Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Budget proposals cut care homes and day centres
Some of the most vulnerable people in Haringey will be hit hardest of all over the next three years in a raft of cuts as the council is forced to hack another £70million from its budget.
The Journal has the list. Some of it:
Top of the list - close up to three day care centres for people with severe learning difficulties, while Linden House residential home in South Tottenham is also slated for closure.
- streamlining youth services to focus on health and training over leisure opportunities;
- closing Tottenham’s recycling centre, one of only two in the borough;
- closing Wolves Lane Nursery;
- cutting £500,000 funding per year from Alexandra Palace;
- offloading Bruce Castle Museum in Tottenham to a charitable trust;
- stopping the partial funding of Highgate’s Jacksons Lane theatre;
- withdrawing from managing Crouch End’s Haslemere respite centre for children and their carers;
- cleaning the streets less often and according to need;
- hiring out public parks for events more often;
- increasing parking charges;
- cracking down on traffic offences;
- overhauling the parks service to make it more efficient;
- increasing social housing rents (by £2.36 to an average £105.49 per week);
- offering more people housing outside of Haringey;
- withdrawing free advisory services;
- reducing consultation with residents on planning applications;
- creating a “single front door” online for all customer services and transferring as much online as possible.
This is the hardest hit, personified.
Does anyone else think that freezing Council Tax is not necessarily part of the answer?
Tags for Forum Posts: budget, cuts, hardest hit, wolves lane horticultural centre
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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"Does anyone else think that freezing Council Tax is not necessarily part of the answer?"
Call the referendum - let's see if people will pay for decent public services and local government.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Something just under 2% (the top limit) increase would surely be better than some of these cuts. That would be about £17 a year to me. Those on low incomes get most back in CT benefit. Why are they so resistant to doing this? They want to be popular? They have 4 1/3 years still in power.
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Permalink Reply by Finsbury Park Ranger on
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Ally pally should be paying for itself by now, if they hadn't spent years trying to kill it off and instead worked to get the theatre open many many moons ago etc it might be comerricially thriving by now. The problem with ally pally was always the lack of atmosphere internally and that theatre was always it's one chance to address that problem. Especially given the links to TV and the BBC with potential for it to be televised for big events and draw the crowds using the most powerful medium available at the time.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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FPR in the past, there's been many millions of pounds wasted at Ally Pally – by an inattentive Trustee: the Council.
Despite its size and complexity, it's suffered – and continues to suffer – from a poor, ill-suited governance regime. This has actually been recognized, formally, in the past, but any lessons learnt do do stay learnt for long. Management has long treated the Trust Board as a rubber stamp and there are signs that this continues.
Currently, management has submitted an enormous and complicated Planning Application for approval. The bulk of it is fine but some parts are seriously flawed (it is not made clear, management intends to demolish part of the 1936 BBC television studios – AKA the birthplace of television. This is in order to make it look neater and the exterior more symmetrical).
If they don't get this completely right, yet more time and money will be wasted – and there has been prodigious waste in the past.
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The home of TV bit is the USP and will be forever more I would imagine which gives ally pally a unique chance for a global reach, I really hope they don't cock that bit up.
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Permalink Reply by DavidJ on
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I agree - but we also have to recognise that such an increase would do almost nothing to dent the massive cuts that have been imposed on local authorities.
The coalition have quietly brought in a sea change in the structure of our state. We really need to get our heads around the scale of these cuts. Arguing with local politicians who are left to deal with this is missing the point:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/19/councils-risk-financ...
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Yes, austerity is working perfectly. Just as they intended, they have decimated the welfare state, and shifted huge amounts of wealth to the rich. And now we have a smaller welfare provision than before the war. Win, to the big guys.
I wouldn't want Cllr Kober's job for £400k a year.
But - freezing the one tax they have power over, for four (?) years running, means they have lost 8% possible CT income (yes I know many dont pay any). Is this like unpopular kids handing out sweets in the playground?
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The coalition have quietly brought in a sea change in the structure of our state.
The previous government quietly neglected banking regulation and in October 2008 it culminated in a Tsunami called the Financial Crisis, leading to a bail-out of banks and their restructuring, and to a state of enormous government borrowing.
Banking regulation has improved only a little but at least the deficit is reducing. Even in the current low interest rate climate, the government is still spending tens of billions on interest payments. Even the less financially literate might work out that this indicates the colossal scale of borrowing.
Unfortunately, this horrible state of affairs will continue under whoever forms the next government.
And yet many continue to believe the problems only began with the current government ... and – even more delusionary – that the election of a different government will somehow solve these problems.
Meanwhile, local councils have some choices as to how to make cuts. That these can be implemented in party politically expedient ways, can be seen by a close reading of the Supreme Court judgment against Haringey Council and the way they scripted the "Consultation" over Council Tax Benefit reduction.
It was despicable, though the Supreme Court did not go that far.
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The argument that somehow the global banking crisis was the fault of the last government is clearly ludicrous and yet is to be heard by Tories and Lid-Dems alike as this coalition use this as an excuse to break up the welfare state, destroy local government and privatize the NHS.
There are choices to be made, and the coalition have chosen this route and have picked on the poor.
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David British banks are global players, indeed RBS was then one of the biggest banks on the globe, if not the biggest.
And London is perhaps the biggest metropolis on the globe for banks; it is said that there are more German banks represented in London than in Berlin.
It's plausible that little innocent Britain was swept away by events beyond its control. Except it's not true.
Banking regulation in Britain is a function of the British government. It's interesting that Canada was relatively much less affected by the "global" crisis. Ditto Australasia.
UK banking regulation was feeble (if it'll make you feel better, IMO, it would probably have been even more feeble under the Conservatives).
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Incidentally, as a local Councillor, I will be arguing against the proposed cuts to day care homes: there are other things within Council purview that should be cut long before such a move is even contemplated.
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"UK banking regulation was feeble (if it'll make you feel better, IMO, it would probably have been even more feeble under the Conservatives)."
Indeed, and we now know how lib-dems actually behave in government - just like Tories.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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No sensible person would claim that the global banking crisis was the fault of the Labour government. Where it WAS at fault was in running down the country's reserves, spending like a drunken sailor and borrowing to the hilt to finance its unsustainable populist schemes. When the Lehman Brothers failure in 2008 triggered the international banking meltdown, we had nothing to fall back on to mitigate the effects.
You would have thought that Gordon Brown, as a son of the manse, would have heard of Pharaoh and the seven fat years followed by seven lean years and would have kept our barns full.
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