Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Cuts, cuts and more cuts to the services we rely on. But not to spin
Buried on this page are the planned Council 'savings' for the next 3 years, which involve axing around a quarter of council jobs - mainly those of frontline staff, especially in adults and childrens services.
To be discussed or not (if anyone has time to read through and assess the detail of what is planned) at the Cabinet meeting Tuesday, 16th December, 2014 6.30 pm (Item 7.)
But apparently no cuts to the spin we will be subjected to, as there are currently adverts for these newly created jobs in the propaganda sector:
Consultation Co-ordinator £40k p.a.
Three x Policy & Equalities Officer 40k p.a. for the new 'Policy & Strategy team'
and a new Strategy Officer 40k p.a. for the new Policy & Strategy team
There's well over £200k that could be saved in one easy move.
P.S. to be clear I'm in favour of consultation, communication and equalities, but if you look at what the roles involve you have to ask why these new highly paid posts are being created at a time when so many vital services face the axe. Wrong priorities.
Tags for Forum Posts: Council, budget, cuts, jobs, savings, services
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by matthew cuthbert on
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Many council officer's & frontline worker's job security have been undermined by 'restructuring,'
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Permalink Reply by Protheroe O'Shea on
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As a front line council worker I can safely say we are all f*****. Please please please don't vote Tory at the next general election.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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It's people who voted Labour three elections ago who put your jobs at risk.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Yes. Were I a gambler, I'd bet on that too. I'm not normally a fan of the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, but he was right when he described the like of Haringey People as 'propaganda-on-the-rates'. HP is part of the Council's big Communications Department.
Not all parts of total Council expenditure are being offered up for discussion as 'cuts'.
In some senses, the more the cuts, the more the need to subject them to spin.
As for the new post of Consultation Co-ordinator, this (new?) spending may reflect the recent Supreme Court judgement against the council about an unfair and unlawful consultation a couple of years ago. One of the Supreme Court judges suggested the motivation for the format of that consultation was political.
I would prefer to see fewer, but better consultations that incorporate the (long established-) four principles of lawful consultations, together with the recent Supreme Court judgement. Amongst other things, that judgement established that Consultations need to set out alternatives (and not solely about the Council's preferred option).
Too many Council Consultations are empty, worthless and a waste of money.
Clive Carter
Councillor (Highgate)
Liberal Democrat Party
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Yes, Alex, it's dishonest if the Council dresses-up cuts to essential services, labelling them savings in document after document. And it's also grossly unhelpful to a Council which is at least nominally Labour. Because:
- It pretends the good ship Haringey is being competently and safely steered through terrible storms without damage. When it ain't.
- It does the Government's dirty work for them by colluding with their fiction that this is all about combating waste and inefficiency.
Okay, so what can people do? If our council as a body won't tell residents the unvarnished truth, then it's surely time for those in the know to find ways of letting the truth come out.
How do we arrange for insiders who know what's going on to bring the hard factual information about the doings of Koberville into the sunshine and fresh air? Without damaging their own jobs and careers.
Harileaks?
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Permalink Reply by alex on
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Sounds like a good idea - who has the technical knowledge?
My worry, although I haven't had time to look through all the paperwork, is that while cutting services they still appear to be recruiting a lot of higher paid staff and consultants - see here "average length of a contract for a consultant is six months.... All of the council’s current consultants are on a day rate in excess of £150 per day (up to £800pd)" and here where they don't even seem to be sure how much they are paying - the list of consultants as at 1st August 2014 includes
"Permit & Concessionary Officer £5540.93 Daily,
Permit & Concessionary Officer £4701.41 Daily
Public Health Commissioner £1640.00 Daily"So question is the Council being run as a recruitment agency for the mates of highly paid people already working for the Council, or is it being run on behalf of residents to provide the services residents need. I doubt the Councillors would necessarily even notice given the volume of paperwork produced by officers for every meeting.
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Alex some of the highest paid posts in the Council are in the big Communications Department (this publishes Haringey People magazine).
The Prime Minister once suggested that the maximum ratio between the lowest paid and the highest should be 20x (even the PM's £142k salary is eclipsed by some at the council).
Unfortunately Councils don't set the best example in this. While the rates of pay for some consultants and temporary staff are surprising, at the same time, day care centres are for the chop.
It is not fair or even moral.
What is the purpose of the Council and who does it serve?
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Alex, who do the consultants and temporary staff serve? Plainly not the rights of trade unionists; nor the principles of a free society with free speech and respect for dissent.
