Nearly £90m of cuts in under five years, Lambeth emergency budget shows
7:00am Thursday 22nd July 2010 in Where I Live By Matt Watts
Nearly £90m of cuts in under five years for Lambeth
An emergency budget has revealed nearly £90m will be have to be slashed from Lambeth Council’s budget in less than five years.
The true extent of the cuts, released by Lambeth Council last week, shows it is preparing to slice up to £82m from its budget in the next four years from next April, amid “unprecedented” funding cuts – along with £6.5m of savings this financial year.
Voluntary organisations helping young people may be forced to close as their funding is axed by up to 35 per cent from January – with all having to reapply to provide services next year.
Services for the elderly and vulnerable hang in the balance, with funding reductions to this sector still not known.
Julia Shelley, co-chairwoman of Lambeth Health and Wellbeing Voluntary and Community Sector Forum, said she feared essential services for vulnerable residents would deteriorate and wanted to see “everything done to protect them”.
Some department budgets will be axed by 40 per cent. Up to 400 council jobs will be lost within months, with more than 200 going from the hardest-hit department, children and young person’s services.
A senior council source revealed up to 2,000 jobs could be lost from the council by 2015. Lambeth Unison has been considering strike action.
In education, both the special educational needs literacy team and the service supporting ethnic minority pupils could be disbanded. Paul McGlone, the council’s cabinet member for finance and resources, said reductions in Government funding were “unprecedented for a generation” and the council was faced with difficult decisions.
He added more council job losses were inevitable, but said the 2,000 figure was “unrealistic”.
He added the council would not rush in to making cuts and was working on ways to least impact frontline services – such as integrating literacy and ethnic minority support services into mainstream teachers skills.
Lambeth Council has an annual budget of about £310m.
The latest gloomy forecast follows announcements frontline police numbers will fall and news that £300m of Government cash for school improvements was being pulled.
The council has already admitted £230m decent homes funding from the Government reduction looks increasingly insecure.
How will the cuts affect the differnet areas of the council? A more detailed look at the current state of play is below.
REGENERATION The Streatham Hub mixed housing and leisure scheme is “completely guaranteed”, according to Paul McGlone, Lambeth Council’s cabinet member for finance.
He said the council was fully behind plans to redevelop Norwood Hall in West Norwood but £14.2m Private Finance Initiative credits towards the new customer service centre, swimming pool, gym, dance studio and health centre must now be re-endorsed by the new Government, meaning in principal it was under threat.
He said the new leisure centre and library in Clapham were financed, but the council would “have to take another look” at other regeneration projects because of the economic conditions.
The Government has already pulled out of a £9m regeneration project on the Clapham Park housing estate that would have seen 120 new affordable homes that would in turn finance regeneration projects.
A £1m housing and planning delivery grant has also been cut by the Government. The council will look to sell off some £17.2m of housing to fund its capital spending commitments this year.
EDUCATION The loss of up to £300m in Building Schools for the Future (BSF) funding is a major blow to improving school facilities.
Lambeth, at the forefront of early BSF projects, has been one of the hardest hit places in the country in the savage cuts announced earlier this month.
Eight school building projects have been axed, while another three projects at an advanced stage, including major improvements to Dunraven and Norwood schools are “under review” and hang on a knife-edge.
Coun McGlone said the Government had promised to ring fence schools spending, but he remained unconvinced.
Belt-tightening within Children and Young Person’s Services this year is set to see the current service to help literacy for people with special educational needs disbanded, along with the service supporting minority ethnic pupils, including the interpreting, translation and refugee support service.
Lambeth said the same service can be fully integrated into the workloads of schools’ staff.
Many jobs within the popular Lambeth Music Service are also set to be lost.
HOUSING A proposed savings target of £1.5m imposed on Lambeth Living (LL), that manages Lambeth’s housing stock, has been scrapped in the council’s emergency budget after the arms length management organisation (almo) stated publicly it would not be able to provide expected service improvements.
Yet council tenant representatives still predict extensive job losses within the housing service that are likely to affect the quality of service they receive.
