Andy Slaughter
Main Page: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)(13 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Caroline Flint
Unlike the Secretary of State’s hon. Friends, we put money into the Supporting People grant to support local initiatives. Now councils face cuts in their Supporting People funding, and have no alternatives to the decisions that they are having to make.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I will talk about the myths of Hammersmith and Fulham later if I have the opportunity, but for now may I correct my right hon. Friend by pointing out that £2.9 million is the saving for the three boroughs next year—£500,000 from Hammersmith and Fulham—out of £27 million in total savings? The sum the Secretary of State said the three councils would save when he launched the initiative last October was £100 million. That is the sort of voodoo economics we are dealing with here.
Caroline Flint
My hon. Friend always enlightens us as to the true nature of what is happening in Hammersmith and Fulham. Only in the last week we have heard about a building that houses some 30 charities, from which many of the charities are being evicted. I heard only the other day that Hammersmith and Fulham council is so in touch with the big society that refugees from Afghanistan who were seeking support were directed to an Afghan society that happened to be an Afghan hound society. That shows how in touch those people are with the concerns of their residents, and the extent of their knowledge of the charitable and voluntary sector.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Hammersmith and Fulham council is closing nine of its 15 children centres this year, and by doing so it will generate about £2 million in savings. That is part of the £6 million savings in children’s services, which in turn are part of the £13 million savings in social services, which in turn are part of the £27 million that the council aims to save in the coming financial year. The total over the three years is £65 million, or about a third of its budget.
Because of the policies the Secretary of State is pursuing, many councils are having to make unimaginable cuts of this kind. I want to focus on two points in respect of Hammersmith and Fulham council. First, in making those very difficult decisions it has chosen to target the most vulnerable people, and the services that all parties represented in this House say that they wish to be preserved. Secondly, it maintains a charade, with which the Secretary of State has colluded and continues collude, that it is doing this in a new way—that these are new cuts that will not affect front-line services.
In particular—this picks up the point just made by the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt)—the council says that it will pay off debt, and in that way generate revenue income. It says that it will merge back-office services and in that way avoid affecting front-line services. I will break the spell immediately by saying that even if those two ideas—the merger and the disposals to pay off debt—are both successful, which is by no means certain, the total amount of money generated would be about £1 million, or 4% of the total cuts. That is what we are being led to believe is the new way of making cuts.
Before I came to this debate, I had two meetings this afternoon about Sure Start. The first was of an all-party group, to which the Minister with responsibility for children came to speak. He is an honourable man, as well as being an hon. Gentleman, and I believed what he said, which is what I have heard all the Education Ministers repeat. They believe that there is sufficient money to maintain the network of children’s centres and that there is no need to attack their budgets, particularly the phase 1 centres that serve the most vulnerable groups.
That appears to be Government policy, but this is what is happening in Hammersmith and Fulham. First, the closure of the nine centres was announced between Christmas and new year—on page 34 of a report called “Family Support”. Secondly, when that report came up for decision—by that time, thanks to the Daily Mirror and other great organs of state, a lot of the local population had been alerted to the situation—the council said, “You’ve misunderstood what we’re doing. We’re not closing any children’s centres,” but it then proceeded to vote through, on 10 January, the 50% budget cut that meant that those centres had to close. Having made that decision, it then began a consultation process—but that process identifies phase 1 children’s centres, the budget for which is to go down from £473,000 to £19,000. Threats were made to the staff, who were not informed before the closure of their centres was announced in the press. Heads of centres were told that they could not talk to me, or even to the Government, about what was happening.
To her credit, the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), did say during a Westminster Hall debate that she was concerned about, and was monitoring, what was happening in Hammersmith and Fulham. If the Government want to hold their line on Sure Start, they need to address the situation in Hammersmith and Fulham. It is not just Sure Start centres; youth clubs are closing too. I received a deputation representing 1,000 young people who use a youth club just outside my constituency that is closing, and I am told that all but one of the youth centres will close. Council estates are being demolished.
I went to a meeting at an old people’s home last Friday where, in order to raise £250,000, the air rights over the car park are being sold to a private school next door, so that no light will reach the old people’s home. Some of those old people spend 100% of their time in that home. This is what is happening in a Conservative-controlled council in London at the moment. This is the reality of the “painless” cuts.
