And it is all about ‘Johnny Cash’. Thursday morning (11th February) is the Council’s budget approval meeting. An ill-advised strategy to save money by cutting funding to child support services – in some cases by absolute amputation – is to bring a demonstration from Cairndow Community Creche to petition the budget approval meeting tomorrow (11th February).
Scrutiny of the proposed budget reveals the Council’s response to the inevitable need for hard cuts in the current financial circumstances.
However, areas where one would expect to see shelter offered from the storm, instead show defenestration.
Support services in the Children and Families sector seem virtually singled out for the grossly termed ‘Quick Win Savings’. This strategy brings nothing but the quickest possible loss for the most fragile element of Argyll society – young children and mothers working to maintain their families in a low wage economy.
Against this, some areas where the people of Argyll would rightly expect to see real cuts made – like Central Management Costs and Corporate Support Services – are set to rise virtually across the board and by quite significant percentages – from 12.9% in Corporate Services to 69% for the Head of Facility Services; and with Corporate Support Services going up by 91.46%, with a further rise projected for 2011/12.
This contrast demonstrates a serious lack of awareness of real and natural priorities.
Even though Argyll’s population is skewed to the far end of the age scale (and that area of need is to see Lochgilphead’s Fyneview respite home closed), the total child population in 2001 was 21% of Argyll’s overall population and fairly evenly distributed across the Council areas
The biggest population centre, Helensburgh and Lomond, accounted for 30%. The least populated, Oban, Lorn and the Isles, had 21%. The other two areas, Mid Argyll, Kintyre and Islay (25%) and Cowal and Bute (24%) were all but identical.
In the 2001 census, 71% of Argyll’s children were under 12: with 24% below the age of 4; and 47% between 5 and 12 years old.
- All of the FUSIONS (Fuller Services In Our Neighbourhoods and Schools) across Argyll are to lose their operating budgets.
- Programmes for Under 16s on Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) are to be cut absolutely.
- Surestart will see 2 Homestart projects and the Soroba Young Families project suffer reduced funding, saving that part of the budget £50,000 this year.
- Groups supporting children affected by disability will lose funding of £50,000 this year, a cut of almost 17%.
- Funding for the Childcare Strategy Project is to be cut by almost 20%, saving £65,000 this year. The Council admits that this saving – to be made by a total cutting of revenue grants to voluntary organisations – is likely to see the closure of some services. It identifies those most at risk of closure: Innellan and Toward family Centre; Fyne Families in Lochgilphead; Castlehill After School in Campbeltown; Rothesay Playgroup; and Cairndow Community Creche. The Council also admits that jobs will be lost through this ‘saving’.
Service closures from cuts to Childcare Strategy Project
This is the proposal that is bringing the Cairndow Community Creche and its supporters to demonstrate and petition the Council at its meeting in Kilmory on Thursday.
The Creche had hoped to see its 5th anniversary in Apri this year.
It has 7 qualified staff and 29 children – 9 of whom are babies (under 2 years old) on its roster:
- taking children from 6 months to 8 years old.
- providing ‘wrap-around’ care from 8.30am to 5.30pm for 5 weeks a year.
- providing pre-school services
- serving families from Garelochhead to Dalmally.
If this service closes, the only similar provision is at one of 4 other centres, based in Oban, Lochgilphead, Dunoon and Helensburgh. If parents were able to move their children to any of these centres – and waiting lists are significant in several cases – it is estimated that such rearrangements would require an average of 100 miles a day in driving time and costs – before you look at the increased carbon footprint impacts.
Losing the revenue grant of £25,000 per annum the Cairndow Creche receives would leave it with the option of raising its fees to try to survive. Mothers in the low wage local economy simply could not pay. The minimum wages they earn would be consumed – and more. They would have no choice but to stop work and go onto state benefits.
Yet here are people who want to work and are working for very little. They exemplify the ideal citizen, the necessary citizen for whom work is honourable in accepting responsibility for onseself, is a support for self esteem and sets an attitudinal example for children
Argyll needs working people as much as it needs more opportunities for work and a rise in the number and type of businesses aiming to operate beyond a low wage economy.
Choking some of the very people with the capacity to contribute to this is simply wrong-headed.
While the social cost of this proposal is obvious, the financial and economic costs are significant. The apparent saving may be an increase in real costs, with a rise in the benefit budget and more children growing up in homes with the enforced role model of parents who do not work.
Some key local businesses – for example in Inveraray, where the George Hotel, the Argyll Hotel and the Inveraray Jail tourist attraction, will lose core staff, with replacements hard to find.
Alternative cost cutting
The proposed savings are relatively modest but they will have a significant negative impact on services to children and families and on the local economy.
The obvious area where savings could be made to cover the current cost of such services is in the Council’s own spending on central management and corporate support services.
A telling example of proposed savings is found in another Quick Win Savings list – in the Improvement and Strategic Human Resources section. It is proposed to cut the spend on an Overall Review of Staffing from the 2009/10 cost of over £2 Million to a 2010/11 spend of £101,000.
The note on this proposal admits that the impact of the saving on service provision would be ‘minimal’ – the risk being that staffing savings may not be achieved. (And who ever thought they would be anyway?)
A last – and telling – example of where the right sort of savings might be made lies in the proposed increase of 28.27% in catering costs for the Head of Facility Services.
No person with a grounded set of values still intact would expect corporate hospitality to burgeon in times like these – and not when services to children are being cut and mothers who want to work are forced into the benefit culture.
Listen to tomorrow’s petitioners.
Note: Jim Mather, Argyll’s MSP and Alan Reid, Argyll’s MP are each reported as having been swift to respond to communication from the Cairndow Creche on its predicament. The staff there are disappointed that, uncharacteristically, no response has yet been received from Jamie McGrigor, Highlands and Islands MSP.
The photograph above – of Argyll and Bute Headquarters at Kilmory Castle in Lochgilphead, is by copyright holder Patrick Mackie and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
