Birmingham Lobby of Council on care & support service cuts

• Birmingham Lobby of Council on care & support service cuts
• Les Woodward on the Sayce Report
• Supreme court’s decision on Elaine McDonald case is a major setback

Birmingham Lobby of Council on care & support service cuts Posted: 06 Jul 2011 05:18 PM PDT Thank you to Birmingham Against the Cuts for this post A lobby at the council house was held yesterday, called jointly by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Social Work Action Network (SWAN), UNISON Birmingham Council Branch, Right to Work and Birmingham Against the Cuts. The five groups have come together this month to campaign on cuts to social and care services that the ConDem council are seeking to bring in, as part of the £212m council cuts. The council plans to cut back services to disabled people in particular, with care only being available to those adults judged to have “critical” needs.  This means that adults with only “substantial” needs will no longer have access to care services.  Originally the council said that this would affect 11,000 people, but have more recently said that it will only be 4,500 people who are affected – we, like Graeme Horn from UNISON, are inclined to believe the original figure as the council are likely to have tried to massage the numbers down following an outcry from the people of Birmingham about these horrendous cuts. Following the announcement of the cuts, a legal case was started which resulted in a judicial review in May that the cuts were unlawful, as the council had not done an equality impact assessment or consulted properly over the cuts.  This review has forced the council to start a new consultation, which begins shortly.  DPAC and SWAN decided to use July to campaign on this because the UN is currently monitoring the convention on the rights of disabled people – so at the same time the government is monitoring the report from the UN, they are cutting services to disabled people.  They then contacted UNISON, Right to Work and Birmingham Against the Cuts to build a united campaign which can be effective in its resistance to these cuts. Graeme Horn from UNISON Birmingham said: We need to make sure that during the consultation as many people as possible examine what the council are doing and speak up in defence of vulnerable and disabled people Rich Moth from SWAN added that We have chosen to start the campaign now because of the court victory under the Disability Discrimination Act concerning the £33m cuts to care and support services.  What we want to do coming out of that judgement is to build a campaign because Birmingham City Council will come back with proposals that we expect to be more or less the same and we need to build a campaign to fight these discriminatory cuts which kind of show who is really going to suffer – not the bankers who caused the crisis but disabled and vulnerable people. Godfrey Webster from Birmingham Against The Cuts spoke about how it is important to make sure that the narrative of the neccesity of cuts is defeated The problem is that the majority of people think the cuts are inevitable and there is no alternative.  We need to get the message out that there is an alternative False Economy is a good website to start with to explore the alternatives to cuts, which broadly speaking encompass ideas such as closing the £120bn tax gap – especially the £25bn of tax avoided each year by wealthy individuals and large corporations; a robin hood and/or bankers bonus tax to ensure that the people and organisations that caused the crisis play their part in helping to get us out of it and investing in the economy (particularly in green manufacturing) to stimulate growth and prevent a double-dip recession which would cause tax revenues to fall, welfare payments to rise and the deficit to increase. Matt Raine from Right to Work chose to highlight one particular cut Mobility allowance is being stripped from old people.  This will mean that they are effectively prisoners in their care homes He talked about the importance of linking up this struggle with the wider struggle against cuts, mentioning the Lib Dem conference in Birmingham in September, and theTory conference in Manchester in October. SamBrackenbury Finally, DPAC Sam Brackenbury spoke about how disabled people need to be active in this struggle.  He said that he was fighting so that he could have the support that he needed to have an independent life, to not be dependent on other people or have to accept the scraps that fall from the table.  Calling for all disabled people to be proactive in this struggle and to join DPAC in taking action to defend their benefits he said Don’t cause a fuss, stop a bus referring to this action that he took with Members of the Greater London Pensioners’ Association took to highlight issues of access and the cutting of mobility allowance, as well as broader cuts to benefits (Sam is one of the activists handcuffed to the back of the bus) There will be more events from this campaign this month, as well as ongoing work as we seek to prevent the council from cutting vital services.  To steal SWAN’s slogan we want the budget to be based on peoples needs, not private greed. On Thursday (7th July) Birmingham Trades Council has its monthly meeting, at 7:30pm in the Council House.  Bob Findlay-Williams from DPAC will be speaking. On the 20th July there will be a public meeting at Transport House on Broad Street (TGWU/UNITE building) with speakers from the groups and services affected by these cuts.  Join the Facebook Event and invite your friends. Come along to these events and help the campaign to ensure that the consultation that the council are being forced to undertake is not a sham, and that vital services for vulnerable and disabled people are protected. All photos (c) Geoff Dexter Sherborne Publications – see more photos in his Flickr stream

