Public Sector Cuts that will affect all

[Kirstie55]

I'm just wondering how many parents out there are aware of the cuts that Local Authorities are making to frontline Childrens Services and how these are going to affect our children? In Hull 1369 jobs are being cut 650+ of those are vital services in the CYPS- teen parents, connexions, surestart, day centres, youth work- the list goes on!

What are your thoughts?

@ThisIsANiceCage.... the cuts we are talking about on this thread relate to public services rather than disposable income. Those on lowest incomes have had their gross income protected, by and large. Increases in petrol, food and commodity prices may be affecting disposable income but are not wholly determined by the government. And, for those in work but on low incomes, personal allowances have gone up and tax credits remain the same.

The main areas directly impacted by government decision are the cap on housing benefit, VAT and linking benefits to a different index. In the case of VAT, yes that has affected those on lowest incomes disproportionately because a man with £100 paying an extra £1 for something struggles more than a man with £500 paying the same extra £1. However, ask the man with £500 to pay £50 more tax on top of the £1 and things quickly level up.

Children can get careers advice in school and at careers evenings or believe it or not go on line or to the library to check things out.

I accept there is a difficulty in not knowing what jobs there are for some children. In fact if hardly anyone around you even works or you think careers are beauty services or call centre it's harder but there are not that many jobs at the moment at all and self starters of all classes are much more likely to do better. I think we really have had far too much spoon feeding. We need more self reliance. It is a hard world out there and only the few who are prepared to work very hard, get up, seek work etc are likely to find jobs for the next year or two at least.

(As others have said higher rate tax payers have been hit much harder than just about anyone so far and in fact so hard that it will simply mean there will be less tax and people will choose not to be based here, tax revenues will reduce and there will be less to feed the poor)

"It's about addressing social inequalities. ".... Sadly, over the last 13 years, despite all the measures designed to correct social inequality, social mobility has gone backwards. We have greater inequality rather than better. So when looking at the front-line children's services that are supposed to create greater social equality, and squaring that against the money available, we have to be more objective about which actually work and which were a nice idea at the time but are not creating the desired result.

I think they might eradicate social inequality if they got teachers in state schools to teach the children received pronunciation even if the children then spoke in their accented English at home. It would cost nothing. Also confidence, how to shake hands, what to wear, how not to stumble, lots and lots of practice at public speaking. None of that costs a penny.

Yes chil is right about impact of cuts. It's the higher rate tax payers who are now being taxed more, not the poor. Also on VAT some of that is voluntary spending. A lot of us use bikes and walk to places and keep fuel costs down (although I accept not everyone can work from home and they may need to take the bus or in rural areas share cars). I don't often buy clothes and there is on VAT I think on most of the food I buy - which is real proper food not cakes. We can all give up smoking and drinking - I don't do either.

This weird Daily-Mail-esque fantasy world that some of the more right-wing punters here live in....
"It is ridiculous that anyone who thinks they're bright enough for Uni needs handholding through careers guidance."
Sure. That's right. It's not like the most academic schools and universities in the world offer careers guidance. Nooo. No-one at HBS or Wharton or Cambridge or Insead etc ever uses careers advisors.

It's a really bright thing to do to figure out all the answers for yourself and not actively seek advice from others (paid or not). The word mentor has never been invented and the concept is risible. Etc etc.

And this:
"My local county council finance director left the money in Icelandic banks despite being warned they were about to go tits-up. Don't think he's worth £50k, tbh, let alone four times that."

Did it not occur to you, edam, that if you want your LA's FD to make good decisions, you might need to fork out to pay for someone who's a bit better? Bear in mind that the Big 4 accountancy firms pay their partners well in excess of £300k a year, on average - as Gottakeepchangin says newly qualified accountants earn £40k+. If you pay £50k only, you are going to get people who could never hope to be a Big 4 partner. That means they won't be as good. And yet you want them to do a good job with a budget of several hundred million a year. Bonkers!

More idiocy here:
"I think they might eradicate social inequality if they got teachers in state schools to teach the children received pronunciation even if the children then spoke in their accented English at home. It would cost nothing. Also confidence, how to shake hands, what to wear, how not to stumble, lots and lots of practice at public speaking. None of that costs a penny."

