Category Archives: Sleaze

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2 Dec 2017

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Accountability, Affordable and Social Housing, Cranbrook, Developers/ Development, Estate rentcharges, Persimmon, Public Open Space, Sleaze

Another new-build developer scam

Estate rent charges apply in Cranbrook:

“Thousands of homeowners on private estates are facing unregulated and uncapped maintenance fees, amid allegations that developers have created a cash cow from charging for communal areas not maintained by the council.

Management contracts for “unadopted” private estates are frequently sold off to speculators and property management companies in the same way as freeholds and ground rents – leaving homeowners with spiralling fees and nowhere to turn.

If a new-build estate is “unadopted” it means communal areas such as roads, grass verges, pavements and playgrounds are retained by the developer. The developer then usually sub-contracts day-to-day management.

These companies then pass on the costs to homeowners (both freeholders and leaseholders) via a deed of transfer which obliges the homeowner, under the Law of Property Act 1925, to pay for maintenance of this land. This is often referred to as an “estate charge” or “service charge”. These are on top of full council tax – even though the council doesn’t maintain their street.

Critics say the system is open to abuse because management companies have no obligation to keep costs down or provide evidence the services they charge for are being carried out. Buyers may find the bills spiral as soon as a management contract is sold on.

Lynn Myers bought her two-bed leasehold house in Penrith, Cumbria, from developers Persimmon in September 2016. The sales agent told her the estate would be managed by Carleton Meadows Management Company with an estate charge of £100 a year per household for grass cutting.

When Gateway Property Management took over in July 2017 it tripled the fee to £308 a year – that’s £17,000 from the 55 residents. Myers alleges that the fee includes more than £3,000 “postage”.

“I am on a lower-end income and ploughed my late husband’s insurance money into this property,” says Myers. “I worry that I will be unable to afford this on top of full council tax etc, and also I will be unable to sell. I have been mis-led by Persimmon and the government.”

Persimmon says the initial costs had been miscalculated and that it was working with Gateway to resolve the issue.

Meanwhile, 40 miles away across the Lake District, residents in Church Meadows in Great Broughton are in a similar situation. Richard Elsworth moved into his Persimmon-built freehold property in May 2013. The estate’s 58 residents each pay Gateway a service charge of £125.53 a year, amounting to £7,281 to maintain about 600 square metres of grass.

But Gateway’s charges don’t stop there. When Elsworth’s neighbours sold their home, they were charged £360 for a “management pack” for the buyer, plus £144 for a deed of covenant.

“The only part of the pack that is relevant to the sale is a financial statement so that the service charge information is available to the prospective buyer. As the properties are freehold, Gateway has no responsibility whatsoever for the conveyancing process, other than to receive a deed of covenant from the conveyancing solicitors,” says Elsworth.

Gateway claims it provided an “often exhaustive” amount of information to purchasers’ solicitors when a sale takes place. It said it was common practice for managing agents to charge fees for sales packs and additional legal documentation. It says: “The information we are asked to provide varies from development to development and this is reflected in the amount we charge ranging from £150-£300 plus VAT.

“It is best-practice for the information to be prepared by professionally qualified staff because purchasers are reliant on information being accurate to enable the sale to proceed as smoothly as possible. Typically, a sales pack contains in excess of 25 pages and is tailored to the development.”

Privates estates were debated in parliament earlier this month. Kelly Tolhurst, Conservative MP for Rochester and Strood in Kent, told MPs how homeowners in Hoo bought from Taylor Wimpey and Bellway but are now in dispute with their property management company, SDL Bigwood.

Tolhurst went on to criticise Hyde Housing Association, and London and Quadrant. The latter tried to charge residents at Lodge Hill, Chattenden, for street lamps and street cleaning undertaken by Medway Council.

The Homeowners’ Rights Network (Hornets) is the campaign group fighting for a fairer deal for homeowners on private estates. Its main issue is a lack of a cap on charges and that homeowners don’t have a choice of provider. And, if homeowners have a dispute, there’s no resolution service in place.

Cathy Priestley, spokesperson for Hornets and a freeholder on a private estate, says the private estate model seems to be the norm for new-build estates. “We can only speculate as to why this has happened. The main benefactors are the plc developers who get to keep the estate land, don’t have to prepare it to adoption standards and don’t have to pay for its maintenance or the commuted sums for adoption,” she says. “All councils have to do, under planning, is to ensure there is a long-term sustainable arrangement to maintain the land (under the Town and Country Planning Act). They seem to readily accept assurances from the developers that the management company will deliver this. They don’t appear to have thought about how this affects homeowners.”

While leasehold owners have some (albeit limited) statutory protection, freeholders have very few options. They can take cases to court, but this can be expensive and time consuming. If they decide to simply not pay, they can ultimately lose their home. “Any arrears will normally be recoverable as a debt claim in the county court.

