Closed meeting of council committee, membership unknown, to decide tomorrow, alone, on service cuts to the vulnerable

(Update 19th May – see new statement in Comments) Tomorrow, 19th May 2011, the Budget Working Group of Argyll and Bute Council whose anonymous membership is made up of elected members and officers, will meet in closed session to decide on damaging cuts to social care services supporting vulnerable people in the community.

They will do so without referring their decisions to the full council for ratification. They say that the Budget Meeting in February gave them the right to act in this way.

The Equalities Impact Assessment they have issued only a week ago, in support what they propose to do is arguably not compliant with the law in ways very familiar to those currently fighting to protect their local schools from closure.

Funnily enough, the department responsible is also run by one, Cleland Sneddon, Executive Director for Community Services.

The services to be cut

The Budget Working Group tomorrow plans to cut social care services altogether for vulnerable people in community whose needs fall int0 categories 3 and 4 of a 4 category classification of urgency.

The necessary services will continue to be provided only to the two most urgently needy categories – a strategy which, by the precedent of a recent Judicial Review decision in the high court, against Birmingham City Council (noted below), is of questionable legality.

Cutting the services to the needs of the vulnerable in Categories 3 and 4 means the ending of the funding to Neigbourhood Networks, a organisation providing what is called ‘preventative’ services to vulnerable folk in the community.

What the Neighbourhood Networks services prevent is increasing isolation through the loss of social interaction with neighbours and engagement with the community;  and the collapse of personal competencies and self reliance through ignorance and fear of process.

These are the things that underpin the capability – or not – of vulnerable people to exist relatively independently in their communities.

Some of us can manage this sort of thing for ourselves, to a greater or lesser degree according to circumstances. Others cannot deal easily or at all with the world outside themselves. Filling in forms is a Kafkaesque nightmare for the strongest of us.

Managing the efficient routines of daily living, being aware of the passage of time, keeping appointments, being involved in community initiatives – the vulnerable canot quite do these things directly, Many need an interface that explains or guides or assists.

Neighbuorhood Networks was that interface – for those vulnerable people whose needs are classed as category 3 or 4 -  less urgent.

Argyll and Bute – or Argyll and Brute?

We can’t claim credit for the epithet above. It has come from a person on the phone distressed about this issue.

We are looking at a situation, as with the school closures crisis, where Argyll is plagued with a council lacking social responsibility and lacking humanity, in addition to lacking competence and probity.

The Scottish Government’s strategy for supporting vulnerable people in the community centres on the preventative, on the avoidance of a crisis that would propel need from category 4 to category 1.

Almost all Scottish local authorities are currently making more rather than less use of Neighbourhood Networks in the midst of today’s and tomorrow’s  financial cutbacks. They know that the most vulnerable will be the most disadvantaged and are ensuring that the added protection they will need in bad times is there.

Not Argyll and Bute. It is carrying on spending money on consultants both to act as scapegoats and to disguise inadequate internal capability.

At the same time it is cutting away the vital interface between the vulnerable and the communities in which they live and with which they must negotiate.

Neighbourhood Networks’ contract expires on 20th May 2011. The organisation will therefore lose its funding the day after the faceless Budget Working Group makes its undemocratic decisions tomorrow – although they will have to be given a three month notice period.

In an incompetent and arguably legally unable Equalities Impact Assessment (EIA) issued only a week ago, the council says that under the priority of need framework it would access ‘…preventative support through local community resources in place of direct social work resources’.

Council officers have been unable to tell Neighbourhood Networks what is meant by ‘local community resources’.

The new Equalities Impact Assessment (EIA)

This is said to be an EIA in name only and is largely a very poor attempt to justify restricting funding social care services only to the needs of those priorities 1 and 2 needs.

The consultation process it describes as having undertaken amounts in a many cases to little more than in-house discussion amongst professionals.

Council officers have been unable to identify anyone  – neither professional nor service users -  being asked at any stage involved – to consider the specific question of what the impact of the withdrawal of funding for Neighbourhood Networks might be.

