Medway Council cuts negatively impact children and families

Ollie & Sophie

I've been becoming more and more disillusioned with the cuts and removal of services over recent years.

What started as efficiency savings and the trimming of dead and dying wood was necessary. However as time has gone by the cuts have gone to deep and with misdirection of the banner of attacking the "benefit scroungers" they are starting to attack those who genuinely need it.

Local Labour leader Vince Maple talked about governing bodies having different priorities in his recent article for the Medway Messenger and how they choose to act. He especially criticised the ruling Conservatives locally and nationally for their choices of where the axe should fall.

For example, and this is a personal example, Medway's conservatives have changed the way money goes into Sure Start centres which equates to a severe cut to their budgets.

Many of my regular readers will know that I have two children; Sophie (2 and 11 months) and Oliver (9 months) and my wife was getting ready to go back to work around the end of July. We'd put Ollie's name down and were waiting for the green light.

Last Saturday we received a letter saying that the centre would no longer be accepting children under two years old!

There has been talk of staff numbers being cut and the current staff, all of whom are excellent, having to reapply for their posts. A meeting has been called to discuss the changes and how it will effect services.

However, the big problem is, IF we can't get Ollie into a nursery then Sam cannot go back to work and our household income is cut by a third. It would be an impossibility for the four of us to exist on my wages alone what with utilities, council tax, rail fare and even food prices all rising.

Serious choices would need to be made and we might have to pull Sophie out of nursery all together, which could be bad for her development. Further to that choices will need to be made regarding power, water even food and heating in the winter. Our already cold house may have to become devoid of all heat in the winter save for low heat on the bedroom heaters which will impact all of our health, just so that we can get by.

In this times it would be reasonable to turn to the state for help but with the new welfare reforms can we expect much assistance?

What I am struggling to understand is that the Coalition are trying to get people back into work and supporting those who aspire and work hard. However thanks to, frankly, fiscal mismanagement, the local Conservative council have put a few people out of work and effectively blocking others from returning to their jobs and possibly forcing people to look at benefits?

It is nonsensical.

My family have always worked, we've never taken anything we haven't been entitled to and we live with in our means. The very epitome of what this Government is trying to encourage and yet we're being kicked in the nuts - and not just us but also the other families who have applied and the staff at the centre which will have a knock on effect on the development of the other children.

Thanks a bunch.

Letter from the leader: Behind the budget

Dear Chris,

Agreeing the Budget is a long and painstaking process.

It started at the beginning of the year, with a presentation by the Chancellor to the Quad (that’s me, him, the PM and Danny Alexander). The information is confidential enough that everyone in the room –even the PM – has to give back the print outs at the end of the meeting for them to be locked away in the Treasury again.

And the discussions on the fine details of our policy plans went right up to the last minute with a succession of emails and phone calls between our offices agreeing changes to the small print.
The series of meetings in between were, as ever, all absorbing, as we traded proposal and counter-proposal and, slowly, a consensus emerged. The one that sticks in my mind most of all was held on a Sunday evening, in an otherwise deserted 10 Downing Street, right after our Spring Conference.
It being a Sunday evening, when most of us would have given anything to be at home with our families, someone laid on dinner. We all had cottage pie as we pored over the figures and agreed the plans.

And at the end of all that economic analysis, confidential briefings and cottage pie, I think we put together a Budget Liberal Democrats can be really proud of.

We cut taxes for people on low and middle incomes: ensuring that from next April no-one will pay tax on the first £10,000 they earn – a total £700 tax cut for millions of working people.
We stopped a planned rise in fuel duty, helping people with one of the biggest worries they face: how to afford to fill up the tank to get to work.

And we’re backing people who want to buy a home with a new scheme called Help to Buy which effectively makes the “bank of mum and dad”many first time buyers have had to rely on available to everyone: an equity loan, on favourable terms, to make your deposit money go further and help you get a mortgage.

This Budget has Lib Dem credentials all through it. Bringing forward the date for Steve Webb's flat rate pension and the cap on care costs for the elderly put forward by Paul Burstow and Norman Lamb. And the cut in beer duty my Yorkshire colleague Greg Mulholland has fought so valiantly for in his campaign to save the local pub!

Of course the Budget wasn’t all good news. The economy is still struggling to emerge from the massive shock it suffered. That's why we sensibly decided to let the debt target slip another year - sticking to our overall plan, but not dogmatically so. As I said at our Spring Conference, we've got to be unflinching but not unthinking in our approach.

That's why we are doing everything possible to get the economy moving, and balance the books. Even in these difficult times, more will be spent on infrastructure in this decade than Labour managed in the last - even though they spent money hand over fist on almost everything else. This budget announced investment in the construction of social and private rented homes, a new £2000 employee allowance to cut the cost of National Insurance when businesses take on staff, and an industrial strategy that has already put £1bn into Britain’s world-beating aviation industry.

This Budget does exactly what I hoped: it delivers on our core objective to build a stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling everyone to get on in life