“However, homeowners should be cautious as the rent charge owner may have a number of options including the ability to take possession of the property,” says Adrian McClinton, associate solicitor at Coffin Mew.”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/dec/02/homeowner-freehold-management-fees-unadopted?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

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1 Dec 2017

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Accountability, Asset sweating, Austerity cuts, Sleaze, Transparency

What you can get away with in business in a greedy, unregulated system

“Palmer & Harvey paid out £70m since 2008 despite ongoing losses.

UK’s biggest tobacco distributor called in administrators and ceased deliveries on Tuesday, making 2,500 people redundant.

Palmer & Harvey directors, former directors and other shareholders extracted about £70m in cash from the grocery wholesaler over the past nine years despite ongoing losses.

The company, where 2,500 people were made redundant earlier this week and a further 900 jobs are at risk, had been owned by dozens of private individuals via a complex web of equity and loans. The company supplied 90,000 stores including 50,000 independents that are now struggling to secure stocks of tobacco and groceries at one of the busiest times of the year.

The UK’s biggest tobacco distributor called in administrators and ceased deliveries on Tuesday after hitting “challenging trading conditions” while efforts to restructure the heavily indebted business were unsuccessful.

P&H was bought by its management team in 2008 in a deal that valued the company at £345m. The deal was largely funded by debt.

P&H (2008), the wholesaler’s parent company, has paid out more than £8m a year in dividends since 2009 to its shareholders despite making losses of about £10m a year or more in all but one year, 2014.

The company’s net debt hit £48.6m in April 2016 and has been above £29m every year since 2011.

Some former managers, including the former chairmen Christopher Adams and Christopher Etherington, hold special preference shares, according to the latest list of shareholders filed at Companies House. These “B preference” shares pay out a fixed dividend twice a year.

Etherington, who stepped down as chairman earlier this year, and his wife were entitled to an estimated £300,000 in dividends last year and Adams £941,000. Half of this payment was deferred under an agreement with shareholders which pledged that it could be repaid if and when the B preference shares were ultimately redeemed.

Etherington and his wife have together held the same number of these B shares since the takeover, entitling them to about £2.5m in dividends since 2009.

In 2009, Etherington also held another form of preference share, the “A preference”, that entitled him to an annual dividend. The latest annual report indicates he no longer owns those shares. He was able to redeem them for £1 each or £500,000, before dividends owed.

Accounts for Palmer & Harvey McLane (Holdings), another parent company of P&H, also show that Etherington received a £3.44m interest-free loan from the company’s employee benefit trust with which to fund his stake in the company. This was repayable on the sale of any shares held by him.

Only a handful of shareholders in P&H (2008), most of whom are former and current staff, retained their A preference shares at the time of the last Companies House filing. But their rights to redeem the shares were protected at the time of the 2008 buyout with ring-fenced cash of £42m held in a separate company, Buildtrue, in April 2016. That company is not part of the administration process and it is understood that the majority of A preference shareholders have cashed out in the past year, receiving funds from Buildtrue.

Administrators at PricewaterhouseCoopers declined to comment.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/01/palmer-harvey-paid-out-70m-since-2008-despite-ongoing-loses

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24 Nov 2017

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Accountability, Affordable and Social Housing, Austerity cuts, Corruption, Developers/ Development, Housing (local), Inequality, Privatisation, Scrutiny, Sleaze, Spin, Transparency

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Grenfell Tower resident blogged that fire would be result of council’s deliberate neglect – local media refused to take up the story

Local media knew about this for YEARS but refused to take it up or investigate, leaving a lone Grenfell Tower blogger to document the unfolding disaster. One so-called “local” journalist was actually filing copy from Dorset!

“[Edward] Daffarn [a social worker who had lived in Grenfell Tower for 15 years] is understandably emotional when reflecting on the last few months, but more than that he is angry. Angry with the way he feels Grenfell residents were treated by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation – the people who were entrusted to maintain the estate and keep its residents safe. Angry with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council, which was meant to scrutinise the KCTMO. Angry with a society which didn’t seem to care about people like him – people who live on housing estates – until it was too late.

“The reality is if you’re on a housing estate it’s indifference and neglect, two words that sum up everything about the way we were treated,” he says. “They weren’t interested in providing housing services, keeping us safe, maintaining the estate. They were just interested in themselves.”
It wasn’t for us to tell the council what they should be doing we were just trying to raise an alarm.

Edward Daffarn, Grenfell Action Group blog

Daffarn and fellow Grenfell resident Francis O’Connor had been blogging on behalf of the Grenfell Action Group since 2012. They wrote about issues that concerned their tight-knit community – air pollution, the closure of the local public library, and their fears that corners were being cut during the refurbishment of the tower.

“We wanted to record for history how a community on a housing estate in the fifth richest country in the world could be ignored, neglected, treated with indifference. We never thought we could make change. We just wanted to record what was happening,” he says.