Consultation and communication

Neighbourhood Networks were not consulted in the process that has brought this issue to the stage it is now at. Neither were many, if any of the vulnerable people who are to lose their interface services.  They are on the record as apprehensive of what lies in front of them.

The failure of the council to consult directly with the local men and women who currently use the services of Neighbourhood Networks, is in breach of Equalities and Disability Discrimination Legislation.

On 2nd February 2011, Neighbourhood Networks received a letter from Cleland Sneddon on budgetary constraints.  This letter stated that ‘as soon as any decision has been made by the Council, a member of my staff along with the Procurement and Commissioning Team will be in touch in order to ensure that we work together in partnership, to minimise the impact of current financial constraints and optimise service delivery to Service Users’.

Another example of the disease of language that betrays the essential nature of this officer now on his 7th local authority.

Moreover the promised contact has not happened.  Neighbourhood Networks were told on 16th May – this Monday past – of what decisions are to be taken tomorrow on 19th May. They were told that this was it. that this was it – more than three months after the Sneddon letter, and at the eleventh hour.

In a familiar compound abuse, Neighbourhood Networks was asked to work jointly with the Council in implementing this decision = effectively to arrange the funeral for their own service with those to be most affected by its loss.

They were also asked to wait until after tomorrow before advising their members of the decision (on the grounds that the recommendation might not be approved by the Budget Working Group and people would thus be needlessly upset.)

Neighbourhood Networks indicated that it could not agree to do this and would have to try to influence the outcome of the meeting.

The outcome is that they have organized joint meetings with the Council tomorrow (19th May 2011 – in Oban at 4.00 pm and in Lochgilphead at 7.00 pm – where members will be advised of the decision.

They have made it clear to officers that although these are joint meetings, they are not communicating a joint decision, or a shared message.

Judicial Review and the precedent of Birmingham City Council

Neighbourhood Networks is now seeking a judicial review on behalf of the men and women who use its services , in keeping with the recent judicial review relating to the actions of Birmingham City Council .

In this action on a very similar case of cutting social care services, the high court ruled that the cuts proposed were unlawful.

This means that Birmingham City Council cannot carry on with assessing individual needs until Mr Justice Walker delivers his full judgment next month. It is likely to have to conduct fresh consultation on equalities issues before reaching a new decision on the future of social care – a process that could take several months.

The Judicial Review that Neighbourhood Networks will have to pursue will propel Argyll and Bute Council into the same fundamental legal challenge of failure to comply with the governing legislation that the school closure campaigner, Alasdair Stirling from Toward, has issued to them.

Is anyone keeping a tally of the sheer cost of failure incurred in so many areas by Argyll and Bute Council?

How can this performance be said to evince prudent stewardship of public funds or the exercise of proper responsibility for Argyll and for the most vulerable of its residents.

And has anyone consulted the communities and neighbourhoods in which the abandoned vulnerable live?

Are these, in fact, the ‘local community resources’  the council is saying it will access as a replacement for the support provided by Neighbourhood Networks?

Is ‘preventative support’ to be managed without support and on an ad hoc basis by neighbours who simply discover that someone living near to them is in crisis?

Housing support and the Supporting People grants

Who has forgotten the Supporting People grants reintroduced by COSLA and seriously disadvantaging Argyll and Bute Council? This happened  through its own negligent management of the council’s annual revenue grant negotiations for 2011-12. These grants are now part of this issue.

The grants, effectively discontinued in 2007 within the concordat that underpinned the council tax freeze, were eccentrically reintroduced this year at the request of COSLA.

Their former ring fencing, removed in 2007, was not reintroduced. Neither was the flooring mechanism protecting councils that night suffer a catastrophic loss of revenue funding in the calculation of their entitlements under these grants.

