While our idiot councillors and idiot senior council officers write out a blank cheque to an international Swiss gangster operation for something between £17m and £40m – depending on who you want to believe – to host four football matches in 2018, there’s been rather less publicity about the more prosaic matter of the huge budget deficit the council is running up in the here and now.
So how do the council intend to fix this deficit then? By hitting the old, the unwell, the disabled and the mentally ill hard of course!
A report to the Resources Scrutiny Commission on 4 December explains all:
• We are undertaking a programme of reviews of care packages for older people. A target saving of over £400k has been set for the remainder of this year.
• The temporary team established to ensure maximum take up of continuing health care funding remains in place and has been set an additional savings target of £500k for this year.
• A programme of care package reviews for people with learning difficulties and PSI is also well underway. A realistic savings target for this financial year is currently being determined.
• Reviews of mental health packages are also being implemented. A target saving for this year of £500k has been set and the team remain confident that significant savings can be made.
Charming isn’t it? Blank cheques for the wealthy accompanied a few weeks later by savage funding cuts for the voiceless and the vulnerable. The term ‘scum’ doesn’t begin to do justice to the people who run this city.
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This is another reason I really, REALLY hope we don’t win the world cup bid – they’ll probably institute a policy of mugging poor people in the street and demolishing all the council housing with the tenants still inside to pay for the frigging thing.
I really hope someone who ISN’T a hippie or trot starts a serious campaign against this corrupt bid.
Yeah – but that £40m they’re spending on the World Cup is going to bring in £250m to the city which means we’ll be able to afford social care for everyone! No-one will have to work again!
As long as all the spectators spend £1500 each we’ll be fine.
As I’m in my 50s, I don’t want to be in Bristol when I may need to call on the denuded public services in my old age, when the city is so badly in hoc the only people able to afford to live here will be the developers, who will of course all shop at Tesco…how dare they do this to the people of Bristol so a few of their mates can make a killing?
Oh Lordy ! Mrs Blobby and the Lib Dem Babs Wanke along with Humpty Numpty Eddy have signed the papers for the football croud but left the rest of the city high and dry. No doubt the richest man in Bristol Mr landsdown has paid all of them lots of cash to put it through on the nod. Backhanders and brown envelopes have probably passed through to these people. No doubt Cllr Steve Comer has had his allowances topped up as well ! His lack of charisma is only matched by his lack of integrity with public funds over his travel expenses ! GIVE US our money back Comer ! Its seems to me these arseholes don’t care if pensioners are abused, starved and bullied by legal tospotts or if people with learning difficulties are fucked by the system ! Why do we pay these people all this money when their such WANKERS !!!!!!!!!!!! Give us a refund ! why waste our mony on assbandits, asylum seekers, somalis, lazy work shy bastards who balme foreigners for all of societies problems when they can’t get off their own arse to get a job and bone idle tarts !
One for spEak You’re bRanes there , I think…
Not at all. Clearly, Bob Jones is someone who blames foreigners (and ‘assbandits’) for all of society’s problems. It’s just that we can assume he isn’t a lazy work shy bastard. Thank goodness for that.
On another more important point, BCC are clearly ‘not fit for purpose’… Time to do something about it.
How dare these scumbag rich bastards cut back help to the elderly and disabled. They are living off of the sweat from the working Bristol people, whose parents/grandparents, some of whom survived the bombing/war, rebuilt this great city of ours.
These scumbags aint fit to clean their shoes. They are the same ones that stand around the War Memorial with solemn faces on Remembrance Day, fucking hypocrites.
Why is this cosy little clique voted in time and again, I for one am sick of the sight of their two faces rule, and their grubby little self- enhancing deals.
Wonder how long they will hold back publishing plans to privatise social and care services again
Home care services are already 80% privatised bristolwestpaul, as you know full well because all of that outsourcing happened under Labour administrations.
You know I had the strangest feeling just now that things are going to be so bad economically that the council are actually going to end up doing a discreet bunk. That eventually when they’ve sucked us completely dry they’ll just fuck off and leave the country with all our cash, like one of those old-time, Bond Villain style third world dictators.
What a curious thought…
Get out – please give calculations for 80%
Perhaps 80% is the new Lib Dem/Ormondroyd target?
I think we should be told.
January 2009, Question MQ6, Q1:
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/committee/2009/ta/ta000/0113_11c.pdf
You can also watch Cllr Pickup’s response to the supplementary here, 3h 31min in, where he says 80% private was Labour’s target:
http://www.bristol.public-i.tv/site/player/pl_compact.php?a=21632&t=0&m=wm&l=en_GB
These figures are well known, as it was that Home Care provision was already over 50% private sector in 2007 when Labour ran their dishonest “Don’t privatise Home Care” campaign. But simple facts like this will never stop the Labour Party trying to scare the vulnerable into voting for them again.