Daffarn and O’Connor shared a theory that Kensington and Chelsea – a London borough more widely known for its museums, designer shops and flower shows – actually wanted its council estates to go into decline, so that the residents would leave and expensive flats could be built in this sought-after location. For this they were described as fantasists.

“We weren’t fantasists,” he says, visibly hurt. “We were trying to raise genuine concerns about how our community was being run down.”

The natural consequence, he concluded, would be loss of life. Which is why on 20 November 2016, frustrated and desperate, Edward wrote the blog post KCTMO – Playing with fire!

“It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord.”

A few months earlier a fire had ripped through five floors of a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush, just down the road. Edward was worried that if a fire broke out in his tower block residents wouldn’t know what to do. They had been given no proper fire safety instructions from the KCTMO. There were no instructions on individual floors on how residents should act in the event of a fire, there was only a recent newsletter saying residents should remain in their flats – advice which in the case of the Shepherd’s Bush fire would have led to fatalities.

There’s a lot of abusive behaviour evidenced forensically about what was happening to our community, but it wasn’t sexy so it never got picked up.

In March 2017 the KCTMO installed fire safety instruction notices in the entrance hallway to Grenfell Tower and outside the lifts on every floor of the building, again urging residents to “stay put” unless the fire was “in or affecting your flat”.

It wasn’t the first time the Grenfell blog’s authors had raised concerns about fire safety.

Before the blog began, when a school was built on the only green space the residents had, they wrote to the borough pointing out that access for fire and emergency vehicles had been compromised.

Later they blogged about the blocking of a fire exit with mattresses during the refurbishment and the power surges in 2013 that manifested in flickering lights, computers and stereos blowing up, and entire rooms filling with smoke. These continued for three weeks, Daffarn says.

“We were tenants we weren’t fire safety specialists but we were switched on enough to feel this was important and it was not being dealt with on our estate and that’s why we were blogging. It wasn’t for us to tell the council what they should be doing., We were just trying to raise an alarm.”

An alarm that went unanswered. The November 2016 blog post represented the last moment at which something might have been done to avert the disaster which followed six months later. But why didn’t anyone heed or investigate Daffarn’s claims?

Hidden within the story of the Grenfell blog is another story of the decline of local media. There simply was no local press on the ground in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea scrutinising the authorities and helping to amplify the voice of people like Edward Daffarn.

The last time he had the attention of a local journalist was in 2014 when Camilla Horrox, the reporter for the Kensington and Chelsea Chronicle ran front page stories about Grenfell residents’ concerns regarding the possible presence of asbestos on the site of the new school and about the power surges.

She had met Daffarn several times, and had been concerned about KCTMO’s dealings with the residents of the properties it managed.

But when the newspaper was closed down later that year Horrox was made redundant and all her Grenfell articles disappeared from the web. The Kensington and Chelsea Chronicle was incorporated into a website that reports on 29 west London districts.

Horrox’s replacement was expected to report on three boroughs – Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham – while based in Surrey, an hour’s drive away.

Some residents of the borough might have been under the mistaken impression that they did have a local newspaper. In 2015 a free paper, The Kensington and Chelsea News, was established to fill the gap left by the closing of the Chronicle.

But when I tracked down its reporter he explained that he was the sole reporter working on the paper, and on two other local newspapers – his salary was £500 a week and he did almost all his reporting from home in Dorset, 150 miles away. He made it to the borough only twice in two-and-a-half years, and the one story he ever published about Grenfell was from a council press release about the installation of the new cladding.

Though he always searched for a “good front page splash” for each of the three editions, he also made sure to find two pages of royal stories and two pages of entertainment stories.

Edward Daffarn didn’t take his concerns to the media in November 2016 because he no longer thought anyone would listen. But the blog was out there for everyone to see, he points out, if only they had been looking.

“We’d been blogging for three or four years and you go back over that time there’s a lot of abusive behaviour evidenced forensically about what was happening to our community, but it wasn’t sexy so it never got picked up.”
For Edward, what was going on at Grenfell wasn’t just a local story, but a national one. A story about invisible people in a society that cared more about celebrity and wealth than its most vulnerable residents.

Close to tears, he admonishes the nation’s journalists.

“If you look back now our whole community of North Kensington, the policy that the local authority was taking every public space and privatising it, that that could be missed by the BBC, by Channel Four, by these wider news agencies… The question should be for you, why did you miss it?
“Why aren’t our lives important enough for you?”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-42072477

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23 Nov 2017

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Accountability, Conflict of interest, Democracy, Electoral Commission, Lobbying, Scrutiny, Sleaze, Transparency

More political donor sleaze

“The publication of Northern Irish political donors’ identities has been postponed to the new year because of a delay by the government in putting the necessary legislation before parliament.

The Electoral Commission had planned to publish information on donors who had given money to parties registered in Northern Ireland for the first time on Thursday.

Ann Watt, the head of the commission in Northern Ireland, said it was “extremely disappointed that we are unable to provide the public with the information they expected on how political parties in Northern Ireland are funded”.

