Council promise full employment*

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Permalink Reply by alex on January 25, 2015 at 22:21

Here are a few of the options open to those Councillors:

How about saving £5M a year by not hiring consultants on rates of up to £850 a day - over 3 years that's £15M of the £70M total.

(Follow the links on item 7 here )
and while you are on the page ponder why it is that senior management pay and rewards have to be kept secret from the residents who are paying for them (items 10 & 11) . Introducing a cap on highly paid staff would save more on top of the consultants fees.

and have a look here too if you are interested on how much is being squandered:
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_about_mr_chas_ak...
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/number_of_consultants_and_their
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/223964/response/559454/attach/3/Haringey%20FOI%20Response.html
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/conflict_of_interest_nick_walkle
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/lbh_staff_numbers_and_pay

Then reduce spending on capital projects: £86M planned, some of which could be cancelled altogether, some could wait for better times:
£2M on emptying Technopark for the benefit of Harris Academy
£14 million on helping Spurs and other developers make profits in Tottenham (rather than receiving S106 money from them)
£3M on fitting Customer Services into Marcus Garvey Library - which no-one wants anyway
£6.8M on Alexandra Palace
£9M on Business Infrastructure programme
£4M on new Customer Services platform
£9M on Bruce Castle restoration

Some of these are a total waste of money, or should be paid for by the companies which will benefit.  Others are no doubt worth doing, but should they really be a higher priority at this time than keeping care homes and day centres open? 

Then you could save the cost of making all the staff redundant - it comes out of a different pot, but we still have to pay - around £17M since the last round of cuts in 2011, so we can expect a substantial figure for the next 3 years. 

A large proportion of Council staff live in Haringey so it makes no sense to cut their jobs providing useful services, just so that money can be re-directed into another pot to create jobs in the private sector (which are more likely to be low paid, insecure / maybe zero hours contracts.)

Meanwhile Council documents talk about making residents 'more resilient' i.e. they want us to volunteer to cover cut services for nothing, but aren't leading the way by ending Councillor's allowances and taking those roles on as volunteers (as councillors used to be).  That would save another £2-3M over 3 years.  Many of them are paid roughly double what the lowest paid staff get.

This Tory / Libdem government is totally sick inflicting cuts and punitive benefits sanctions on the poorest in society so as to divert money to the already wealthy, but this Labour Council is taking exactly the same approach.  Rather than making choices which protect services for the most vulnerable in society they choose to give money to developers, overpaid consultants etc.  We really shouldn't have the wool pulled over our eyes about the intent of those who are currently in power and the need for change.

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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on January 24, 2015 at 22:57

Ummm.... anyone with low job prospects will be pushed out by young graduates hungry for a place to put their heads down at night after working their arses off in the city or partying like it's 1999 in Harringay.

The 50 new businesses will replace older businesses. The 1,235 jobs is just a typo, it's 1,234. The 1,000 businesses benefitting from super fast broadband could easily be left out as it's not really the council's responsibility.

I'm beginning to think that mechanisation and automation mean that only 50% of us should be "working". I appreciate that Audis would not be so cheap if they were not made by robots (or so reliable) but why did all the savings from replacing people with robots just go back to manufacturers to make cars cheaper?

What businesses can we bring back to Haringey that it doesn't already have and will survive in these tumultuous times? Manufacturing? Really? More breweries owned by the sons of wealthy rocks stars more like.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on January 25, 2015 at 12:30

Zena and Alan

In a few weeks time I will have worked I local government for 36 years. I've been employed in libraries, social care, mental health services, planning and environment. In the 1980's I sat with the rest of my team every Friday while we argued which 5 or 6 of the hundreds of housing repairs we'd had reported would get done as we had so little money because the council refused to set a legal rate. I can honestly say I have never experienced such a financial crisis in local government in all of those 36 years as the one we are going through now.
You both know that council tax is a tiny proportion of the money a local authority has to spend. Certainly an increase will stop some cuts happening - for one year- but not the great bulk of the others.
I suppose the question is how to deal with this. Do nothing as John suggests and get to the point where wages can't be paid and the redundancy notices go out in the post (remember Liverpool City Council), save the odd bit of service here and there while the others just slide away or confront the fact that you have millions of pound less to spend and decide what the hell you can do.

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Permalink Reply by Zena Brabazon on January 25, 2015 at 16:20

Hi Michael 

For the first ten years i worked in local government it was cuts, cuts, cuts which I had to propose and implement as a head of service. With some imagination, extensive staff involvement, consultation and and quite a lot of risk taking  we kept 90% of the services open and finally even expanded as we made successful bids for external funding. So I absolutely appreciate what you say. However, given there is an election in three months making decisions which could be irreversible seem to me to be the worst approach. Not only will it destabilise services, but announcing, for example, that social workers workers will be cut, will hardly attract people to come and as you know, having stability and staff who know the borough is vital particularly in such sensitive services. 

At this point being cautious and just setting a legal budget for 2015/16 seems sensible. That isn't doing nothing -its hedging your bets. As I understand it, that is what Islington is doing. We don't know how this elections will turn out, and there is always time to bring in the cuts. But if they are decided now going into reverse might prove difficult if services are closed and staff disperse.

What we surely don't want is a virtual council where everything is run by an external partner who in practice is hard to reach and unaccountable. Barnet is going down that route, and I hear Northampton are planning much the same.  This isn't just austerity; this is an ideology which is about breaking up the local state and public services as we know them.  

Zena

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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on January 25, 2015 at 16:47

I think the difference in the way we think Zena is that I do not imagine that any incoming government is going to make chages to funding that comes even close to undoing what has happened over the last few years and what is planned to happen over the next three. My real fear is that if local authorities don't have a plan in place to deal with the reduced amount money they will have to spend, the cuts will be far worse that what is predicted now, as they scramble to get their spending within budget. Sorry to labour the point but that is precisely what happened in Liverpool.

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Permalink Reply by John D on January 25, 2015 at 19:53

But surely,  Zena , what we don't want is a real council where everything is run by an internal cabal which is hard to reach and unaccountable ? Isn't that what we have now ?

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Permalink Reply by Zena Brabazon on January 26, 2015 at 9:31

Hi John

Touché!

I agree - we need a real council which is accountable, transparent, open to debate and not frightened of challenge from either colleagues or the public.

Zena

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Permalink Reply by JJ B on January 30, 2015 at 17:46

What will happen to ALL THOSE LOCAKL BUSINESSESS AND JOBS that will be displaced/destriyed by the plans to radically redevelop the area west of the HIgh road and north of White Hart Lane. They are all under threat. The local wood yard - accessible by bus that has loads of patterns for decorative wood features from many local houses is under threat. It has vast, productive and active workshop spaces behind it's modest High rd frontage. We do not need to clone high street and the shops we can find in Westfield. If I want t shop on Oxford St I can get there in 10 on the Tube. I need shops that serve my needs not Sports Direct!

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