After the headteachers and National Union of Teachers met at ACAS and agreed to settle their differences, many of us hoped the Council's attacks on Julie Davies, NUT branch secretary, would cease. We hoped the momentum generated by the agreement would lead to Julie's suspension being ended. And that she would be free as any other resident to comment on and - if necessary complain about - the council's services, like her uncollected bins last summer.
And also as free as any other citizen and Labour Party member - other then those who are politically restricted - to exercise her political rights to speak out on political matters.
But Julie Davies remains suspended. She is not even free to properly represent her union members. An absurdity which risks squandering the momentum towards a win-win outcome generated by the ACAS meeting.
This week Cllr Claire Kober, interviewed by Aime Williams for the Tottenham Independent newspaper, admitted she was "concerned about the effect of the cuts on vulnerable people". (A further £70 million.)
'In lots of ways", she said, "councils are social care organisations, we support people who are facing challenges who perhaps have difficulties to contend with in their lives and therefore in cutting budgets in councils you remove services and resources from people who really need them.'
I completely agree. And I also recognise that it is the Government not councillors, who are imposing the new wave of brutal cuts.
But this makes it even more inexplicable that our Council leadership chooses to pursue the flimsy case against Julie. And in doing so chooses to waste some of the very limited cash it does have on investigators and lawyers.
(Declaration of Interest. Julie and David Davies are personal friends of me and my wife Zena.)
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Yet more council bashing, political bandwagon-jumping and disinformation about the Council. I am ready to believe there is both corruption and incompetence in LBH but making bald assertions here are not helping - it looks from the comments that people want to promote this idea - this is shooting ourselves in the foot - it's us we're talking about here. Our council. We have responsibilities too.
No wonder our local politicians steer clear of HoL in numbers -they'd never convince those posting here, whatever they said, so why bother?
I keep seeing this 'let's hate on the Council'-type posts. What can we actually do about it? There is no way LBH can prevent the imposition of this £70m round of coalition cuts, or all the previous and future ones, is there?
The majority of the voters have consistently elected the ruling Labour party for decades now and earlier this year in the May Elections came down heavily on the only remaining opposition. Anyone see that changing in the next four years (next election 2018)?
The examination and audit of council activities is as fierce and detailed as it's ever been. Almost all of what LBH does is carried out by it's 3800 employees under a Chief Exec and Board of Directors - so if there is widespread corruption and incompetence, it must be found here. So people here feel that both the internal and external scrutiny is ineffective?
In an organisation of this size, how many 'consultants' would you allow them to take on and at what rates? How could it be policed? By the Council Leader sending a memo to the Chief Exec saying 'don't hire expensive consultants'? I don't think so - the Chief Exec would surely reply - 'I am allowed to run things any way I want, that's why I get paid the big bucks, so buzz off.'
Councils are more open than ever - they have to publish huge amounts of info and must fulfill any reasonable request for info from anyone. So, if you can help by making a positive change rather than just name-calling, you'll lower our council tax from the savings but please, let's make progress away from hammering LBH on principle - we're better than that.
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As far as I can see, Chris, no one in this thread is: "hammering LBH on principle". And the only person who mentioned "corruption " (twice) was you.
You make the perfectly sound point that: "There is no way LBH can prevent the imposition of this £70m round of coalition cuts..." But you go on to ignore examples where Haringey "leaders" have arguably chosen to spend money unwisely. (On PR for example.) And in other cases with utter stupidity. The pointless and wasteful victimisation of Julie Davies is an obvious example of the latter. The bill for lawyers and investigators is still mounting steadily.
Your say that "Councils are more open than ever". Well, ours isn't.
Don't believe me? Well, go and have a chat with someone from the residents' association on Hillcrest Council Estate in Highgate as reported in the Broadway Ham&High. As far as I know they aren't "let's hate the Council -types". Nor are they closed-minded anti-Labour activists. Simply Haringey residents who were concerned because the Council is considering developing on their Estate. (As it is entitled to, of course.) But what really made some of them angry was discovering that the Council was not taking them fully into its confidence and telling them about secret plans and reports about their estate. Which our "more open than ever" Council didn't do until Freedom of Information Act questions forced them to.
Chris, the eyes of Cllr Claire Kober are nothing like the sun. However much you love to hear her speak, you know deep down that candid speech hath a far more pleasing sound.