“The continuing secrecy only serves to undermine trust and confidence among the public in the democratic process,” she said. “We were consulted by the Northern Ireland Office several months ago on draft legislation and provided detailed comments.”

The non-disclosure of information on donors to political parties in Northern Ireland dates back to the Troubles. It means that while Northern Irish political parties have to divulge donor information to the Electoral Commission, it cannot publish information identifying those donors.

The provision came under intense scrutiny when it emerged earlier this year that the Democratic Unionist party had spent £425,000 in the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum campaigning for Brexit.

Following questions from the media, the DUP MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said the cash had come from the pro-union Constitutional Research Council, chaired by the former Scottish Conservative party vice-chairman Richard Cook. The CRC’s donors are unknown.

The majority of the money was used to pay for a wraparound advert in the Metro newspaper, which is not published in Northern Ireland, while £32,750 was paid to AggregateIQ, a social media political consultancy based in Canada, also heavily used by Vote Leave, the official leave campaign.

Earlier this week, the Electoral Commission announced an investigation into Vote Leave over whether it breached the £7m EU referendum spending limit. The official leave campaign spent £6.8m itself and donated £625,000 to a fashion student’s campaign called BeLeave. At issue is whether BeLeave was genuinely independent of Vote Leave: the money it received was sent directly to be spent on social media marketing for AggregateIQ.

A government spokesperson said: “There remains widespread support for full transparency among the people of Northern Ireland.

“In line with that aim, we have brought secondary legislation before parliament that would provide for the publication of all donations and loans received by Northern Ireland parties.”

The Electoral Commission then updated its position in a second statement from Watt: “We are pleased that the UK government has acted to make this important change a reality. Transparency in how our political parties are funded is key to ensuring public trust and confidence in the democratic process.”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/23/publication-of-northern-ireland-party-donors-delayed-until-new-year?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

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23 Nov 2017

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Accountability, Austerity cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Scrutiny, Sleaze

“The House of Lords is a rolling expenses scandal – now politicians must act”

… “At the end of 2015, the ERS conducted an audit of the House of Lords, Fact vs Fiction. It challenged claims that the Lords is a beacon of independence and professional diversity and demonstrated the huge democratic and financial cost.

Indeed, in the 2010-2015 parliament, £360,000 was claimed by peers in years they failed to vote once. On independence, over a third of Lords (34%) previously worked in politics.

The research also found that the Lords represents only a small section of society: 44 percent of Lords listed their main address in London and the South East, while 54 percent were 70 or older. More members have worked in the Royal Household than in manual jobs.

But the problems of an unrepresentative, inefficient and growing house have not improved since those revelations. The ERS’ new report, The High Cost of Small Change: The House of Lords Audit, shows that 109 peers failed to speak at all in the 2016/17 session. Sixty-three of those claimed expenses – claiming a total of £1,095,701.

More shockingly, 33 peers have claimed nearly half a million pounds between them while failing to speak, table a written question or serve on a committee in the past year. Particularly at a time when Parliament is dealing with major legislative upheaval, this kind of behaviour is unacceptable.

We know the upper house is grossly oversized. But we also know that the bulk of the work of the Lords is carried out by a smaller number of peers. The top 300 voting peers account for over 64% of all votes in divisions during the 2016/17 session – suggesting much of the work of the Lords is done by a minority of peers.

Indeed, nearly 1 in 10 of the peers eligible to vote throughout 2016/17 (9.2% – 72 of the 779) are inactive when it comes to scrutinising the government’s work on committees, in the chamber, or through written questions – vital roles for the revising chamber.

This is something that is finally being recognised by the upper house. The Lord Speaker’s Committee on the size of the House was set up to discuss how to shrink the supersized second chamber. In October 2017, they released their plans to reduce the size of the Lords to 600 in 11 years and move to 15 year terms by 2042. But by that time NASA plans to have landed humans on Mars.

Calls for reform are often dismissed on the basis that the Lords is a bastion of independence. We can reveal the truth is far from it. Our analysis shows that nearly 80 percent of Conservative peers didn’t once vote against the government last year.

Of the Labour peers who voted, 50 percent voted against the government more than 90 percent of the time. And non-partisan crossbenchers often don’t turn up – over 40 percent voted fewer than 10 times last year: leaving decisions in the hands of the party whips.

Finally, the House hosts 184 ex-MPs, 26 ex-MEPs, 11 ex-MSPs, 8 ex-Welsh AMs, 6 ex-London AMs, 11 ex-MLAs and 39 current or ex-council leaders, as of April 2017. Rather than an independent chamber, the Lords is increasingly being used as a retirement home or a gift to those no longer wanted by parties.

The ERS are calling for a much smaller, fairly-elected upper house the public can have faith in. Around two thirds of voters agree in both the need for a drastic cut in its size, and for it to be largely elected.

This report lays out the state of Britain’s second chamber today. It’s now up to politicians to meet the challenge – before trust in our democracy falls even further.”

