Local Councils

Around 150 people turned out for the second Notts anti-cuts meeting on 22 September. The meeting saw a real political and organisational debate. Two Labour MPs spoke (they positively asked to speak rather than being invited), along with the Labour opposition group leader on Notts County Council. All good “fighting talk” but all three failed to respond positively to calls on them to defy demands on them to make cuts. Nottingham AWL put out a leaflet outlining the politics of the cuts and repeating the demand (passed successfully at the Trades Council) for Nottingham’s Labour city council to...

Dan Jeffery, Assistant Branch Secretary of Lambeth UNISON, spoke to Solidarity in a personal capacity. How did Lambeth Save Our Services begin, and how has it developed? Save Our Services initially came out of Lambeth UNISON, GMB, NUT and UCU thinking there needed to be an anti-cuts campaign in the face of the huge cuts from both the Tory/Lib Dem government and the local Labour council. We then got various community groups and activists to come on board, produced 10,000 newsletters for the Lambeth Country Show and have organised several anti-cuts demos and lobbies. This resulted in saving over...

In many areas Labour councillors say they will "fight the cuts" - but also implement them! This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper. They say they have no choice. In fact they can and should use their council positions as platforms to mobilise to defy the cuts. The alternative is not a little harmless trimming. Central government is set to cut councils' funding by 25% over the next four and a half years. Since much that councils do is "statutory" - background stuff that they must do, by law - a 25% cut is huge social destruction. Poplar's Labour council, in 1921, and...

The GMB union has reported (27 September) that on Friday 24th it received from Sheffield City Council "HR1 forms" for 8,500 staff employed by the council. This is the same move as recently made by Birmingham City Council . It means giving workers an ultimatum to accept worse pay and conditions, or be made redundant. Birmingham City Council is a Tory/Lib Dem coalition. Sheffield is Lib Dem. Paul Kenny, GMB General Secretary speaking from the Labour Party conference in Manchester said, "These official notices for 8,500 staff at Sheffield, coming on top of the notices for 26,000 in Birmingham...

Birmingham’s Tory-Lib Dem council has become the latest in a string of public sector employers to interpret the so-called “need” to make cuts as an excuse to take a sledgehammer to their workers’ pay, terms and conditions, and indeed their jobs. 26,000 workers (the entirety of Birmingham’s local government workforce, in fact, excluding education workers) have been issued with Section 188 notices. Section 188 is a notification of intent from an employer to make a number of workers redundant; it is not a formal notice of specific redundancy, so not every worker who receives one will necessarily...

In Camden and Islington (and there are rumours in other London boroughs) there are plans to cut all discretionary mental health services. These are mostly in the voluntary and private sector due to years of outsourcing and privatisation. “Discrectionary services” describes pretty much everything that mental health services do that doesn’t involve an element of social control. Therefore people who use mental health services (whether through choice or coercion) will have the right to a mental health act assessment which should they become really unwell could result in detention in hospital; the...

Barnet Council Unison report that their members working for the collapsed building maintenance firm Connaught have been sacked by conference call. The same is reported happening on Merseyside. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-11257089 According to the BBC report, construction group Morgan Sindall has agreed a deal to take on 2,500 of Connaught's 4,400 workforce. Which leaves the others surplus to requirements? Around the country, council housing tenants are wondering what is going to happen to their repairs service. Since the news of Connaught's collapse, Barnet Unison has been...

The coalition government's Budget proposed a pay freeze in the public sector - but with a £250 rise for those on under £21,000 a year. Details were unclear. Government documents referred to 2011/12, but mentioned 2010/11 for civil servants whose deals were not signed off. In local government the employers were proposing a pay freeze for 2010/11 anyway, and so are not giving even the £250 for the low paid. Many workers who believed the Budget are very unhappy about not getting the £250. Unison is saying it has a dispute over this, and is going for arbitration. In fact this means that local...

Librarians in Southampton struck on 13 August against job cuts, de-skilling and casualisation. This followed a first round of action in June. The council plans to staff libraries with unpaid and untrained volunteers, replacing six full-time trained workers, in order to cut costs. It has said it is dealing with “difficult economic times.” Speaking in the Southern Daily Echo at the start of the dispute several months ago, Unison’s regional organiser Andy Straker said “There is real anger from our members over this issue. They feel that management and councillors are devaluing their skills and...

In 1972, the Tory government told local councils to implement the “Housing Finance Act”, designed to claw in a bit of extra money by increasing council tenant's rents. The context was in some ways similar to that of today – an aggressively pro-profit, anti-worker Tory government seeking to make working-class people pay for economic instability created by capitalism itself. There was significant working-class resistance to the Act, with several Labour councils initially stating that they would refuse to implement it. We reproduce below articles from Workers' Fight (the paper of the forerunner...