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Alan, we are probably misunderstanding each other - maybe I'm not very good at expressing what I mean, maybe I'm not reading what you write correctly.
The issue for me is that you can present the facts in several ways, it's your choice. Those who have already decided what is true present those facts to reinforce their prejudice. That's what I think you do.
You seem to have already decided that the Council is odious, so you make a lot of posts almost gleefully haranguing them - what you might call 'holding them to account' I suppose and 'shining a light' on bad behaviour wherever you find it.
Sometimes it's in response to Clive - a sitting Councillor (representing all the electors in his ward, not just those who share his 'oppositional' stance') who surely ought to know better. That provokes a few posts of the 'yeah, they're even worse than that' kind, often by people who do not use their real names on this site. I reckon you do this at least once a week but I don't really know as I only see some of them, usually by chance.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that after you decided not to stand for re-election this year, these sort of 'I told you so' posts have increased in frequency and become more scathing. Your behaviour whilst sitting as a councillor may have been consistent with this level of criticism, I don't know - you had the whip removed, didn't you, because you wouldn't agree to being whipped? You stood up for your point of view against the other Labour members in the majority party, didn't you? I think the way it works is that you either have to agree to supporting the majority in a party of local councillors or you get ostracised, don't you?
You chose your own principles over that of the 40 or so other councillors in your party, so they excluded you, didn't they? That takes guts and I admire you for it - I'm like that, although I've never been in the position to have my mettle tested.
Forgive me if I got this bit wrong, I don't know the truth and have never taken the trouble to ask anyone who might know, I'm getting this from your posts here on HoL and may have got completely the wrong end of the stick - I've no idea what it's like to be a councillor, nor the reality of local politics.
The reason I mention all this is you come across as an ex-Labour councillor who really, really doesn't like the existing or past Labour Councillors, particularly the senior ones like the leader of the council and the cabinet.
You particularly seem not to like anything they claim to be a success. You seem to want to pull them off their perch. You comb through the detail of, presumably, many of their announcements and, if you find inconsistency or contradiction, highlight it here. You often make Freedom of Information requests, aimed at exposing faults in their actions.
This, in a way, is how we should all behave I suppose. Concerned, informed citizens who watch over our council like hawks and bleat when they try to pull the wool over our eyes. I salute you and urge you to redouble your efforts. As Clive has done, you can, by your hard work, expose important ways in which the Council have done the wrong thing and bring them to book. We owe you a debt for doing that.
It's when you start calling them Tories and mangling surnames to catcall that I think, hang on a minute, is the rest of this guy's stuff like this? Generic slurs do your case no good. I am a critic of the council yet, because I criticise you, you write:
However much you love to hear her speak
I've only ever heard her speak once I think - can't remember, maybe at the Crouch End Festival years ago? You;re plain wrong then so how much else is as wide of the mark?
You might see her as a key figure but I challenge anyone here to name a single 'Kober' policy - I can't. One thing implicit in women's struggle for equality is a more collaborative way of working and I hope that, because she is a woman in what was been for decades a male-dominated world, she is bringing a long overdue, more consensual, inclusive approach. No idea though - how can I tell? Maybe because there's no such thing as 'Kober-ism'?
Implicit in almost every criticism you make is the shining presence of the perfect council - the one with no political agenda, the one that never wastes money, never makes mistakes, is never incompetent, is 'joined-up' and in perfect harmony with all the electors etc.
Given that you can't please all the people all the time, I hope you accept that the Council model you should compare Haringey to is not that of a non-existent 'perfect' body. It is the other councils. Even then, it's difficult to put criticism in, for instance, a London-wide context when we are regarded as a non-inner borough and the one next door is an inner London borough with a larger allowance etc.
So, if they do better than us because they have more money to spend on, say, educating our kids, can we fairly claim we are rubbish at it?
You write, for instance, that I:
>>ignore examples where Haringey "leaders" have arguably chosen to spend money unwisely. (On PR for example.)
I don't ignore or gloss over the many failures - they make me annoyed. My message for years has been, we're doing it wrong. Don't get me started on the tech (I've spent a lot of my life in IT) - the opportunities are legion and they are just not taking them. Internally I bet it's a complete mess of systems that don't talk to each other etc etc. They could do so much more.
Haven't bothered to try to find out the truth because this forum shows me that it's probably impossible. Even a simple diagram of the kit they use is not obtainable it seems. Which major software packages do they use, for what? Nobody seems to know. Nevertheless you develop an instinct and my instincts tell me they're not very good at this - I suspect it's the Chief Exec's fault. He knows he can save money using open-source software so, as he is the chief cuts administrator, why isn't he cutting the income that software companies like Microsoft are getting out of us?