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/money-for-nothing-weve-audited-the-house-of-lords/

The full reportis here:

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research/publications/the-high-cost-of-small-change/

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20 Nov 2017

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Accountability, Affordable and Social Housing, Conflict of interest, Developers/ Development, Sleaze

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“One in seven councillors in English rental hotspots are landlords” – including Torbay

Freedom of Information request to EDDC anyone? To include councillors spouses and children, of course!

…“In Torbay, 39% of councillors own multiple properties, including one who has received more than £63,000 in housing benefit payments for tenants in the last two years.

Three Conservative councillors in the south coast authority, including the mayor, own a combined 68 residential properties. In Bournemouth, 15 of the 37 councillors hold multiple property interests; in Labour-controlled Leeds, 26 of the 99 councillors own more than one property in the city.

Councils have the power to regulate private landlords with licensing schemes that enforce minimum levels of safety and habitability, particularly in the poorest areas with large numbers of rental homes. None of these three authorities, which have the largest proportions of landlord councillors, have introduced such schemes.

“It is worrying that towns and cities with high numbers of private renters are governed by a disproportionately high number of landlords, especially if it makes councils less inclined to regulate the local rental market properly,” said Dan Wilson Craw, director of the pressure group Generation Rent.

He said landlord licensing could make a significant difference. For example, the London borough of Newham’s licensing scheme accounts for 70% of all housing prosecutions in the capital.

Landlord councillors insist there is no conflict of interest and say a lack of resources and a belief that the schemes are not the most effective form of regulation influence the decisions. Others have said licensing is under consideration. …

… Torbay council has admitted that the age and quality of the housing stock “means that it is poorly insulated, generally inefficient, which leads to poor living conditions and fuel poverty”. It has also said it may consider licensing landlords in certain areas to increase control over the quality of private sector homes, but has yet to do so.

Six of its councillors rent out 19 properties in two of the most deprived wards. James O’Dwyer, who sits on several council committees, is also a property manager and landlord, and eight of the 44 houses and flats in which he and his family have an interest are located in two wards – Tormohun and Roundham with Hyde – that are ranked in the bottom 10% of living environments in England, according to the government’s indices of deprivation.

Since 2015, O’Dwyer has received more than £63,000 in housing benefit payments for his tenants, according to figures released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

O’Dwyer said budget cuts rather than the influence of councillor landlords was more likely to be the reason for the failure to introduce licensing schemes in his area.

“This lack of resources and the burden of bureaucracy is far more likely to be the cause of any stagnation of a licensing scheme than the Machiavellian cabal of landlords targeting Torbay,” he said.

O’Dwyer said he would support the right kind of scheme in Torbay and stressed that any conflicts of interest were dealt with under council rules.

His fellow councillor Ray Hill rents out five homes in Tormohun as part of a portfolio of 19 residential properties that he owns or leases. Hill said he and his wife were “responsible and attentive landlords”.

“All of the 19 flats owned by my wife and myself in Torquay and elsewhere are of a high standard, some furnished and some unfurnished,” he said.

A Torbay council spoke4sperson said the authority had invested in an enforcement team rather than licensing, which had resulted in prosecutions changing the behaviour of bad landlords.

“This has had an impact bay-wide rather than in a specific identified area,” they said.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/20/one-in-seven-councillors-in-english-rental-hotspots-are-landlords

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9 Nov 2017

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Accountability, Inequality, Sleaze, Spin

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What the Tory council did next after Grenfell Tower tragedy

“The council responsible for Grenfell Tower has been accused of wasting huge sums of money after it emerged it was trying to recruit more than two dozen communications staff to spread the message about its work in the aftermath of the fire.

Kensington and Chelsea council is advertising for as many 28 “communications and engagement professionals” on one-year contracts. With salaries ranging from £26,500 to £49,500, the move could cost as much as £1m….”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/09/grenfell-council-accused-of-wasting-up-to-1m-on-communications-jobs

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9 Nov 2017

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Accountability, Austerity cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Scrutiny, Sleaze, Sovereignty, Tax avoidance

UK politics and corruption – it’s not (only) “Johnny Foreigner” to blame

This article, written in December 2016, foresaw developments this week. We have had the warnings, but where is the path to change when all the paths are obstructec by the corrupt?

“… Our media likes to write about crime and corruption as though they are the funny fetishes of Johnny Foreigner: Italian mafia, Russian oligarchs or Mexican drug lords. But this year alone, the former banker and anti-corruption campaigner Roman Borisovich made the claim that three-quarters of the money looted in Russia comes to Britain, the Italian mafia expert Roberto Saviano described the UK as “the most corrupt place on earth”, and our biggest bank was sued for its involvement in laundering Mexican drug money: appropriate, given than HSBC was founded by criminal drug dealers on the back of the Opium Wars.

