BIG SOCIETY

SAVAGE CUTS

Big Society Savage Cuts briefing

The Government has indicated that it wants to cut the amount it spends each year by at least £83 billion by 2015 or around 14 percent of all public spending.  There are estimates that the cuts announced today, in the Comprehensive Spending Review, could mean that around 490,000 public sector jobs are going to be axed.[1]

There have already been cuts in areas such as support for unemployed young people, universities, youth services, legal aid and the Child Trust Fund – affecting some of the most vulnerable people in our society. It is clear that the public cuts will NOT BE FAIR and that any further cuts will mean large scale unemployment with people being unable to access services they need to survive.

Public Sector workers did not cause the recession and should not have to pay for the fiscal deficit by losing their jobs, cuts to their compensation, pay freezes, working longer before retirement and with worse pensions. The banks and speculators caused the problem yet they are still receiving obscene bonuses as if nothing has happened. In addition, there is some £30 billion a year in tax avoidance and in tax havens for business and the super rich.

The Government has argued that spending cuts are needed to tackle the economic crisis but spending reductions will hurt the economy by the creation of unemployment – people’s spending power will decrease and the tax received by the Government will actually decline as companies pay less tax on falling profits and those out of work stop paying income tax and VAT.

The public sector has already been facing sustained attacks through outsourcing and privatisation where billions of pounds of public funds are being wasted boosting the profits of private companies who are downgrading services and slashing conditions and jobs for public sector workers. Now not only is the sector facing cuts of an unprecedented scale under the slogan of the ‘Big Society’ but the sector will even suffer more dismantlement, privatisation and outsourcing.

The Trade Union Co-ordinating Group (TUCG) brings together nine national unions (BFAWU, FBU, NAPO, NUJ, PCS, POA, RMT, UCU and URTU) to co-ordinate campaigning activities in Parliament and beyond. We understand that the public sector works together as a whole – with each arm providing important services to make society function properly and allow people to live in dignity. Therefore, the TUCG stands alongside other unions in opposing all cuts.

In the coming period as the details of the cuts become clear, each union will be distributing information highlighting the specifics of how the cuts will affect their members. However, please find below an outline of the sort of picture we are facing across some areas of the public sector and some the real terms effects of the Government’s proposals on unions of the TUCG’s members.

Workplace Health and Safety

The number of people working who are killed or injured at work, is inevitably set to rise if there are any further budgetary cutbacks at the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the Comprehensive Spending Review.

According to the Health and Safety Executive’s annual figures 2008/09, 1.2 million people who worked during the last year were suffering from an illness (long standing as well as new cases) they believed was caused or made worse by their current or past work and 180 workers were killed at work. There are problems with the way the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) records incidents, meaning that the true and more detailed picture is never shown and being a victim of a work-related fatality or injury is far more likely than experiencing conventionally defined and measured violence and homicide.[2]

The HSE already has too few inspectors, administration staff, doctors and nurses to protect the workforce throughout our industry. Tragedies that impact on our members and their families have little adverse impact on unscrupulous employers, who will inevitably take advantage of a less effective HSE.

The Fire Service

Any cuts to the fire service will have disastrous affect. We know that cuts like 25% from fire service budgets could amount to 10,000 frontline fire-fighter jobs in the next four years, unless we prevent it. Some regions such as Yorkshire and Wales have already earmarked hundreds of jobs to go this year. This would seriously affect fire-fighter safety and the service that fire-fighters provide to the public, with slower response times, less cover at night and smaller crews.

Fire-fighters will also feel the impact of the CSR in other ways. The VAT and benefit changes will cost an average fire-fighter around £600, while the pay freeze is effectively a cut of at least £500 with inflation. Fire-fighters may have their pensions hit through higher contributions and working longer for less – even though most pay 11% already and don’t want to carry out rescues when they are 60 years old.

Criminal Justice Sector

A memo leaked to Channel 4 News indicated that the Ministry of Justice will lose 14,000 jobs with the front line bearing “the brunt”. The proposed 30% cuts for the Ministry of Justice are potentially dangerous with just under 10,000 workers in the prison and probation system expected to lose their jobs. These reductions in budgets to the Ministry of Justice will make it impossible for the component parts to carry out their statutory duties. The reduction in probation resources will necessitate a reduction in caseloads.  The behaviour of court report writers and sentencers will change if there are no probation programmes and less staff.  The courts will impose additional short custodial sentences.  The programme of court closures will lead to delay, adjournments and individuals spending longer in prison on remand.  The severe cuts to legal aid, both criminal and civil, will mean some individuals will have minimal or no representation in court.

Prisons

There has already been year on year efficiency savings but these draconian cuts have the potential not just to place the Health and Safety of staff in danger but cuts to frontline staff will lead to prisoners being locked up for longer. Prisons will become unsafe which could result in riots which will cost the tax payer more money in the long term.

The overall result of the cuts will mean that the prison population will not fall, but will rise significantly in the medium and long term.  This will have the effect of negating any immediate cuts made because of the expense of incarceration.

