12/9 View from the Trent

View from the Trent         Eric Pickles warned that cuts will cause social problems December 3, 2010 at 3:44 PM   There are some worried faces among the leadership at Nottingham City Council. It's been doing some serious number crunching on the likely impact of the government's changes to the annual cash funding it gives to our town halls. Services and jobs are at stake, says the city's Labour Leader Councillor Jon Collins. The Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles is due to make his announcement fairly soon; it's already been delayed. But councils have a pretty strong clue that the so-called "area-based grants", the funding formula used by Whitehall to allocate cash support, is to be changed. Jon Collins believes the aim is not only to cut budgets but also to shift resources from some of the big cities to the shire counties. That alone will have an impact. "Funding to help young people out of drugs. That's gone. The Connexions scheme to help young people find work and apprenticeships. That's gone. Funding to tackle teenage pregnancies. That's gone. These cuts will hit some of the most vulnerable people in our big cities," he says. Finance experts have already calculated that the city's annual budget of £272m faces an 18% cut next year - that's £58m, almost as much as the city's schools' budget. The council has 6,800 employees (11,000 when you include schools staff). The Coalition has talked of budget reductions of around 25-30% over the course of this parliament. But it's the scale of the cuts next year... so-called front-loading... that is causing particular alarm. I've seen a confidential list of 37 different council funded projects in Nottingham that face being chopped or seriously cut back. They range from concessionary bus fares to schemes to tackle anti-social behaviour. The council's Deputy Leader Graham Chapman highlights what he calls "cuts by stealth", which he warns will cause social problems. The Coalition's proposals for a "Pupil Premium" is aimed at targeting additional funding at vulnerable communities with low academic achievements. But the message from Nottingham is that the "Pupil Premium is flawed because of the way the funding is worked out. Some public sector figures think young people will be hit hard by cuts "Some of our poorest schools will lose money out of it and some of the better off schools in the counties will gain. We've calculated we'll lose four or five million on that. And that's because the formula will be based on children who receive free school meals. "The government should stick with the deprivation index. That's a much more accurate measurement for distributing funding to the most needy areas," he says. "A lot of our young people are going to be hit very, very hard. If you have a lot of young people without any income, without any work or training schemes, there will be the type of social problems, which I thought we had already dealt with. I am very concerned about that." Eric Pickles has already urged councils to dip into their reserves to mitigate the effects of the recession and the budgets cuts. That's not cutting any ice among Nottingham's Labour leadership.             This email was sent to asad.ali2.mirjat@blogger.com. Delivered by Feed My Inbox PO Box 682532 Franklin, TN 37068 Account Login Unsubscribe Here