This racket is big enough to have vast control over our politics. An enterprise dogged by criminal charges can pay to hush up the nation’s biggest broadsheet. It’s hard to look at party funding in the last two UK general elections without concluding that it was the donations of the financial sector and prominent tax dodgers which put David Cameron into Downing Street twice to ensure that they weren’t regulated after the 2008 crash.

And it’s not just the Tories. After trade unions, the biggest ‘donors’ to the Labour party before the 2015 elections were the accountancy firm PricewaterhoueCooper, who ‘gave’ in the form of £600,000 of research ‘help’. Then shadow-chancellor-now-TV-dancing-supermo Ed Balls effectively outsourced £200,000 worth of policy work to these much criticized wizards of tax accountancy for the mega-rich, while shadow business secretary Chukka Ummuna got £60,000 worth of ‘support’.

Not wanting to miss out on the action, the Liberal Democrats accepted 1371 hours of policy ‘technical support’ from PwC in 2015 alone, the year after the Luxemburg Leaks revealed the firm’s significant involvement in helping the hyper-rich slash their tax bills through complex accounting arrangements. It’s worth pondering on who wrote the maze of loopholes into the laws in the first place…

Once they leave office, the deal only gets better for our prominent politicians. Former British foreign secretaries like Malcolm Rifkind, Jack Straw and David Miliband have auctioned access to themselves for huge sums of money. Former British health secretaries like Alan Milburn, Virginia Bottomley and John Hutton have all quietly slipped from government into the private healthcare sector, and now make millions of pounds between them cashing in on NHS privatisations they (and their cousins) pushed through. Former British Chancellor George Osborne has seen his best man’s firm rake in £36 million from his bargain-basement privatisation of the Royal Mail. Former British prime minister Tony Blair used the links made in office to secure vast sums of money running round the globe as a lackey for the violent royal dictators of the United Arab Emirates, and working as an advisor, lobbyist and spin doctor to a cast of characters including Nursultan Äbishuly Nazarbayev, the dictator of Kazakhstan and Aleksandar Vučić: once Slobodan Milošević’s Information Minister, now Serbia’s prime minister.

Our country is represented in the world by a trade minister who was previously sacked as defence secretary for allowing a businessman funded by companies which “potentially stood to benefit from government decisions” to sit in on at least 40 meetings and a foreign secretary whose time as London Mayor included overseeing property deals described by the former chairman of the government’s Committee on Standards in Public Life as “having the smell of semi-corruption” involving large donations to the Conservative party. Do either of them have an eye to the second career profits of their predecessors? We’ll have to see.

And those who wish to buy influence get their way. David Cameron promised “no ifs, not buts, no new runways” at Heathrow. Theresa May came out publicly against the scheme. Boris Johnson and Zac Goldsmith both tied their reputations to their opposition to it. But it is going ahead, costing the Tories an MP and a bucket of political capital across marginal seats in West London.

It seems to me that there is a simple explanation for what would normally be seen as an astonishing act of political self-harm: as the organisation 10:10 puts it: “15% of the population took 70% of all flights in 2014. People in that 15% group earn more than £115,000 a year. They tend to have a second home abroad. And their most popular destinations? Tax havens.[1]” The third runway only makes sense if seen from the top of the towers of Canary Wharf. But in Britain, that’s the view that matters.

The scar of living in a country run by and for the rich is marked by more than a runway, though. Even if you ignore the vast quantity of wealth hidden in tax havens, Britain is the sixth most unequal country in the OECD, after Chile, Mexico, Turkey, the USA and Israel. This is a level of inequality of the scale that tears whole societies apart; or is only possible in places that have already been rent asunder: three of those countries have governments at war with their own citizens; and the USA just elected Donald Trump.

By some measures, the UK has nine of the ten poorest regions of Northern Europe, while London is the richest. We produce 18% less per hour worked than the G8 average, and real wages have fallen 10.4% since 2007: a figure only matched across the OECD by Greece. Children in England are among the least happy in the world, and in 2013, the UK was criticised by the UN for a mortality rate among under 5s that’s higher than in countries including the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Meanwhile, the bonfire of the London housing market sucks in ever more of our cash, ensuring the nation’s wealth is squandered on making homes in the most expensive city on earth ever-more expensive, rather than investing that capital in anything productive.

For those of us who seek answers to serious questions about how to build a just, sustainable economy in this archipelago, one of the first questions must surely be what vehicle we have to do this through. And whilst government is certainly necessary, the ancient British state; built to run an empire, seems utterly unfit for the purpose. Without the modifying influence of the EU, though, it’s all that England is left with.

In this context, any conversation about tax in Britain must include a thought about the constitutional position of our tax havens. Any discussion of regional inequality has to look at the vast centralisation of power in our supposedly sovereign parliament. Any talk of financial regulation has to ask why the City can have such vast influence within our politics. Any look at income inequality must also survey inequalities of political reach. Because once you accept that the state has a decisive role in our economy – and it does – you need next to ask who runs that state, in whose interests, and how that can change.

