Hammond does it again!

As expected Labour’s Deputy Leader, the bearded fool, Peter Hammond is destroying yet more of Bristol’s Social Services because the hopeless incompetent can’t understand – let alone control – expenditure in his department (again).

Back in 2005, as leader of the council, Hammond ditched Bristol’s day care services – and those using them – to plug an £18m budget deficit. Fast forward to 2007 and we find Hammond needing to balance another budget he’s fucked up, this time by allowing home care costs to spiral upwards, instead of being six months into a reform process he canceled without another plan.

The target now is the city council’s residential care services for the elderly with extremely vulnerable and ill residents being put on the line so that Hammond can dig himself out of the shit. His plan is for eight city council care homes are to be closed – and the complex needs of the clients instead met by Hammond’s trusty in-house home care service – while the rest of the homes will be handed to the private sector to run.

All well good and until you hear what Tory Geoff Gollop has to say about this. He points out that Hammond’s cost cutting proposal has been drafted by comparing the high costs to the council of complex needs-based residential services with the low cost of the private sector’s charges for low-intensity home care-style services. They’re not the same thing.

And the result? Just what Hammond wants to hear at the moment. The council can make huge savings by closing homes and handing services to the private sector.

This plan and the budgetary disaster it entails is expected to start unraveling in January next year.