Tories Reveal Cuts Proposals

At Hounslow's Council Meeting on Tuesday night night the Tories revealed the £8m cuts they want to make to the Council budget for the next financial year. These include direct attacks on front-line services to the most vulnerable families. Specific cuts we said should be ruled out now even before scrutiny were:

• The ending of school uniform grants to families on very low incomes
• The ending of the subsidy for community use of school premises,
• Cuts to council funding on children’s centres, play and youth activity
• Reducing social care funding for disabled or vulnerable children.

All the “savings” proposals will go to Scrutiny meetings over the next few weeks, and we will be looking at each to assess the impact to residents. The Tories have said the proposals will go out to public consultation, but we saw no programme for this at the Council meeting.

Tuesday's cuts proposals are in addition to the ending of £1/2m subsidy for the Hounslow Language Service which we opposed last March. This has had to be delayed as the Executive had not consulted on it before proposing it. We are demanding to know where the £1.5m redundancy cost for the teachers who will lose their jobs will come from.

All this emphasises the contempt the Tories have for vulnerable children and their families, as the really pernicious front-line cuts are in the Children’s services budget. What’s more we believe that direct service-level cuts shouldn’t be necessary if the Tories had not messed up their Performance Improvement Programme. A classic example was making a third of all admin staff redundant without properly assessing the impact on front-line staff - many of whom struggle with work-load and low morale.

The Independent Community Group who have been in coalition with the Tories since May 2006, distanced themselves from the Torie's budget. March's Council meeting will be interesting.