Not such a happy new year for Oldham

MICHAEL MEACHER

MICHAEL MEACHER writes on the damaging local effects of government cuts

No Happy New Year this time round: it’s going to be grim.

We now have enough information from the Government to have a pretty good idea about what is about to hit Oldham. It does not make cheery reading.

Oldham is the 42nd most deprived local authority in the country and the 39th worst in terms of income deprivation.

Over a quarter of Oldham residents live in households with incomes below £15,000 a year, the level generally regarded as the poverty line in today’s Britain.

On this seriously deprived town the impact of the cuts will be stark.

It’s current annual NHS budget of £420m is being cut by £80m over the next two years (a cut of 19 per cent) and the local authority grant from the Government is being cut by £41m (out of a total budget of £210m once the pass through education grant is excluded, i.e. a cut of nearly 20 per cent).

These cuts are huge, and will change the face of public services in Oldham out of all recognition.

How does this pan out for the average family in the town?

In health terms, there will be at least 1,000 NHS job losses in Oldham from consultants to nursing assistants over the next three years.

Four planned new health centres have been stopped and the four new GP practices (which Labour funded in one of the most under-doctored areas of the country) are either being amalgamated or curtailed. Only one will survive.

Support for the most vulnerable groups in the community, both young and adult social care as well as support for the elderly, is being specially targeted.

The programme called Supporting People (to enable pensioners and other disabled groups to stay in their own homes rather than be transferred to care homes) has been cut by £179,000, the Mental Health Advocacy programme by £87,000, and the Learning and Disability Development Fund by £142,000.

Children and Young People’s Services, including the very important Surestart centres, are being cut by £3m and Adult Social Care by a further £3.8m.

Council services will be devastated by the huge grant reduction from the Government because the Area-Based Grant has been deleted and councils have been told to fund activity through the main council budget which has itself been cut dramatically.

At least 800 council jobs are being made redundant which, despite the £25m budget cuts being made next year, will cost £18m in redundancy pay.

In terms of security and law and order, 120 front-line police jobs are being chopped, together with fewer Community Support Officers and a reduction in forensic staff.

Inevitably, this must mean less detection and prosecution, more anti-social behaviour, and greater insecurity for the public with 10,000 prison places also cut and fewer probation officers to supervise convicted persons in the community.

Last, but by no means least, housing is being made a disaster area.

The 15-year project called Housing Market Renewal which would have achieved government investment of £500m and attracted external investment of some £2bn during its life, which would have transformed housing in Oldham, is being abandoned after seven years.

In two of the most deprived wards in Oldham (Derker and Werneth) there are now 369 boarded-up properties, with 83 occupied houses in the middle of boarded-up rows.

These people are now suffering environmental blight, infestation of vermin, and are often the target for severe anti-social behaviour, leaving them in helpless limbo for years.

This is besides the Government’s latest measures to cap Local Housing Allowance and peg Housing Benefit to the bottom third of private sector rents in each area, down from the current average.

In Oldham 2,600 households will be affected by these measures.

People in a one-bed property will lose £312 a year, £260 a year in a two-bed property, and £364 in a three-bed property.

Because a quarter of Local Housing Allowance claimants are in low-paid employment and because Housing Benefit is means-tested, these cuts will of course hit the poorest hardest.

What is so painful about all this is that the people of Oldham have done nothing to deserve this.

It is happening for two reasons.

It is because, as everyone knows, the bankers by their reckless and greed nearly derailed the whole economy and had to be bailed out at a cost of tens of billions of pounds.

It is also because the Tory/Lib-Dem Government then chose to reduce the budget deficit (which did indeed have to be reduced), not by a job creation programme to restore economic growth and government revenues, but by colossal spending cuts hitting the victims and not those responsible for the financial crash.

That is why these cuts have to be resisted.