Posts Tagged ‘Tameside council’

Osborne’s new austerity will force local government beyond breaking point

09/12/2014, 08:02:33 PM

by Kieran Quinn

December the 12th is one of my favourite days of the year: I attend the pensioner Christmas party in my ward. It’s an opportunity to mark the contribution that many of our senior citizens have made to Tameside in Greater Manchester. It also gives people the chance to celebrate and socialise with other Tameside pensioners.

With further austerity measures being levelled on local government over the next few years, I fear for the future of events like these, and services that residents have taken for granted.

£142 million will have been taken from our budget by 2017, we are currently consulting on the £38 million of cuts imposed upon our borough over the next two years, and we are now at a tipping point. Put simply, with half of our budget taken away we simply cannot fund the same level of services, and our workforce has halved so far. We are beyond the approach of doing more for less, despite a hardworking, innovative and dedicated workforce.

As the 980 residents that have taken part in our budget consultation will know, nearly two thirds of our budget is spent on safeguarding the very young and the very old. These services are statutory, laid down in law by parliament. With no additional resources put into these services our ability to provide for our most vulnerable citizens will come into question.

While any funding ring-fenced for the NHS is welcome(a one-off figure of £2 billion , not year on year) a more holistic approach to public sector funding is needed. If you cut our budget by £142 million, high spend areas such as Adult Services are not immune from this and the pressure on NHS resources goes up. It is both morally and economically sensible to integrate these budgets, the emphasis must be on early help in the home and community.

Enough really is enough. If the Chancellor genuinely believed “we are all in these challenging financial times together”, he would have responded to the cross party call for a fair approach to local government finances and deliver an even bolder approach to devolution.

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Let us build our way to growth and well-being

26/09/2014, 06:02:30 PM

by Kieran Quinn

Many of us have direct experience of friends and family that aspire to own their own home but fail at the first hurdle due to the spiraling cost.

According to the latest census information, meeting housing demand will require the building of 245,000 new homes each year. This is 145,000 more than is currently being built per year. House building levels are now only slowly rising from the lowest level of activity since the 1920s.

This housing shortage has led to a massive increase in the price of housing, excluding many young first time buyers from getting their first foot on the property ladders

In 1997 it took an average family 3 years to save up for a proper deposit on a home, today this can take 22 years. Ed Miliband announced plans that go someway towards addressing this. The pledge to commit the Labour Party to increase the level of house building in the UK to 200,000 homes per year is a welcome step.

A key part of stimulating new house building will be to unlock capacity in small house builders.

25 years ago 2/3 of new homes were built by small builders, this has fallen to less than 1/3 today. The number of firms building between 1-500 units has also fallen from 12,000 to less than 3,000 over the same period. Labour’s “Help to Build” scheme will attempt to address this through improving access to finance by guaranteeing a proportion of bank loans to small house builders.

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