The problem is, who am I to spout about how wrong they are? Why should they listen to me when they think they are all trying to improve things as a group and know that I do not know or understand the detailed reality they face every day. I read of a council in the South West that had invested decades of their expertise in Microsoft Word 'macros' to automate a huge range of their processes. How can they untangle all that to get rid of Microsoft Word? It would take years and cost a fortune and risked breaking the service delivery.
What do I expect, that they should abandon what they are doing, rip up their plans and come and sit at my feet writing down my every utterance of someone who has only ever seen one or two tiny pieces of the jigsaw?
What have I got? Opinions. I can argue my case but what credibility do I actually have? Where are my supporters? Where is my track record of success in Local Government - where is the proof that my way the 'right' way?
What would you do if you were them? You'd listen in case the guy had something valuable to say, then try to get rid of him, particularly if he had form as a moaner. What would have been gained?
Ultimately, we have to trust them - trust that they are doing the best they can. Trust that they are people of integrity, worthy of respect. Maintain scrutiny systems and use them.
I once lived somewhere where more than half the residents worked for the government - that's the sort of society I want to see. I heard on the radio of some great new stem-cell treatments that were likely to be delayed by the private sector only bothering where there were huge profits. This revolutionary way of healing people is a technique that, left to the profit motive, may never see the light of day. So the NHS plans to build a factory to make the drugs, cutting them out of the deal until the drug is established - the NHS knows that this is the future of medicine and doesn't put profits above saving lives. That's how we can help people into real jobs. In the private sector the shareholders get the gold mine and the workers get the shaft.
It's in their interests to position Public sector as one of the most depressing jobs. Years of mistreatment by a government that hates them ideologically, 'nudging' a public who's anger has been cynically funnelled onto frontline staff. Who'd be a social worker or bedroom tax officer in Haringey?
Yet people step forward. I cannot believe that they are money-grubbing scavengers only in it for what they can steal. Or that the bosses are all incompetent, wasting money hand over fist. Or that Councillors are pouring money down the drain on purpose out of spite, or to punish political opponents or because they are given a free hand to do whatever they like with a big budget.
My suspicion is that the Council is run by the Officers not the Councillors - that the elected members are practically powerless. If I was an officer, I'd know I had decades to build a system that disempowered Councillors if necessary, and I'd build it. I'd see myself as a custodian of the borough, for the good of the people and make sure I had the power, if needed, to prevent some crazy councillor leading us down the wrong path. I think that's exactly how central government sees local government too, and they have real power. So they have created a system where local Councils can do hardly anything independent of Central government - that's why the scrutiny is so intense. This certainly adds flavour to the call for local Councils to get more power now that we nearly lost Scotland.
>>Your say that "Councils are more open than ever". Well, ours isn't.
This is what I mean about you, Alan - here's a bald statement you make sound factual when in fact it's a matter of pure opinion. The only meaningful measures we can apply are statutory ones, everything else is arguable. If they are doing what they are obliged to do as regards openness (which they are) then they're as open as they need to be, as open as we collectively through parliament have decreed they must be.
That's a lot more open than before. They publish a huge amount on their website - that's both more open and more accessible than they've ever been. You're probably old enough to remember when there was no register of member's interests, when it was not even a part of a Council meeting to declare whether you had any conflict of interest before joining it. That's more open then they ever were before.
They have not withdrawn a right to information they previously granted - the opposite is true. Central government forced all councils to publish every spend over £500 - that's more open then they ever were before. Residents can not only sit in at a wider range of meetings than ever before, but they have the right to record meetings and re-publish them. The Council videos their main meetings (unlike, say, Islington) so we can all become armchair scrutineers. They are required to publish huge amounts of info to government which is made public whereas previously it was not. They are about to be obliged to publish huge amounts of 'open data' about Haringey that councils previous held secret.
You ignore almost all of the things the Council do well Alan - you often dump on education for instance but Haringey's claims are true - kids here are getting a much, much better education than they used to and they have turned it around from being much better outside London to much better here.
What I'm saying is, by all means continue to be the knight in shining armour exposing the real truth behind the Council's every move (if you can back it up with facts)
Put it in proper context and try to be as equally active in endorsing and promoting what they do well and much as what they don't do well. Get something good going.
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