http://www.unison.org.uk/news/tuc-save-local-government
Full speech below:
'Congress, be in no doubt that this Government have seized every opportunity possible to undermine local public services and to attack the vital role they play in making our country a better place to live. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles is using the opportunity presented by slashed Government spending plans to implement his ideological desire for a smaller state. With Party conference season nearly upon us, there is much talk in the air about reshuffles. Surely it is time that Pickles was quietly shuffled off... preferably over the nearest available cliff.
We saw the attacks on local government straight away back in 2010 when George Osborne delivered his emergency budget and announced that councils would have to save more than a billion pounds that financial year. Not savings that would need to be made in future, but instant cuts to budgets across local government right there and then
The results across the country have been shocking:
• youth workers in Cambridgeshire ordered to concentrate only on the most at-risk children
• Nottinghamshire sold care homes to make ends meet
• Gloucester closed down two schools
• and Somerset even looked at selling the town hall!
Then, in 2011, Osborne sneaked through another two years of cuts in order to pay for the disastrous policies of the coalition. Robbing local councils, schools and hospitals to pay for unwanted and unnecessary reforms in areas such as schools and the NHS.
But they didn’t want to stop there... Hidden within this year’s spending review, amongst the attacks on pay progression and the confirmation of another 144,000 public sector job losses, was a 10% cut in the local government resource budget. These cuts to council budgets have been unfairly targeted on the poorest parts of the country. Areas with the highest deprivation and highest levels of unemployment and benefit dependency – the areas that depend the most on central government grants to help them fund vital local services.
And as our motion notes, these cuts have also unfairly targeted local government workers – with over 400,000 jobs having been lost from local government since 2010. These devastating losses come on the back of a vicious settlement for local government workers:
• the £250 pay increase that George Osborne promised to public sector workers went unpaid
• a pay freeze introduced at a time of high inflation was basically a pay cut for council workers – squeezing the income of thousands of families across the country
• local government workers began to find that not only were they providing help to some of the hardest hit – they were also experiencing this hardship directly themselves
And in the North West, there is ongoing industrial action in Rochdale where UNISON members have come face to face with the consequences of employers using outsourcing to lower costs by paying workers less. Through the Future Directions social enterprise, the local foundation trust can pay care workers less than they would be entitled to as direct health trust or local authority employees.
Staff are having their employment transferred to inferior terms and conditions – a strategy of expansion through exploitation. Other organisations opted not to bid for the contract.
The previous contract holder did not bid because the terms offered would mean service quality cuts. These sort of commissioning arrangements mean that it is the providers that are most prepared to scrimp on a service and attack employee pay and conditions that end up providing crucial public services for vulnerable people.
Working across the country, the TUC and our sister unions should take the message across the nation that we will not sit by and watch our public services be demolished. We must support moves to empower public service workers and create closer relationships between public service users and providers. But we must oppose privatisation at all costs. We must look at how in-house provision actually improves service quality and leads to better value for money.
We need to work together in highlighting the true impact of these devastating cuts: the livelihoods blighted, public services decimated, and jobs erased by a government that hates the very idea of state-run local public service provision. And most importantly of all, we need to make it clear that there is an alternative. There is a different way to manage the economy allowing us to invest in local services so that we can ensure we have improving public services rather than disappearing ones.
Congress, support this motion and the amendment from the FBU. I move'
