“This government have seized every opportunity possible to undermine local public services and to attack the vital role they play in making our country a better place to live,” UNISON’s Angela Raynor told delegates to the TUC congress in Bournemouth this afternoon.
“Communities secretary Eric Pickles is using the opportunity presented by slashed Government spending plans to implement his ideological desire for a smaller state,” she added.
Ms Raynor was moving the union’s motion to TUC on saving local government.
She noted that local government has already seen three years of drastic cuts, including
- youth workers in Cambridgeshire ordered to concentrate only on the most at-risk children;
- Nottinghamshire selling care homes to make ends meet;
- Gloucester closing down two schools;
- Somerset even looking at selling the town hall.
She told congress that “hidden within this year’s spending review, amongst the attacks on pay progression and the confirmation of another 144,000 public -sector job losses, was a 10% cut in the local government resource budget.
“These cuts to council budgets have been unfairly targeted on the poorest parts of the country.
“Areas with the highest deprivation and highest levels of unemployment and benefit dependency” she said, are “the areas that depend the most on central government grants to help them fund vital local services.
“And as our motion notes, these cuts have also unfairly targeted local government workers – with over 400,000 jobs having been lost from local government since 2010.”
Local government workers, she said, ” began to find that not only were they providing help to some of the hardest hit – they were also experiencing this hardship directly themselves
“And in the North West, there is ongoing industrial action in Rochdale, where UNISON members have come face to face with the consequences of employers using outsourcing to lower costs by paying workers less.
“Through the Future Directions social enterprise, the local foundation trust can pay care workers less than they would be entitled to as direct health trust or local authority employees.
“Staff are having their employment transferred to inferior terms and conditions – a strategy of expansion through exploitation.”
Looking forward, she said the union movement ” must support moves to empower public service workers and create closer relationships between public service users and providers.
“But we must oppose privatisation at all costs.
“We must look at how in-house provision actually improves service quality and leads to better value for money.
“We need to work together in highlighting the true impact of these devastating cuts: the livelihoods blighted, public services decimated; jobs erased by a government that hates the very idea of state-run local public service provision.
“And most importantly of all, we need to make it clear that there is an alternative.
“There is a different way to manage the economy allowing us to invest in local services so that we can ensure we have improving public services rather than disappearing ones.”