They might eradicate social inequality if they taught RP? You've gotta be fuckin' kidding, right? Do you have any idea of what true social inequality looks like? It means having nowhere to sleep, or coming home to violence, or parents who abuse drugs. What fucking difference is RP going to make? And how much confidence do you think you can teach a child when they get the shit kicked out of them on a daily basis?

And where do you get the idea that teaching RP, or deportment (deportment!) costs nothing? It requires a teacher and a classroom. That is a pay cost and a non-pay cost. I believe Swiss finishing schools for gels charge rather a lot for those services. Apparently Eton is quite pricey too, for teaching people
"confidence, how to shake hands, what to wear"

Shilly, my ds wants to do medicine. He therefore, at 14, ordered a load off books from Amazon about how to get into med school. He wrote a CV based on advice he found online. He wrote to a GP practice and asked for some work experience.

Two years later he had a half hour with a careers advisor who told him nothing he hadn't already figured out for himself, because, in Xenia's blunt but true language, he isn't one of the "thick non selfstarters".

Xenia - "children can get careers advice in school and at careers evenings" - not from impartial professionals they can't - we've all been fired! Yes they can go to the library, but careers guidance is about more than dishing out basic information.

And mumblechum - your DS is one child. There are others, believe it or not, who don't know what they want to do, who are confused by a lot of the information available, or who don't have the confidence to take their ideas further.

I'm sure we can all cherry pick children who managed without careers advice, but there are many who have benefited.

And Chil - I would say if social inequality remains, do we not need to do more rather than less to support disadvantaged people?

Of course we should support disadvantaged people, but we also cannot pile up debt as if there's no tomorrow.

This is why councils must be held rigourously to account for their spending decisions, and involvement in your local decision making processes is so important. These cuts may have widely differing impacts for us - not because of what services you might or might not be using at any specific time, but because councils choose their priorities individually and also because council performance varies. Each of us needs to get involved with our own if we want our priorities heard.

"Yes chil is right about impact of cuts. It's the higher rate tax payers who are now being taxed more, not the poor."

As a matter of fact, Xenia, my personal income is so low I don't pay any income tax. But I'm being taxed more.

Be it on new clothes because my old ones are in holes, a pump for my wheelchair wheels, or fuel for delivery services and taxis because I can't use the bus to town anymore (and even if I could, the bus company also has to pay for fuel).

All this before we even begin to contemplate services.

And the "impact of cuts" is not the same as the "amount of money cut". If you and I both had £1000 fraudulently taken from accounts, the "impact" on us would not be the same.

Very sad this is happening.Of course if you have terribly bright children and don't live in a socially deprived area then you're alright Jack.Just hope some of the posters on this thread never have recourse to use some of these services.

ThisIsANiceCage am wondering if I know you??

The special needs board is MUCH friendlier.
Posting in "Chat" may bring this thread to a wider audience!!!

mumblechum1, if your ds is studying medicine, then I hope he'll be able to reinforce the message to you that the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because your son did not need careers advice to help him get into medicine doesn't mean that the only people who do use careers advisors and find them helpful are "thick non selfstarters". I'll say it again: some of the brightest people on the planet make extensive use of the careers advice on offer at prestigious institutions such as Ivy League / RG universities, top state and private schools etc etc. They are not "thick non selfstarters". They are simply aware that there is value in advice, including careers advice.

I find it ironic, actually, that you bring up medicine. Medicine is a notoriously opaque world, where research from the internet is not going to be sufficient to tell you who runs a good Firm, how to weigh the pros and cons of doing an advanced degree for each specialty, the relative prestige of different rotations, etc etc. And that's without the complex policy context, which is for example giving every GP a very tough set of decisions about how involved or not to get in GP commissioning.

" if social inequality remains, do we not need to do more rather than less to support disadvantaged people?"

Yes we need to do as much as we can afford but not necessarily 'more of the same', especially those elements that demonstrably don't work. BTW.. may be a Tory MN-er with all that entails but would like to distance myself from whoever it was who thinks received pronunciation is the answer to social equality.

Yes I did have a small chuckle at the RP idea.

