We know there are homeless people out
there, thousands upon thousands of them, and we know there are rough sleepers.
I have seen more and more tucked away in quiet corners of the borough over the
summer, and left them to it; in warm weather it may be tolerable. Some rough
sleepers have work of a kind (manual labour at a certain building site), some
have come to the UK to work and found none, others have simply fallen off the
edge.
So I shouldn’t have been shocked by this photo, sent in
by a resident, of a rough sleeper on Portobello Road, with one layer of
wrapping, lying on concrete on the coldest night of the year, Friday 5 December.
But I was.
Now sensitised, while I am out and about I
look out for bundles of blankets and cardboard, and see quite a few. Sometimes
there’s a poor soul hidden inside. How many will survive this freezing weather?
In a civilised society, in the self-professed ‘richest
borough in the universe’ this is unforgivable. I have sat at meetings when
Council officers backed by a pinstriped Cabinet Member have painstakingly
explained how night shelters, lunch clubs, even food banks, encourage the
hungry and un-housed to hang about in the borough. How unseemly! ‘Out of sight,
out of mind’ and never mind where they will end up, half starved and rough
sleeping.
So, the churches fill in where they can, and thank God
and all the gods for that.
So reflect on this for a moment:
The ‘richest borough in the universe’
is CUTTING £150,000
from its homelessness prevention scheme
this year.
Yes, the Council that can justify handing over, no
strings attached, £5m to a loss-making business, Opera Holland Park, that some
say has cost us cc£20m since inception - a ‘business’ that loses up to £125,000
per week on its eight-week summer run – is CUTTING the price of a week of opera
(if you add in the cost of renting the location at Holland House, which is
given free), for a year of homelessness prevention.
As we go about our rounds, we find the message of
financial incompetence and tortured priorities by the Council is getting through. So, for the sake of
absolute clarity and accuracy, here are some figures to feed your outrage this
wintry season. So, when you are wondering how a civilised society and
‘fabulously’ rich Council can walk by someone sleeping on a pavement in
below-zero temperatures, this is how:
Short course
‘SQUEEZING THE VULNERABLE TO FUND INDULGENCE’
Any organisation
that has been run inefficiently for years can make savings through better
planning and tightening up on costs.
But RBKC has
taken this to a new level. While bleating ‘austerity’ and ‘tough decisions’
they have cut back on services, particularly focussed on the most vulnerable who cannot speak for
themselves.
And yet, most of
this is simply unnecessary. Here’s why. Below you will see a table of
government funding cuts to RBKC since 2010 (cuts = savings). In the third
column is the total of UNDERSPENDING across the Council in the same year. All
these sums have been taken from the Council’s own documentation:
Year
|
Government
funding cut
|
Total
underspend
|
2010/11
|
£11.6m
|
£9m
|
2011/12
|
£23m
|
£19.8m
|
2012/13
|
£13m
|
£24.3m
|
2013/14
|
£10m
|
£30.6m
|
TOTAL
|
£57.7m
|
£83.7m
|
A large chunk of
the underspends every year are put into the Capital Reserve, to fund major
projects such as the cc£100m Holland Park School.
The ‘usable
Reserves’ from which capital and other projects are funded look like this:
10/11 - £206m
11/12 - £224m
12/13 - £241m
13/14 - £267m
at September 2014 - £283m
You would think
that having large Reserves means you would get some interest on that to ‘soften
the blow’ of savings; in fact Council policy states precisely that. You would
be wrong.
These Reserves
are kept almost entirely in the Debt Management Office (very safe but can be
accessed quickly), whose return on investments is .25%pa. Given that inflation
has been cc2.5%, the loss on say £100m of these Reserves (the sum
the Council states they have not earmarked for capital projects) is cc£4-5m/yr.
So we are actually LOSING money. If that £100m was invested, we could GAIN
cc£4-5m/yr. So you could say that we are forgoing cc£10m/yr.
Now let’s look at
some of the Council’s PRIORITIES. In
2010/11 (election year) £4.2m was spent on an ‘efficiency dividend’ of £50
each to all registered for Council Tax. In
2013/14 (election year) £7.5m was spent on an ‘efficiency dividend’ of £100
each to all Council Tax PAYERS (ie not in receipt of Housing Benefit).
Here are some
more ‘priorities’:
Opera Holland
Park – underwriting loss of cc£1m/yr
Leighton House –
this year alone £2.6m refurb costs
National Army
Museum – ‘loan’ of £2.5m for refurb
Kens Academy
artwork - £150k
Holland Park Ac
artwork - £120k
In the past six
years, the Council has spent an incredible £1m on Pre-Raphaelite art:
-
Clytie
(lady in a nightie)
-
Cimabue’s
Madonna ( lady in a nightie)
-
Nymphs
in a Landscape (shockingly, ladies without nighties)
Now let’s look at
‘underspends’ in services, using 2013/14 as an example:
Adult Social Care £6.4m
Children’s
Services £641k
Env Leisur and
Res £2.3m
Housing £638k
Libr, Arch,
Heritage £238k
Planning, boro
devt £1.6k
Transp &
Techn £6.4m
Corp Servi £3.8m
Adult, Family
Learning £44k
As you can see
for yourself, ‘tough decisions’ are in truth IDEOLOGICAL.
And people, if
the Tories get into government again and are allowed to kick off their
destructive ‘deficit balancing’ budget, make no mistake, people will die.
Which is why. given that RBKC is a microcosm of all that is very wrong in the country at present, we
need to understand how our Tories in RBKC make their decisions, where the money
is, and just how the process is driven by wrong-headedness, incompetence and
ideology.
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