Residents First

Cutting Tax AND protecting & enhancing front line services for all

Budget Council speech by Cllr Joe Carlebach, Cabinet Member for Community Care Adult Social Care, Health & the Voluntary Sector.

There can be few examples where an administration is able to propose a tax cut and to be able to say with some confidence that we have done a good job protecting front line services across our Council, and meeting the complex needs of our most vulnerable residents. Pushing taxes as low as possible is in my view not just a goal or target it is a responsibility. Lowering the Council tax does not help the wealthy as some claim, it is actually generates the most benefit to those hard working families in our borough who currently face great financial challenge and to whom every penny counts. It is for them and their children that we must keep working to reduce the tax burden.

We live in some of the most difficult economic times in living memory and I fear that it will be a long time before we return to the sort of prosperity we all hope for. It is therefore especially important for us to enable our residents to keep as much of their hard earned cash as possible and not take the easy addictive route of taxation as the answer to all problems.

I am minded of what Ronald Reagan said of Governments and administrations default position “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it.” This is absolutely not what our administration is about, we are proud of our low tax philosophy and proud of our low tax record.

Social care quality boosted

An innovative quality assurance programme has improved the quality of adult social care and at the same time made savings for the council.

Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) Council’s quality assurance programme assesses social work practice against 50 standards.

This new method has driven significant improvements in safeguarding practice and court work, reduced paperwork, strengthened morale at the front line, and has led to a more efficient way of working which has resulted in significant cash savings.

The learning disabilities team is one social care service that has benefitted from the quality assurance programme. An initial review, in December 2010, identified a number of problems, including a lack of face-to-face contact with service users and inadequacies with safeguarding.

BBC features improvements for carers in H&F

 

Council leads smarter savings league

A think tank has named Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) Council as leading the way nationally at protecting disabled residents from the impact of cuts to social care budgets.

Funded by disability charity Scope, Demos has researched how 174 councils in England and Wales have reacted to the national budget crisis when it comes to delivering services to disabled residents.

They say; "Many councils who introduced the same degree of budget cut scored vastly differently on the coping scale; demonstrating that councils have the ability to introduce measures that can reduce the negative impact on their disabled residents."

The research compares councils by matching the size of budget reductions with changes in charges, eligibility criteria and contributions policies and highlights H&F as a council doing more than most to reduce spending without damaging services to disabled people.

Cllr Joe Carlebach, cabinet member for community care said:

“We are very pleased that Scope has endorsed the work that we are doing to protect disabled residents from the impact of budget cuts.

“We have 27 per cent less to spend over the next three years, but we have worked hard to ensure that our charges and eligibility criteria are better than most other local authorities in London and even compared to local authorities nation wide.

“To date our savings on services to disabled people have been achieved through hard work identifying and delivering efficiencies.

"We are getting rid of unnecessary overheads, cutting back office and management costs and combining many of our services with Westminster City Council and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea as well identifying and acting on savings with our colleagues in the NHS.

“We are living through particularly difficult economic times and the need to cut the nation’s spiralling debt mountain means that all parts of government, including local authorities have had to make many tough choices.

"We have decided that it is a priority despite the current difficult climate to protect front line services where we can.”

Scope judge Hammersmith & Fulham doing "well" on services for disabled

Cllr Harry Phibbs writes

I'm generally uneasy about charities devoting their resources to politics but there is some merit in a project from Scope analysing the impact of Council spending cuts on services for the disabled. The think tank Demos undertook the project of mapping the cuts. You can look up each council and see whether the spending cuts in the area are relatively high or low. But also how well they have "coped" with the cuts. This measure judges each council purely by the service being delivered on the front line.

I am pleased to see that Hammersmith and Fulham Council was judged to perform "well" in maintaining services despite being "high" in terms of the money.

There is still some criticism which I feel is unfair. Our home care charge to service users will have gone up, as fees and charges go up every year in line with inflation, but this is a means tested charge and only about 100 people are actually liable to pay all their charges and most pay no charge at all. Because the charge cannot be more than the cost to us of the service and we have negotiated low prices with our providers, the charge to service users compares favourably with the charges in other boroughs.

The True Face of Carers

Carers in Hammersmith & Fulham are invited to a series of events across the borough to celebrate Carers Week 2011, which runs from June 13 to 19.

The week kicks off with an open discussion session focusing on the reality of being a carer is, as the week is subtitled ‘The True Face of Carers’, at the Irish Centre in Blacks Road, Hammersmith on Monday, June 13. The week’s events include an open day, an organised walk and drama workshops.