At the eleventh hour LL postponed announcements on its restructuring until September, so the extent of cuts to the housing service are unlikely to be known until then.
Major uncertainties still remain over the new Government’s commitment to £230m of funding to bring Lambeth’s worsening housing stock up to the decent homes standard.
Paul McGlone admitted the council was now seriously considering alternative options to improve the housing stock, likely to be through selling off existing housing and other assets to finance the work.
A watchdog service to inspect the quality of sheltered housing schemes in the borough is also to be cut.
CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE’S SERVICES (CYPS) CYPS is looking to slash £20m from its budget in the next two financial years, according to an internal report seen by the Streatham Guardian.
This financial year it has already had £2.3m cut from its budget through the reduction of a department for education grant, specialist schools grant and extended services grant.
It has by far the most savage cuts, reflected in Lambeth Council’s decision to axe some 215 jobs in the department.
Funding to voluntary organisations providing services to young people is set to be decimated, with reductions in funding of up to 35 per cent coming in from January next year.
All voluntary organisations will also have to reapply for contracts for 2010-11, as the council anticipates massive funding reductions from central Government.
Coun Paul McGlone said it was “inevitable other areas will have to absorb the cuts, as the council is doing.”
Areas relying on voluntary organisations in Lambeth include youth clubs, domestic violence support services, and support for the disabled and those with learning difficulties.
A £100,000 reduction to the four commissioned providers of summer play projects will affect the delivery of summer holiday activities in 2011.
Funding for Lambeth’s anti-gang programme, Young and Safe, has been protected as a council “priority”.
HEALTH The council and NHS Lambeth have said savings through streamlining management, bureaucracy and administration, should be exhausted before cuts are made to health and social care services to those in need.
The two organisations will look to jointly commission services where they currently overlap in a bid to absorb funding reductions, including mental health, substance misuse, learning disability, offenders’ services including prison health services, continuing care, end of life care and social care services for older people, people with a physical disability or sensory impairment, and social inclusion services.
The council’s adult and community service department is still deciding on cuts it must make.
There is expected to be cuts to voluntary sector funding for adult, elderly, and social care but amounts are not yet known.
Hundreds of jobs for backroom staff at NHS Lambeth will go as commissioning powers are placed in to GPs hands as part of the restructuring of the NHS, according to financial think tank Social Market Foundation.
NHS Lambeth is now looking at how it can cut management costs by 15 per cent. It has already withdrawn £150,000 of funding for carers, and £200,000, a third of the whole funding, for the every pound counts scheme, a free checking system for residents to guarantee they are receiving benefits they are entitled to.
CULTURAL SERVICES The council can no longer guarantee the Labour administration’s pre-election pledge of free swimming for all residents at specific times at the borough’s leisure centres because of funding cuts.
Paul McGlone said it would do everything to protect the current scheme of free swimming opportunities for under 16s and over 60s, in light of the Department for Culture Media and Sport’s decision to stop funding for free swimming at the end of this summer, which has seen £193,000 of Lambeth’s funding cut.
He said the council would avoid making any quick decisions on vital community facilities like libraries and other cultural facilities, as funding in this area was not yet certain.
He said this was one area the council was keen to explore being more community-run, to improve services while reducing funding.
POLICE Some reduction in the number of officers patrolling Lambeth’s streets can be expected as a result of “efficiency savings”, according to Lambeth’s top cop, Chief Superintendent Nick Ephgrave.
But the borough commander said the drop, from just over to just under 1,000 frontline officers would still keep Lambeth above its recommended number of frontline police.
He said he would look at redesigning how the police functioned to ensure maximum efficiency from officers who were on the beat, to make sure rather than staying on one area of crime, they were available to assist in other areas if needed.
He said he had reduced overtime, which he accepted would also reduce the number of officers on the streets.
He said he had already reduced backroom staff, and would have to do so further as part of a continued demand to reduce spending.
Chief Supt Ephgrave said he would also look to charge more to police events.
London deputy mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, told the Streatham Guardian he would look to protect frontline policing by using cheaper administration staff to do roles now done by police officers.
The anti-extremism and terrorism programme Prevent, will have £75,000 of its in year funding cut.