Cant get much clearer than that!
What no response from BristolwestPaul?
Isnt it interesting how quiet the unions were while Labour privatised that last 30% slice of Home Care, compared to when the Lib Dems tried it? One could be tempted to say that the previous campaign against outsourcing was politically motivated, hey?
What is Oliver Maunder talking about ? if he expects each spectator to spend £1500 he must be in cloud cukoo land.
So Mr Smith wants the calculations and the Bristol Blogger says “we should be told ” and you were. It seems to have gone very quiet on this issue from all the Labour politicians who had so much to say on this subject when they were misleading the public. Do we have any comments from the unions ,especially Mr Beynon senior who was so helpful in getting his boy elected.
In fact the spending on home care this year is well over planned budget and what is happening is not cuts but a limit being put on the increase in spending.
We are also putting in planned increases for next year.
The number of hours of homecare delivered has increased massively.
His Boy is incompetent anyway.
“Cuts” or “limits” people will be going without homecare who need it won’t they Gary?
Why don’t you just ditch the 20+ senior mangers you’re paying – at a cost of £1m plus a year- who appear nowhere in your management structure charts but continue to slouch around the Counts Louse receiving handouts paid by us?
Gary you mean you are trying to get to grip with a budget that is out of control, the budget you set in February – looks like panic to me.
Still no comment on the Labour privatisation then Paul? You’re an evasive boy arent you.
Spending £4M more than last year on homecare and other adult social care and delivering more service to more people is not a cut in any sensible persons understanding.
Most of this budget was prepared by Labour and they only flounced out of office when we stopped them spending billions on the incinerator.
Cetainly there were spending pressures under the surface that we inherited from your chums (even if you pretend they are nothing to do with you most of the time)Mr Smith.
Like plans that cost hundreds of thousands on a care home that could never have done the job.
Care to comment on the 80% figure Mr Smith?
Do you approve of Labour having done the privatisation or not?
The Labour Party always like to face both ways at once Gary, didn’t you know that?
I was amused when my brother (who lives in Bristol) told me Labour resigned the Cabinet because your Lib Dems wouldn’t support them building an incinerator.
Back home in SW Devon our Labour candidate is telling everyone sad enough to read his blog how many leaflets he’s delivered against the Tory Council’s plans for……an incinerator!
Labour will always ‘campaign for the workers’ in opposition, but as soon as they get their hands on office they sell them out quicker than you can say kinife!
“Spending £4M more than last year on homecare and other adult social care and delivering more service to more people is not a cut in any sensible persons understanding.”
Gary, could you expand on that a little?
The adult services total spend budgetted for 200-09 was £155 million:
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/cms-service/download/asset/?asset_id=30144071 – page 15
while the same total spend for 2009-10 was £167 million:
http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/cms-service/download/asset/?asset_id=30144072 – page 27
Are there more detailed budgets online you can point me at? I can’t match this (roughly a £12 million increase) with your £4 million.
In actual fact the budget figure quoted for 8/9 was 115.8m and 121.1 m for 9/10.
This planned increase of 5.3 M was partly taken up with basic inflation but there were plans for some increase in service provision.
In fact the service provision has raced ahead and the £2M “cuts referred to were to restrict the over budget spending this year to £4M (therefore total £125M) .
Much of the increased provision has been in extra homecare services but there has also been some unproductive spending when for example we had empty care beds caused by the delayed residential care decision.
Still waiting for someone from Labour to comment on their privatisation hypocracy.
Like Gary, I cant find the numbers Inks refers to. It’s not entirely correct to simply compare baseline budgets between years, because there may be changes to the scope of the service itself, or changes to accounting for ring-fenced grants; for example partners may transfer responsibility for delivery and budgeting to or from the Council, which can make the department total jump by a great deal.
(This can cause problems itself, if the partner transfers the responsibility to us, but then doesn’t send all the cash… happened a bit earlier this year with the PCT, who are also skint!)
The “£2m cuts” BB refers to are measures to prevent the Adult Care overspend expanding to £6m in this year.
This overspend has arisen for a combination of 3 reasons:
1. Extra base demand that wasnt budgeted for this time last year
2. The recession
3. The inability of the framework Labour set up after their “Don’t privatise” campaign to deal with the real world. We appear to have the worst of both worlds now, i.e. much of the service privatised but the old structures in place.