In 2016, millions of British people voted to leave the EU because they wanted to ‘take back control’. The remaining question, then, is a simple one: to whom will that control be returning? Will it be the same ruling class, using the same holes in the same wood-wormed constitution to squirrel away wealth and power and plunder the country like they plunder the planet? Or will the process force us to realise that Britain’s problem aren’t the fault of foreigners from whom we can escape; but come instead from our own failure to free ourselves from Medieval subjecthood, and fight for real democracy?

[1] This research was done by the Tyndall Centre, using the PwC list of tax havens.”

https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/britain-is-not-what-it-thinks-it-is/

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4 Nov 2017

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“Dark money” in British “democracy” – a disturbing development

“… Whatever the grim necessity of these [sexual harrassment] revelations, they contribute to a sense of decline and institutional failure, and thus to an increasingly dangerous lack of trust.

But the rot in Westminster goes beyond alleged sexual harassment, to other forms of subversion that have yet to be exposed. As May prepared to go to the House of Commons for the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions, there was a very significant development in the continuing but almost unnoticed investigations by a handful of journalists—most operating outside the mainstream media—into the financing of the Vote Leave campaign in 2016.

After inquiries led by the independent media outlet OpenDemocracy, Britain’s Electoral Commission announced an investigation to see whether an insurance entrepreneur named Arron Banks broke the law by allegedly channeling $11 million in loans and gifts to a campaign for the U.K. to leave the E.U. (Banks, in response, tweeted, “Gosh I’m terrified.”)

The source of the money is somewhat of a mystery. OpenDemocracy, led by editor Mary Fitzgerald, carried out an analysis by Iain Campbell and Alistair Sloan of Banks’s financial affairs that allegedly showed he was not nearly as rich as he claimed, and suggested the $11 million came from elsewhere.

Some suspect the source is Russia, whose dark money has allegedly been used to fund operations of destabilization across Western democracies.

While Labour MPs Chris Bryant and Ben Bradshaw have consistently promoted the need for scrutiny on this and other possible Russian influence, Banks mocked the idea. “Allegations of Brexit being funded by the Russians . . . are complete bollocks from beginning to end,” he said. Meanwhile, his representatives tried to menace OpenDemocracy. “Make sure you get it right—it’s clearly a political hatchet job and our lawyers will take action if you get one bit wrong,” read a recent e-mail to Fitzgerald.

The Russian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko, was quoted on the Russia Today site as saying the story was “outright insulting for the British government and the British people,” which is not, if you read it carefully, a categorical denial.

There are two other big concerns about the influences on the Brexit vote, which are equally important yet still ignored by the largely Brexit-supporting press and—more shockingly—by the BBC.

In this respect, Britain differs radically from the United States, where media and institutions have taken seriously their duty to hold the Trump administration to account on possible Russian involvement in the presidential election a year ago. In the U.K., there is a kind of chill that surrounds the subject of the E.U. referendum—anyone who dares to doubt that the result was purely the “people’s will” is ignored.

The first area of doubt concerns a donation of $574,000 to the leave campaign from the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, which now props up the May government in Parliament.

As OpenDemocracy has revealed, the money was channeled through a secretive group called the Constitutional Research Council (C.R.C.). Because Northern Ireland has special rules to allow donations to be made anonymously, it is impossible to discover whether the money comes from a legitimate source, as defined by British electoral law. But a hint of something unorthodox came when the Electoral Commission levied a fine of $8,000 in connection with C.R.C.’s activities.

The more worrying development, which Britain shares with the United States, is the use of big data and voter targeting on social media by the far right, which is now believed to have been very influential in the Brexit referendum.

Where to draw the line between the activities of the Russians and the far right is difficult because their interests and methods overlap. However, a recent academic study has shown that a network of Twitter bots comprising 13,493 accounts tweeted on the E.U. referendum, only to vanish the day after the vote.

It is hard to know whether these were controlled by Russia or the far right. “Putin’s agents tried to influence the U.S. election,” E.U. chief negotiator Guy Verhofstadt tweeted this week. “We need to know if they interfered in the #Brexit vote too.” (If you want a very full explanation of this new peril, it is worth reading the research in full.)

Research:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0894439317734157

Source:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/britain-sex-dossier-scandal

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3 Nov 2017

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New defence minister “hypocrite”

“Gavin Williamson has been accused of “rank hypocrisy” by the Labour Party for arguing against cuts to local services in his constituency.

Before his promotion this week, Williamson served as Theresa May’s Chief Whip and was responsible for ensuring Tory MPs voted with the government.

But in an articles on his website, Williamson said he campaigned against cuts to the police, fire services, prisons and libraries.

In one post, the South Staffordshire MP’s constituents were told he had “started a national campaign to protect the [local] police station after learning that the facility was being considered for closure”.

And in another press release, the then Chief Whip said he was “was very concerned to hear that Cheslyn Hay Library’s opening hours have been dramatically reduced”.