Those are the things that we do not hear about in Hammersmith and Fulham. What about the things we do hear about? What about the paying off of debt—that prudent way of reducing debt? That happened on Monday, when, at a meeting of the council’s cabinet—I believe that the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), referred to this earlier—the disposal of nine community buildings was agreed to. Those buildings include four community centres used by more than 100 voluntary groups, all of which will be made homeless, and alternative provision will not be made for them. Those buildings include Palingswick house, an imposing building in central Hammersmith in which 22 voluntary groups occupy space. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State alluded to one of those earlier: the Afghan refugee group.
Because councils have to produce equality impact assessments when they are booting voluntary organisations out on to the street, Hammersmith and Fulham did that. It produced one for the Iranian Association, which caters mainly for refugees from the oppressive regime in Tehran: the Iranian Association was told that the alternative provision was to go to the Iranian embassy. The Kurdish Association for Refugees is also based in the building, and runs not only a cultural advice centre but a museum—one promoted by Boris Johnson on his tourist trail of London. It was told that the alternative to being booted out on to the street was to go to an organisation for the south Asian population based somewhere in east London. The Afghan refugee association was told that there were two alternative sources of provision for Afghan refugees in London, one was an Afghan restaurant and the other—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) has already said—was the southern Afghan club, for the promotion of Afghan hounds. That is how my local community in Hammersmith is being treated by a Conservative council.
Three other community centres all came up with viable business plans that would have allowed them to continue operating from their community centres and pay a commercial rent, which would have meant that over a period of two or three years, the council would not have lost money. Without listening any further to those ideas the council voted through the proposal, and all these buildings will be sold off to produce an income of about £500,000 a year. The opportunity cost for the tens of thousands of people who will no longer have those facilities available to them, including the elderly people and the 750 kids from deprived backgrounds who go to dancing classes at one of these places, is unimaginable. But this is what the council is proud of.
The other thing that the council is proud of is the merger with Westminster city council and Kensington and Chelsea borough council, which was announced yesterday. I alluded in an earlier intervention to the Secretary of State’s claim last October—he associated himself with this claim—that the move would save £100 million. When the report was published yesterday, it said that in the dim and distant future—no detail was provided—this would save about £34 million between the three councils. That is already only a third of the sum that was claimed some two to three months ago. The actual quantified savings for next year, between the three councils, was less than £3 million, and the actual sum for Hammersmith and Fulham council was £500,000. That is the big new idea. [Interruption.] I hear the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) making a sedentary comment. She represents my previous seat, and I always give her credence. She is absolutely right that £500,000 of genuine saving of back-office cost is well worth having, but it is not £27 million, £10 million or £100 million.
That sum is worth having, save for the fact that what those merger proposals envisage is not what hon. Members would like to hear—which is that the savings would come from economies of scale, procurement, and other such administrative matters. We would all support that, but instead the proposals are about creating a new entity that is not Hammersmith and Fulham, not Kensington and Chelsea, and not Westminster. It will be entirely unaccountable to the citizens of any of those boroughs, and it absolutely flies in the face of devolution and localism. No proper risk assessment has been done of the proposal, and £20 million of the notional £35 million will come from cuts in social services. I hate to think about the number of baby Ps that there will be, and the number of elderly people who will be put at risk as a result of these crazy, ill-thought-out and half-baked proposals.
There is no accountability in the arrangement. Two of the authorities have traditionally been Conservative and one has traditionally been Labour. The clear intention is to bind the hands of that authority, so that when it returns to Labour control, as it will doubtless do in three years’ time, it will no longer have jurisdiction over its own spending, because that will be centred in a holding company over which none of the individual councillors has control. Is that really the future of localism in this country? That is the brave new world that the Secretary of State’s favourite council has in store for us.
Mr Slaughter
The Secretary of State may shake his head, but he is very welcome to intervene. He has called the council the apple of his eye, but it is a rotten apple of his misty eye. He needs to have a closer look and clear his vision a little.
The next time people hear about Hammersmith and Fulham council they should think not about the white heat of efficient local government, but about those Sure Start buildings that now stand empty, and the community buildings being sold to property developers or used for pet Government schemes such as Toby Young’s free school. They should think, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley has said, about the old mate of the chief executive being paid a total of £700,000 over three years to manage an arm’s length management organisation at the council. They should think of the six chief officers who are paid more than £150,000 a year and the £250,000 they wasted because they could not be bothered to turn off the lights at the town hall for five years.
That is the reality of Tory local government. They do not care when they waste money, and they take pride in cutting services such as the nine Sure Start centres. The second meeting I went to this afternoon was with the heads of those Sure Start organisations, who met here to campaign to keep open one of the Labour Government’s great achievements. The Conservatives say they are committed to Sure Start, but the reality of Tory local government on the ground means that those services will be shut down before we can draw breath.