of £0.75m’ should be made from corporate expenditure towards the savings target for the Directorate for Children and Young People.’
4) It then goes on to say that a further £0.5m in cuts still need to be identified, and these will be the subject of a further cabinet meeting.
5) So at the very most the council can claim they are protecting children’s services to the tune of £0.75m, for the remainder of 2010-11, while making massive and immediate cuts to a whole range of services,including the teenage pregnancy services and staff numbers on children’s homes.
As far as I can see on scrutinizing the report, the £2.5m the council claims to be ‘protecting’ in the press release is a pure fiction, and is never referred to other than in the press release.
Meanwhile, a further £10m in cuts are dealt with swiftly in the press release:
[R]eductions totalling £10m (the Performance Reward Grant of £9.6m and Housing and Planning Delivery Grant of £0.4m) will lead to projects not taking place, without a specific need for efficiency savings or reductions in service levels.
So what they’re saying is because the money was not allocated – because the council know full well that the money would be cut as soon as the Tories took power – this doesn’t count as a cut.
This is simply ridiculous. Ask the people who were depending on that money.
Expect more of this ‘creative’ reporting from Tory councils up and down the land.
Times like this show democracy for the sham that it is. We have recently been instructed by our chief exec to change the wording against the proposed cuts before they reach elected members. The wording must not emphasise cuts but must emphasise the expansion. How is this seemingly paradoxial position to be explained. Well say if you shut 6 libraries and move some resources to the main central library, well the wording says the central library has been expanded!
It should also be noted that this relies on elected members being utterly incompetent or even worse.
I should add that this is a New Labour authority I am talking about.
The other side to this, which is only possible when you have a large democracy deficit, it that priorities will be based on surveys. So surveys suggest that people prioritise roads as the biggest issue, therefore they should be cut less. But people only say roads because they are in such a shambolic condition, but if you protect this and cut other areas then those areas become shambolic!! So they use a survey that asks one question to enforce cuts that would require a altogether different question.
The process being implemented to bring the greatest level of cuts in my lifetime is built on a lack of thought, lack of quality information, lack of coordination and lack of consultation. What an indictment of the system we live under!