Monklands Woman's Aid lose contract - given to 'gender neutral' facilities

[ArabellaScott]

Statement from Monklands Womens Aid:

'We are devastated at NLC’s decision to remove funding from proven specialist women’s aid services.
Monklands Women’s Aid is a grassroots organisation that has been serving our community for 40 years. It is built on the premise of women supporting women, and as such we are a trusted independent local service which helps change and save lives. This decision undermines the availability of quality proven local independent specialist support.
Monklands Women’s Aid will survive because of separate funding and will continue to offer women’s, children and young person’s services, as well as offer specialist refuge provision.
Our core focus is supporting women, children and young people who have suffered domestic abuse and our approach, practice and understanding has been built up by listening to those we work with. We listen to those we serve and we shape our services accordingly. They know what they need and what works for them so we listen and respond in a manner that meets their individual need.
We are trusted by our community, and have grown out of grass roots movements in the area. This level of trust and understanding is not something that can be replicated by generic providers. Be under no allusion domestic abuse is a form of gender based abuse and women routinely lose their lives due to domestic abuse. This decision to award a contract to a non-specialist community justice organisation makes the mistake of seeing domestic abuse as gender neutral and will negatively impact on women, children and young people.'

From Neil Gray MP:

'Last night, North Lanarkshire Council revealed that the local Women’s Aid organisations had lost the tender to continue providing services to domestic abuse victims in the area.
This is an extremely disappointing move and means there is an unsecure future for Monklands Womens Aid, Motherwell & District Women’s Aid and North Lanarkshire Women's Aid services and staff. I also believe this decision has the potential to harm the confidence of women and children who have relied on the services of local Women's Aid groups because of the relationships and trust built over many years.'

There is a petition on change.org, 'Council to continue funding womans aid'.

Shocking news. I can't find much more about it, this is all on facebook posts, not in the news as far as I can find

@HoldontoOneMoreDay

It’s very tough times and orgs will bid for what they can to survive. I cannot daily any of them in this and I’ve seen very good orgs go to the wall before as a result of competitive rendering. Do we know if there’s a requirement for them to TUPE staff as part of the new tender?

Can not FAULT

www.monklandwomensaid.co.uk/about-us/latest-publications/care-inspectorate-report/

Link to their Care Inspectorate Report in 2019- excellent.

[quote RJnomore1]@HoldontoOneMoreDay

It’s very tough times and orgs will bid for what they can to survive. I cannot daily any of them in this and I’ve seen very good orgs go to the wall before as a result of competitive rendering. Do we know if there’s a requirement for them to TUPE staff as part of the new tender?[/quote]
I'd say SACRO are thriving though. They're managing to employ two business development managers in their Executive team, for example...

I'm so despondent about this. This is what we've been talking about - the purity cycle can never be satisfied. Once you open the door, you open the floodgates - women absolutely, utterly, cannot have anything to themselves. Inclusivity means you include everyone and that is a fucking disaster for women.

@HoldontoOneMoreDay they will continue to thrive by diversifying their activities...the sector is under funded and short term funded and this is the result.

Anyway do we know about TUPE?

I don't know about TUPE no, but I would take an educated guess that a) it will be a completely different service so TUPE won't apply and b) women's sector workers may not have the skills required to do gender neutral work, even if they wish to, because they will all have an absolute commitment that the causes and cures of violence against women and girls are gendered, c) there will - hilariously - no doubt be equalities exempt posts, ie the new service will recruit men to work with men (which I agree with normally, it just seems a bit ironic here) and d) I suspect most workers will be on fixed-term contracts tied to the funding cycle anyway.

TUPE can still apply to fixed term contracts. I don’t work there but I have some links so I will see if I can find anything out.

The tender documents must be publically available too

TUPE would only apply if the sucessful organisations for the funding are literally going to run the existing service provided by Monklands WA.

This de-funding of speicalist women's services has been going on for years, just as likely to be labour as tory. And it is nearly always about refusing to acknowledge that same sex services are important. One labour council took away funding from the local women's refuge because they said after all it is just a housing issue and they funded a hostel in the largest town in the area!

Hard as it might be to accept the gains of 70s women's liberation that set up refuges and rape crisis centres based on the common experience that women have of male violence, has never received wide spread political support.

That is why Refuge (the organisation) has always had close contacts with government because it isn't based on feminist principles, and why Women's Aid has never had the same links.

And, refuges have never ever been funded by private donations.

The intial funding of refuges came through utilising HB. this was not only economically beneficial for local councils, it helpled councils and other funders avoid acknowledging that they were having to fund projects because of male violence. In terms of feminist politics in the this country this was one of the decisions that has had a long term negative impact on the provision of DV services. I think it was Ken Livinstone, or his co-conpsirator John McDonnell.

@ArabellaScott - do you have the link for the Monklands WA statement? thanks

Just watching this too. It’s beyond shocking for councils to defund women’s aid services in the current climate especially. Horrific.

It is. Shameful.

Asked why on Instagram and they said they've been told clearly it's because they don't support men and don't support perpetrators. (My bold)

WTAF?

Just saw earlier today that Solace Women's Aid which is one of the largest conglomorate group in London advertises on their home page that part of their work is to work with men, not only as survivors of domestic violence, but as perpetrator.