That was my comment. Apparently many employers will decide whether to hire you within about 3 minutes of your opening your mouth. Many now just do telephone interviews to start with whiich presumably in part is to weed out those who cannot communicate in a way that the customers of that particular business can understand (which of course might be a very strong accent relevant to that area but isn't always so).

Haitch, you was never mine almost total incoherence and inability to string together a sentence do have an impact. There it is.

We all know the soft factors behind employment such as if you're fat it's much harder to be hired and if you wear the wrong clothes. I certainly think schools should give children high aspirations where that is realistic for that child.

Sadly we have to cut a lot of things so if some careers services go then children will have to look on line. When I was about 14 - the age of the son mentioned above - I decided for some bizarre reason I wanted a scholarship to a university. I wrote off to a good of them to be sent booklets about obscure scholarships offered often by Victorian benefactors and then I arranged for my school to have me sit their specific exams on the relevant day. No one (not my parents, not anyone) suggested that. Of course because I could read and could cycle to a library that helped me and I knew what a univesrity was and I had the idea to go which some people in some families do not even consider but certainly it is very much survival of the fittest out there at present,.

When the economy picks up we can start spending more money again on those things that matter - like ensuring more young people are verballty coherent adn have the language competence and levels that employers need.

Chil - while it can be difficult to quantify the beneficial effects of careers guidance as the effects may not manifest themselves until some years later (I will try to find some research for you) what evidence do you have that the careers service doesn't work?

What is sad is that so many have bought into the Tory rhetoric that public service spending is the cause of all our problems. The recession was caused by reckless borrowing and lending in the private sector, not by by excessive public spending.

I don't think anyone on the right has said the current cash crisis is caused by public spending issues rather than the recession. We go in cycles and will always have recessions. Where money is available in good times we ought to set it aside for bad and we seem to have failed to do so and now we're having to cut back.

We need to look at where the highest spending is and cut there in ways that have a huge impact and ignore smaller things

''people who leech off the state in state funded jobs''

omg

our council set back about £3million!!

they're still cutting jobs even though they have three years to do so

" what evidence do you have that the careers service doesn't work?"

I didn't say that the careers service didn't work. I said that there are many initiatives that have been set up in recent years designed to improve social mobility and reduce social inequality but that the overall picture suggests that many of them are either not having the desired effect or are not targeted accurately enough to reach the right people. Like the Child Trust fund that was designed to encourage low-income families to set up savings plans for their children... but was, in reality, taken up more by middle/higher income families who were already in the habit of saving.

Public spending doesn't cause recessions and I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that, but it is always going to be one of the things at risk when global trade and then tax-income drops sharply. The credit crunch/banking crisis triggered the recession. The recession hit small business and those working in the private sector first .... big lay-offs & liquidations in the 2008-2009 period. Then the reduction in tax revenue from the financial sector, private individuals and commerce generally means that there is nothing like the money to spend on public services.... so we either keep ramping up debt to pay for it or we spend less. The only 'rehetoric' there is which side you want to jump. I believe, like the government and the Labour party spending plans, that spending & borrowing less is the way forward. Other commentators believe that borrowing more is the right thing to do.

I agree with Chil in that things which ought to have been targeted at the truly poor (tax credits, Surestart, child trust funds, health in pregnancy , EMA, - quite a long list) weren't targeted at the poor, ie unemployed, at all but were thrown at people who were in work and didn't really need them.

" The credit crunch/banking crisis triggered the recession. snip Then the reduction in tax revenue from the financial sector, private individuals and commerce generally means that there is nothing like the money to spend on public services."

Yes that is what happened.

But it misses the key reason that explains why we've been hit so hard over this and why we're facing such drastic cuts. Even before the recession there was nothing like the money we needed to spend on the public services we were receiving. In those "good years" the Government was only able to fund it's spending by borrowing money.

And if you're living a lifestyle that you can only fund by hitting the credit cards in the good years then it should have been obvious that when the bad years came again you would be utterly unable to cope with them. And that's what actually happened.

Other European nations are not having to make such drastic cuts as we are, and that's because they worked during the good years to either run their economy at a profit and save the spare money or to reduce their deficits to a far smaller level than ours.

We didn't do that. During those good years rather than save up for a rainy day we just kept on spending and spending becoming accustomed to a lifestyle that was beyond our means.