3 February - Penny pinching Hurts the vulnerable
One of this week’s news stories is that the council is looking for yet more
cuts to cover a shortfall in the government’s grant to Bexley. How much extra
they are looking to save is unclear as yet but health,
adult social care and children’s services are all in the firing line again.
Times are hard, no one would deny that but the council fat cats are steadfastly
refusing to shoulder any of the burden themselves. Last October the council
Leader put out a story for the benefit of newspaper headlines that she was thinking
of reducing the number of councillors but didn’t mention the idea at all at the
November meeting to discuss the cuts. She won’t talk about
reducing councillor’s generous allowances at all and believes the staff on well
above the Prime Minister’s salary “deserve it” and “are worth it”.
Councillors’ allowances add up to almost £900,000 a year, salaries of the fattest cats
another £2 million or so. If Leader O’Neill had been serious about her proposal
to reduce councillor numbers by a third and imposed a modest reduction in allowances, half
a million would be saved. Modest salary reductions, not the draconian ones being imposed on
care home wardens, would push the savings
towards a full million. But no; it’s the vulnerable who must suffer again.
An example of this is councillor
David Hurt’s proposals for health
and social care. His ideas are unfortunately too jargon-ridden to be clear but
he speaks of using “helpful technology” as part of a “new prevention model”.
If this is restricted to the wearing of a pendant which includes an emergency
button then one must wonder why it hasn’t been in use before now, but presumably
it goes beyond that. My experience of the very elderly is that they tend to hate
anything that relies on a plethora of buttons and I hope councillor Hurt accounts
fully for their requirements. The omens are not good because among his proposals
is for “adult transport services and (their) closer integration with Bexley Care
Trust” and “to outsource our adult transport service to an outside provider.
This will provide a service focused more closely on the needs of customers, as
well as generating a financial saving”. Presumably
councillor David Hurt does not
read the News Shopper because if he did he would know that some transport services are
already outsourced and things are not going well.
A recent episode involved a patient at Queen Mary’s with a 9.30 a.m.
appointment for chemotherapy whose transport arrived to collect her at
6.45 a.m. for the ten minute journey. If it was not for the intervention
of a neighbour who drove the old lady to Q.M.H. she would have missed her chance of
life-saving treatment and the hospital would have incurred the extra costs of another appointment. But it
doesn’t matter because some bean-counter in an office has saved a few pounds for
his own organisation to the detriment of someone’s health and extra costs for a
hospital. If the fat cats weren’t so greedy some of these cuts would not be necessary.