Planned Lewisham service cuts?

We had a letter from the mayor through our door this week about coronavirus. On the financial implications for the borough , it said:

‘We are now facing painful and difficult decisions which will impact our services …We are committed to being open and honest with everybody about what changes the proposed cuts might bring. Find out more at www.lewisham.gov.uk/budget2021’

So far as I can see, that page doesn’t say anything about any proposed cuts. On the other hand, there was a piece in ‘The Guardian’ earlier this week (which I’m afraid I can’t now find) which, so far as I can remember, said that Lewisham were proposing to make cuts in ?children’s day centres and in subsidised travel for disabled people.

Does anyone know what’s going on and how we can engage with this ‘open and honest’ dialogue?

Slightly aside, I note that page uses four large graphics with text, but has no alternative tag on those images for screen readers and accessibility tools. I’ve also noticed Damian Egan tweeting statements as graphics in the past too (rather than linking to a statement on lewisham.gov.uk).

I think this all falls foul of the Government’s GDS Accessibility Regulations and I hope Lewisham are called up on it to fix this.

Anyway, back to topic, from early November, Grainne Cuff had reported on the proposed budget cuts:

I would quote from the article, but there’s so much in it, that you have to read it yourself to do it justice - though noting it’s mainly draft proposals, with more to be announced in January for the 2021/22 budget in February.

Thanks. It sounds as if the press article draws on a ‘published’ council document. Do you know where this can this be found? Is the expectation that we should offer comments on it?

I here you go - I believe it is item 5 from the Sustainable Development Meeting, held 2020-11-12T19:00:00Z.

Meeting agenda details are here:

The item 5 pdf is here, but also note there are no less than 10 appendices giving further information and details on specific sections.

The opening paragraphs of item 5 give a good summary of the challenge ahead:

I guess this invites comment as much as any other council policy, and until the minutes are published it may be difficult to guage any specific or discussed concerns of Councillors. Unfortunately it looks like significant cuts are needed and there are only difficult decisions to be had.

Thanks again, @ForestHull.

I challenge anyone other than the officials who drafted them to make sense of these papers, which are written in the densest kind of officialese. Unhelpfully for the lay reader, they are organised not by service (adult social care, traffic, housing etc) but by ‘strategic budget themes’ (productivity, ‘service reconfiguration’, better ‘demand management’, etc) .I can find nothing to suggest that they are going to form the basis of any sort of document which the public could read and understand and even (who knows?) express a view on.

However, if anyone’s interested, I recommend appendix 1 as the best overview of all the proposals.

So far as I can see, the two biggest overall areas where savings are expected in 2021/22 are staff productivity (A-01) and reduction of demand for adult social care (F-01) - £3m in each case. I have a special interest in the latter, as a close relative of ours is supported by Lewisham adult social services. After a lot of hunting around, I discovered that section 3 of appendix 7 deals with this. It seems that basically nothing new is being proposed; the idea is merely actually to implement the things they would have done this year had it not been for Covid-19. These include ‘developing the workforce to increase productivity and manage demand, making the assessment processes leaner’ (love that word.)

F-18 will be of interest to readers of this forum:

‘To meet the challenge of the Climate Emergency in Lewisham, extending our CPZs borough wide would be a key tool as part of the Councils approach to tackling the Climate Emergency and reducing theimpact of the car on the environment and health. Given the need for development,design and engagement, it is proposed that this would have to be year 3 of the budget cycle, in 2023/24…Currently there are 163 kms of uncontrolled parking within the Borough or 77% of the available public highway. If CPZ’s were introduced into these half of these streets, based upon the above policy, over a 2 year period, a by-product [love that word] of this approach would be annual net income in the region of £4m’

CPZ’s as a response to climate emergency. Do they really think anyone can believe that BS?

Grainne Cuffe has a follow-up article in Newshopper about the proposed cuts, which makes for grim reading:

The full article has more details as well as statements from the Lewisham Mayor and Councillors.

Sounds reasonable, provided we can pay in a civilized manner using cash or a card, rather than via a horrible and fiddly little app on our phones, which will induce me, as a dyspraxic, technophobic and cognitively challenged old duffer, to a state of screaming panic.

As the close relative of an ASC user, don’t like the sound of that at all.

Apparently they plan to make £100,000 p/a by clamping down on dumping, littering, pissing on the pavement and dog fouling while simultaneously cutting “environmental services” and laying off staff. Whatever it is these guys are smoking, I want some.

No mention of collecting unpaid Council Tax I see. The last LBL figures I saw for 2015/16 there was over £5.3mil uncollected; so, assuming that was a “normal” year just making people pay their dues would go a long way to closing the gap.

I did scratch my head over that as well.

Perhaps they didn’t pay their council tax because they hadn’t got very much money and gave a higher priority to other things, for example feeding their children.