Probation

It is anticipated that the Probation budget will be reduced by 25% by March 2014 at the latest. The majority of the cut is likely to be absorbed by a reduction in staff complement from the current 20,000 to 15,000.  As a consequence the number of community sentences made will almost certainly fall as court report writers’ and sentencers’ behaviour changes. This could undermine Government commitments to reducing the prison population as a way to save money by a shift in sentencing policy. The National Offender Management Service is expecting a cut of over 30%.

It is already known that unpaid work (formerly community service) and probation hostels will be put out to competitive tender.  The government plans to expand unpaid work, as part of its ‘rehabilitation revolution’, from the current 55,000 cases per annum to around 90,000.  It wants to re-define unpaid work as a punishment only sentence despite the success probation has had in delivering rehabilitation as part of the sentence thus reducing reoffending. It is also rumoured that the Accreditation Board will be scrapped, leading the way to competition for programmes that address offending behaviour currently run by trained probation staff.

Protecting Vulnerable Children

Cafcass, which looks after the interests of children involved in family proceedings, is expecting anything from a flat budget to a 4% – 5% reduction through to March 2012.  The majority of the cuts are likely to be to specialist functions and senior management with vacancies being frozen. Workload demands, which are already high as a result of increases in family court applications, will be worsened by any failure to recruit skilled and trained practitioners to replace those leaving the organisation.

We are anticipating that there will be a drive to reduce costs by pushing cases towards compulsory mediation instead of court.  There will also be a significant reduction to the family court legal aid budget, mainly through withdrawal of funds for expert witnesses and independent social workers.  As a result the information available to staff with which to assess risks to children could be significantly reduced.

Education

The government is currently failing to protect educational provision and through the funding to councils and tertiary education institutions, they are currently presiding over a massacre of jobs in the sector that is undermining their own stated objectives. The total jobs either at risk or already lost in Further Education and Higher Education is 6211.

Journalism

The BBC licence fee is to be frozen at the current level of £145.50 for the next six years, a 16% cut in real terms.
In total, the BBC has committed to spend an extra £340m of licence-fee money to fund all these undertakings by 2014-15. Government expenditure from central taxation will fall by an equivalent amount.

The World Service’s annual budget is £272m, S4C’s £102m, and BBC Monitoring £25m, although all are expected to be cut as part of the government’s comprehensive spending review,. The government is expected to confirm full details of the licence fee deal in Osborne’s announcement to the House of Commons.

BBC World Service

It is rumoured that the BBC World Service budget will face cuts of between 25-40% which are proposed despite the service’s overwhelming success: the audience is 241 million across radio, television and online platforms.  The budget for the World Service is provided by the Foreign Office and is not funded from the licence fee. Such cuts would mean the closure of whole services as well as substantial job losses.

The BBC World Service employs more than 2,000 people of which a significant proportion are based outside of the UK and spread across 45 countries. The diversity of staff and presence in so many key locations around the world contributes to making BBC World Service the leading voice in international broadcasting.

At its best the World Service can challenge corruption, expose human rights abuses and promote democratic values. By cutting the service the Government will cut UK influence in the rest of the world and cuts will also be deeply damaging to the provision of objective quality news services around the globe.

BBC Monitoring Service

There are also cuts proposed for the BBC Monitoring Service based in Caversham which may impact on 300-350 jobs in the UK and 150 jobs overseas. The BBC Monitoring Service provides news and information based on round-the-clock monitoring of TV, radio, press, internet and news agency sources worldwide. The service selects from an extensive range of sources and enables the BBC to provide insightful and reliable coverage of political, economic, security and media news. The service shows what the world’s media are reporting as well as how they are telling the story. The BBC Monitoring Service has its budget provided by the Cabinet Office.

S4C

There are also concerns at Government plans to cut funding to S4C could put in jeopardy the future of the channel or at the very least lead to a greatly reduced service. The formal scrapping of the funding mechanism for S4C has already led to the loss of 25% of jobs and hundreds of jobs are likely to be lost in the production sector in Wales if significant cuts are imposed on S4C.

With Welsh about to become an official language of the nation, alongside a steady growth in bilingual and Welsh medium schools and with a recent Consumer Focus Wales survey revealing that that 80% of the people it surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that services should be available in Welsh, the current proposal to cut funding to S4C goes against such logic.

More information about the economic impact of the cuts and for alternative proposals

Read the TUC’s booklet ‘All Pain No Gain’ on how the coalition has got it badly wrong when it comes to addressing the deficit.

Read the new and expanded ‘One Million Climate Jobs’ pamphlet, which sets out a strategy to solve both the economic and environmental crises.

Read the LEAP dossier ‘The Osborne Ready Reckoner’ testing the statements the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, made at the June Budget Statement.

Read PCS’s There is an alternative: The case against cuts in public spending

[2] ‘A crisis of enforcement: The decriminalisation of death and injury at work’ Professor Steve Tombs and Dr. David Whyte 2008 http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/opus685/crisisenforcementweb.pdf

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.