Les Woodward on the Sayce Report Posted: 06 Jul 2011 04:19 PM PDT Les Woodward wrote this in response to a previous article. The Sayce Report (A Treatise in Treachery for Disabled People) The Sayce Report was launched on June 9th in relative silence. It happened in an upstairs room in a building on Holloway Road, London. You would think that a report that has potentially such an impact on the lives of disabled workers employed by Remploy would have been well advertised and the workers would have had a chance to attend, ask questions, maybe? Make comments? Definitely, but you would be wrong on all counts. No shop floor workers were invited, we had to gatecrash, we had to be disruptive to make our points and we were not at all welcome by the Minister, by Liz Sayce or by senior civil servants of the DWP. This sets the context for the Sayce Report and why, it actually fails disabled people. The report is highly anonymous; it is full of quotes that are nameless. The report highlights aspirations but is very light on how those aspirations are to be achieved. The report is very opinionated and subjective in its approach, which is really not surprising as RADAR who employs Liz Sayce as its Chief Executive is a well-known opponent of Supported Employment factories such as Remploy and were also signatories to an open letter to the Guardian Newspaper in May 2007 fully supporting the then proposed closure of Remploy factories. To understand fully, the implications of the Sayce Report, it must be looked at in the context of the present economic situation in the UK as well as the present political situation in the UK.  The Government has embarked on an austerity programme the like of which has not been known in living memory. An outrageous attack on the working class, public sector workers, disabled people, and just about any group in society that does not belong to the millionaire banking set that Cameron, Clegg and Osborne are so fond of. The Sayce report is weapon in the ConDem armoury, which panders to the politically correct viewpoint that now we have a whole raft of anti-discrimination legislation any disabled person should be employed wherever they like without any fear of discrimination. A very laudable viewpoint and a very laudable aspiration, but we all know that in the real world discrimination and even hate crime against disabled people happens all too frequently, just the same as Women are discriminated against in the workplace, despite decades of the Equal Pay Act being in place, and Black and Ethnic Comrades are discriminated against despite decades of the Race Relations Act being in place. The report calls for either the closure or privatising of Remploy factories. The privatising of the factories could take many shapes, management buy-outs, Social Enterprises, Workers Cooperatives, etc. All of which are fraught with dangerous pitfalls for the workers employed in the factories. Remploy factories have a mix of people with all sorts of health issues and problems. The basic tenet of any factory is that the less able are helped and supported by the more able. Under private ownership the first consideration would be to cut costs, the less able would be viewed as an added cost to be stripped away to save money. In 2008, 2,500, people lost their jobs in Remploy. In 2009 the GMB surveyed those members who had left and only around 5% had actually found work, of that 5% less than 5% of that number had found a job equal to, or better than, they had in Remploy. Liz Sayce almost takes pleasure in rubbishing Remploy factories. There are several references to factories being described as ghettoes, as workers having non-jobs and not being sustainable. All of us would have seen images of our troops in Iraq, and Afghanistan wearing nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare suits. These are manufactured by disabled workers in Remploy Leven, very highly skilled workers who produce garments that are designed to save the lives of those who wear them and are therefore very highly specified. Aston Martin cars are a British icon, the brake assemblies are assembled in the Birmingham factory. One of the workers is totally blind and has for years produced work that is safety critical and has to be right 100% of the time with absolutely no room for error. Non-jobs? Hardly!  Neither do we consider ourselves as working in ghettoes. We have lives outside of Remploy, many of us are active in our communities, some of us are active politically, and socially as well. Just as important we are economically active, paying our taxes and national insurance. We spend our money and contribute to our local economy and when we travel we contribute to other local economies. The fact that we choose to work with other disabled people is our choice. We were not forced into Remploy and by golly we will not be forced out. We are proud of our skills, proud of our products and believe it or not we are proud of our Company. A Company that is a great company, a company that could be a lot better granted, but great never the less. A Company, which has been miss-managed for years, by expensive, overpaid and massively under talented senior managers. A company that has a board of directors that are not capable of running a burger van on the high street at kicking out time on a Saturday. A Company, that governments of all persuasions have allowed to become inefficient and bureaucratic, with layers and layers of costly waste. But that is not a good enough reason to close it, but it is a very good reason to restructure it from the top down and to bring it into the 21st century, in order that new generations of young disabled people can learn all types of skills including life skills and basic skills, learn work ethic, and learn to be valued members of society who contribute positively to that society. Les Woodward National Convenor Remploy Trade Union Consortium Personal Capacity.

Supreme court’s decision on Elaine McDonald case is a major setback Posted: 06 Jul 2011 08:14 AM PDT Disabled People Against Cuts believes the Supreme Court’s majority decision to reject Elaine McDonald’s appeal to keep her overnight personal assistants to help her with regular personal care tasks is a major setback for disabled people of all ages and their families. This judgment will give a green light to local authorities across England and Wales to reassess care packages to find the cheapest way to meet needs, and allow them to impose solutions that may be against the wishes of disabled people. By rejecting legal arguments concerning the human rights and disability discrimination acts that favour Elaine’s appeal, the Supreme Court will shatter disabled people’s confidence in the ability of the legal system to protect their rights. In part of the judgment, Elaine is characterised as being difficult and rigid in her approach to alternatives presented by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea such as a live-in volunteer or sheltered accommodation. The irony is that if an application to the Independent Living Fund (ILF) in 2007 had succeeded Elaine would have been given the resources to fund the overnight care she needs. This case would never have come to court if Elaine’s council had done its job properly. While the Supreme Court gives a lot of weight to statements presented by her council that other disabled people who are not incontinent accept the use of pads or sheets to avoid the need for overnight care, they do not question the veracity of some of the council’s evidence, particularly where inaccurate information has been presented. In the court of appeal judgment, it states in paragraph 13: ‘As it emerged, however, the ILF application failed, inter alia because Ms McDonald, on turning 65, ceased to be eligible for funding from it.’ Yet an independent review of the Independent Living Fund published in January 2007 by the respected academics Melanie Henwood and Bob Hudson confirms on page 5 that applicants had to ‘Be at least 16 years of age and under 66’. In fact at the time when Elaine left hospital in March 2007 when an application to the ILF had a strict deadline of three months she was 63, about to turn 64. It saddens us that English and Welsh law that is so detrimental to the interests of disabled people is developed by expert legal minds that do not have a full grasp of the detailed issues before them. Stuart Bracking