I think you will find all of the now large institutional women's aid groups offer this service. Basically if you want to money to have to follow the agenda of the funder not your own.

This was said in response to a Q asking what reasons were given as to why they lost their funding:

"Gaps in wider equality agenda were identified when NLC undertook a review of domestic abuse services across NLC. NLC made a decision to widen the context and broaden their inclusivity to fill identified gaps; services for men, perpetrator programmes etc., Details on NLC webpage."

To some extent this may be the natural result of the way outsourcing works in practice - in principle it could allow lots of specialist providers, but really the government can't be bothered doing all the paperwork, so they will try to get one provider to provide a huge bundle of services.

Thus "blahco" ends up running everything from schools to prisons to waste collection, and only the hugest corporations can compete for such contracts. Private (near-)monopolies instead of a state monopoly.

If you've got to provide services both for male and female, then obviously the government is going to be inclined to favour one org that does both. So transactivists saying "single sex spaces are bad" are just telling government what they want to hear, and giving them the cover for disfavouring single-sex providers based on cost/admin/effort.

Maybe "blahco" can do a good job, but this utterly screws any sort of smaller local venture like Monklands - obviously they're going to be focused on women as that's 90% of the demand, and where being single-sex is most effective.

I guess the problem is that there is no male Monklands? Men are not setting up their own corresponding male DV shelters to cover the 10%. There may be no counter-organisation to Monklands so they can cover the full service between them.

Effectively men get veto power by inaction - "well, if we don't set up a male service, then they won't use your female one, will they? Bummer." Any female-only org is just going to be forced to run a male companion service themselves to be allowed to provide the female service.

@NecessaryScene1

Bingo

I said in the thread about Rise losing their contract in Brighton that I suspect this is down to the LA tendering for a non-gendered service, i.e. the LA seeking provision for all residents of the LA area by one organisation, and the specialist women's group's bids not fulfilling that criterion.

I still think that ultimately it will likely result in a poorer overall service provided to women, but it's not necessarily some sort of conspiracy driven by a pro-trans or misogynistic agenda.

not necessarily some sort of conspiracy driven by a pro-trans or misogynistic agenda.

Indeed. Unfortunately it doesn't need to be a conspiracy. The whole agenda just is very much suiting a lot of people's different interests.

I suspect there's very little or no actual lobbying activity in this case - this isn't Vancouver Rape Relief.

But it's downstream of that - female-only services are no longer unambiguously a "thing that are obviously needed" that people would be shocked at the failure to provide. They think they can defund them without expecting much shaming (at least from the people in their social circle...)

While I don't think it's a conspiracy, funds are being diverted away from services specifically designed to support women and children who are the overwhelming victims of DV to provide other services. At a time when DV rates are through the roof, this is a particularly low blow

Abd the things is necessary they’re right.

According to this a third of people don’t think it matters if the pandemic causes inequality between men and women to get worse (researchers using gender when they mean sex)

www.theguardian.com/inequality/2021/feb/25/job-losses-in-pandemic-due-to-performance-issues-say-nearly-half-of-britons

stumbledin www.facebook.com/MWAcoatbridgeairdrie/

@Clymene

It's in keeping with LA commissioning of services provided by third sector in all areas over the past ten or so years.

They are continually asking us to do more and more, take on provision for previously uncatered for groups, but when it comes to retendering the value of the contracts shrink every single time. They've even cut the terms in the middle of contracted periods before, and basically challenged small charities to take them to court if they don't like it.

I think that LA's absolutely should be funding services for all groups, but in this specific area the organisations that are going to miss out are invariably women-only services, because before now, they have been, with a very few exceptions, the only providers of this sort of service.

I'd love to know what the thinking is behind the shift to tendering for non-gendered services, as this seems to me a guaranteed way to ensure the quality of provision ultimately ends up harmed. The only thing that actually matters here is the viability of the service provided, and I can't help but feel the more specialist and specific that is, then the better it is for everybody. There's always a degree of natural atrophy whenever one organisation takes over a contract from another, and I'm struggling to think of a real-life case whereby it's resulted in a unanimous increase in satisfaction with the service provided.

Abd the things is necessary they’re right.

And that's why you can never be complacent.

You fight for something, you (eventually) get it. But it's not permanent. It requires annual funding.

People take it for granted. People forget what it was like without it - many weren't even born during the fight to get it.

Eventually the funding dries up and goes away because no-one's actively fighting for the thing that was so obviously vital when it wasn't there.

So you have to start again to bring it back.

(This model applies to pretty much everything in society though, even up to massive things, like "peace" or "freedom of speech" or "secularism")

Just to say there is a 'gofundme' for Monklands Women's Aid, if anyone can spare a shovel or so.

It might not need to be a deliberate conspiracy but you can’t really argue that it is misogyny. They are taking away funding that is needed to save the lives of women and children and giving it to abusers.

Domestic abuse perpetrator programs are not very effective. The only reason men do them is to gain access to their kids when there is a fuck load of evil that they should never be allowed to see them again. So they are spending money that is meat to be protecting victims on enabling their further abuse through the family court.

Didn’t Women’s Aid attempt to appease by TWAWing? It might serve as a timely warning that there is never enough ; the only possibility is total capitulation to MRA.