Argyll and Bute suffered just such a catastrophic loss of funding, was left by the perpetrator, COSLA, to swing in the wind. The Scottish Government took pity on the council, with a one-off subsidy, after a cap-in-hand begging session between Council Leader Dick Walsh and newly promoted Deputy Leader, Ellen Morton and Finance Secretary John Swinney. Had it not been for this, the cuts Argyll will suffer would have been exactly twice as deep.

However – and with awful irony – the reintroduction of these grants – and the specific way they were reintroduced – is crushing the very people the grants were designed to support.

Housing support was one of these Supporting People grants. But the reintroduction of the qualifying process for the grants saw Argyll and Bute lose in comparison with what it had previously been given under this heading.

Then the refusal to reintroduce the ring fencing means that the money Argyll and bute Council has been given under the heading of Housing Support does not have to be spent on that service.

We understand that the council has chosen not to spent it in the given way – and that access to its support is being given  – again – only to those whose urgency of need is classed as category 1 and , where the funding is intended to support all vulnerable people with housing support needs.

We would point out that the removal of the imperative to ring fence the Housing Support grant does not absolve the council from the moral obligation to spend the money on those whose needs justified its being given in the first place.

Argyll and Bute MSP and Councillors suporting Neighbourhood Networks

Michael Russell’, Argyll and Bute’s MSP,has asked his Constituency Manager to express his support for Neighbourhood Networks.  He has also said that he will be writing this afternoon to the Council’s Chief Executive expressing his concern about the course of action it is following.

Councillor Dougie Philand of Argyll First, a health professional, has been very exercised by this undemocratically planned and secretive cut, threatening Argyll’s most vulnerable people. He had been actively supportive of Neighbourhood Networks in the emergency situation in which they have found themselves.

Councillor George Freeman, of the Argyll and Bute Independent Councillors Group, emailed Neighbourhood Networks at once, expressing his unhappiness at this process. Councillor Freeman is also one of those au fait with the way the Supporting People grants work, used to work and now work.

Councillor Donald (Skye) Macintosh issued the following media statement: ‘As shadow spokesperson for Social Services, I am very disheartened to find out from the Neighbourhood Networks that there is a meeting on Thursday 19th May of the Budget Working Group and the topic is the immediate closure of the Neighbourhood Network scheme. Having in the past, as Social Services Spokesperson, met with Neighbourhood Networks and did everything possible to ensure the service would continue, yet again cuts seem to be aimed at the most vulnerable in our society, people who cannot defend themselves.  This is a highly important service that has been provided by the 3rd Sector for a number of years and will be sadly lost if we cannot get this situation reversed.  I will continue to lobby my fellow councillors and officers and hope that common sense will prevail.’

SNP Councilors Ron Simon from Cowal, Anne Horn from Tarbert and Donald Macdonald from Oban have also expressed concern and support.

CouncilorJohn McAlpine, also of the Argyll First group, is very supportive of Neighbourhood Networks and attend3d a meeting on the issue on Monday night (16th May 2011).

Express your own concern and support

In the conveniently shallow world of the  box-tickers, if you do not write to the correct source your concern does not have to be registered.

So make it count.

We understand that the correct recipient of communication on this matter is Jackie Connolly, who in the way of this upside down culture, is described as ‘Performance Improvements Officer’.

Anyone wishing to express an opinion of any kind on this situation should contact her:

• by email: jackie.connolly@argyll-bute.gov,uk
• by post: Jackie Connolly, Performance Improvements Officer, Communications Team, Customer Services, Scot Court House, 45 West Princess Street, Helensburgh G84 8BP.

NOTE: Although it is all but impossible to discover the identities of those serving on the Budget Working Group who will take these decisions tomorrow, logic suggests that LibDem Councilor, Andrew Nisbet from Helensurgh, is one of them. He has made some pronouncements on matters in this field and it is unlikely that he would have been in a position to have done so were he not a member of the group.

The cartoon above shows Executive Director for Community Services, Cleland Sneddon as Stan Laurel, with Executive Director for Customer Services, Douglas Hendry, as Oliver Hardy.