The open day on Wednesday June 15 at the Irish Centre in Blacks Road, Hammersmith, will have information and advice stands from organisations such as H&F Mencap, H&F MIND and Carers UK, along with the council's carer support service teams for young and adult carers. Anyone who regularly provides care, or is intending to provide care, to someone in need of support, can come and find out more what help is available from the council and other local groups. Carers Week in H&F will then culminate in a picnic at Ravenscourt Park on Friday June 17, 12pm-3pm.

Cabinet Report

There was a Hammersmith and Fulham Council Cabinet meeting last night. No Labour councillors turned up. However there were comments from Dennis Charman, Secretary of the Hammersmith and Fulham NUt. He is the partner of NUT General Secretary Christine Blower. In 2000 she stood in the London Assembly elections for a Trotskyist grouping called the Socialist Alliance. They educated their children out of the borough.

Dennis spoke about how parents could not be relied upon to make the right choice of school for their children. There was undue concern, he felt, about the number of parents not having a school place for their child that was their first preference. Cllr Helen Binmore, Cabinet Member for Children's Services told him: "We have a philosophical difference. We believe in parent choice."

The item under discussion was the School Organisation Strategy. In 2006 only 38% of children resident in Hammersmith and Fulham were in state schools in the borough. So the situation under Labour was that most parents would pay school fees or send their children to state schools in other boroughs. The situation is now that percentage of  children in local state schools has risen to 55%. That is a big improvement but also shows that is a long way to go. Greater choice of local state schools - including academies and free schools - will help.

The Big Society in Hammersmith and Fulham

Cllr Joe Carlebach, Cabinet Member for Community Care, gave the following speech to H&F MIND last week

“This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1796

I would like to outline a few thoughts on the Big Society project as we interpreting and implementing it in Hammersmith and Fulham. The term “Big Society” is one that understandably many find a little vague.

The Cabinet Office has published a number of documents on the subject and if I were to summarise the key messages they would be:

1. Give communities and neighborhoods more powers.
2. Encourage people to take an active role in their communities and neighborhoods.
3. Transfer power from central to local government.
4. Support co-ops, mutuals, charities and social enterprises.
5. Publish government data.

In Hammersmith and Fulham we want to use the Big Society as a tool to empower our neighborhoods to eliminate the very marked health inequalities, poverty and urban deprivation that exist in some parts of our Borough through community and individual action.

The Conservative Council is spending more on adult social care than Labour did

Councillors are unanimous in recognising Carers' needs and in ensuring that their interests, health and welfare, and by extension, those they are caring for are met to the fullest extent possible.  

Labour claims that the Conservative council has cut back on Adult Social Care services and expenditure.  This is simply not true.  As expenditure and budget figures for the last 4 years will testify, the previous Administration increased the level of Adult Social Care expenditure and the efficiency of its services, thus providing considerably more value for money than had been the case under the preceding Labour Administration.

There was ample opportunity at last month's Housing, Health and Adult Social Care Select Committee to scrutinise in depth and in a non-partisan manner the issue of the Carers' Centre and its services.  Cllrs Vaughan (as well as Cowan and Coleman) were present and did not raise any issues, thus presupposing they were satisfied with what had been reported by the Cabinet Member and the Director for Community Services, not only in respect of the conduct of the tendering process, but also with what the Council was intending moving forward. 

Rather than using that more appropriate forum to enquire or challenge further, they are instead utilised the Full Council meeting a week later to score political points.

Cllr Peter Tobias

"The time is always right, to do what is right." Maiden speech from Cllr Joe Carlebach

 Cllr Joe Carlebach delivered the following speech at the Council meeting on June 30th:

Mayor, Fellow Councillors, Ladies and Gentlemen,

This is my maiden speech, my first in this chamber since my election last month. These are not quite the circumstances I had envisaged for my maiden speech, however I would like to start by paying tribute to my predecessor in the Community Services portfolio, Councillor Antony Lillis.

Antony was one of the people who encouraged me to get involved in local politics. He was a huge character and a great force for good in our Borough. To follow in his foot steps and do justice to his legacy is clearly going to be a challenge.

I would also like to pay tribute on this occasion to Peter Meldrum. A close friend and colleague for over 25 years who taught me a lot about compassionate conservatism, philanthropy and leadership. Tragically last March following a brief and uncharacteristic period of depression Pete took his own life close to his family home in Dallas. His loss has taught me a hard lesson about the pain and suffering mental illness can inflict on those who suffer from it and on their friends and family.

These are very difficult times for all of us but despite that I hope to be able to make progress and add real value to the brief I currently hold including in the area of mental health and I do this in memory of Pete.