Jon Trickett, Labour’s shadow Cabinet Office minister, said Williamson’s “commitment to his career advancement appears to be stronger that his commitment to his constituents”.

“As Chief Whip, Gavin Williamson was guilty of rank hypocrisy, whipping Tory MPs to vote for cuts to local councils, police forces, fire services and prisons while railing against them in his local papers,” he said.

“Now that he is defence secretary and a full member of the Cabinet, we expect him to keep his word to people in his South Staffordshire constituency and speak up against these cuts that are destroying their public services.”

Williamson was May’s surprise pick to run the Ministry of Defence after Sir Michael Fallon resigned amid the ongoing Westminster sexual harassment scandal.

His appointment triggered a backlash from some Tory MPs. One minister told HuffPost UK it was an “appalling appointment” and another said Williamson was a “real slimeball”.

In further posts on his website, Williamson said he had “campaigned against proposals to close Fire Stations” in his constituency.

And he said in September that prisons needed to “have the right resources to maintain order” and “sentences should be extended considerably” following disruption at HMP Featherstone and HMP Oakwood near his constituency.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/gavin-williamson-accused-of-rank-hypocrisy-by-labour-for-arguing-against-cuts-to-local-services_uk_59fc9627e4b01b47404a2481

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30 Oct 2017

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Powerful Tory committee blocked Cameron attempt to protect Commons staff alleges Evening Standard

“In the Evening Standard today Joe Murphy and Kate Proctor says the backbench Conservative 1922 committee opposed a bid by David Cameron to introduce a binding code of conduct for Tory MPs that would have strengthened the protections available to staff suffering harassment. Murphy and Proctor say:

The powerful 1922 committee of backbenchers mobilised against an attempt made by David Cameron to create a binding code of conduct that would have included a right for staff members to seek arbitration.

Mr Cameron attempted to persuade the speaker and other party leaders to support the measures following a sex scandal but his move met resistance from MPs, said sources.

The former prime minister then attempted to get his own MPs to sign up voluntarily.

But this was blocked by the 1922 committee, which saw the plan as a whips’ plot to impose “central control” on backbenchers.

The story is on the front of the Standard under the headline – Revealed: How backbenchers blocked bid to shield staff from sex pests.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2017/oct/30/commons-sex-abuse-claims-dossier-intensifies-demands-for-ministerial-statement-politics-live

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30 Oct 2017

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Could harassment scandal topple Government? Robert Peston thinks it might

Robert Peston:

“The growing fear among Tory MPs is that the sexual-harassment scandal is evolving into the equivalent of the MPs’ expenses debacle – and that it could bring down the government.

It’s all the fault of that bloomin’ list of MPs and their alleged misdemeanours that was compiled by Tory aides and was published by the Guido website overnight, with names blacked at.

The blacking out is not preventing reputational damage to a pair of cabinet ministers and several other senior members of the government.

Their names are being openly touted in Westminster – and it won’t be long till they are outed on social media, and on offshore websites.”

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30 Oct 2017

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The Nolan Principles of Public Life – a travesty

If Westminster staff need protection from MPs then we are obviously electing the wrong people. Yet, unless they resign – which they rarely do – we cannot get rid of them. In local government we can’t get rid of a councillor even if he deliberately votes against his own party’s wishes (and when members of his own party then protect him after he has done so).

It is even more unlikely that any Conservative MPs will be made to resign – even if they admit to calling an employee “sugar tits” (no asterisks for Owl on this one) and ordering her to make his sex shop purchases – both of which an MP has allegedly admitted to doing – because of their precarious grasp on power. Power which is held only because of a £1 billion bribe to a so-called Christian-values-based party the DUP – with its strong links to the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

There must be a way of local voters being able to deselect an MP (or a councillor) when he or she is shown to be totally unfit for office, surely? Even a prison sentence doesn’t stop someone being a councillor – it has to be for more than a year!

“There is a requirement to inform the House, if Members are arrested on
criminal charges, of the cause for which they are detained from their
service in Parliament. The House is also informed when a Member has been
committed to prison for a criminal offence. In such circumstances, the
Speaker would normally make an oral statement or lay a copy of the
letter on the Table. The Representation of the People Act 1981
disqualifies from membership of the House any serving Member detained
for any offence in the UK or the Republic of Ireland for more than a
year or detained indefinitely, and their seat becomes vacant.

The House of Commons Library has compiled a list of MPs imprisoned since
1979 …”

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mps_with_criminal_records

We obviously cannot rely on the Nolan Principles for Public Life to protect us at any level of government – local, regional or national.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-7-principles-of-public-life/the-7-principles-of-public-life–2

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30 Oct 2017

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Accountability, Affordable and Social Housing, Economy, Sleaze, Tax avoidance

Former Prime Minister Blair’s property empire avoids tax

“Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has set up a company to manage his £33 million property empire, joining a growing number of landlords who are opting for incorporation to beat tax rises on buy-to-let operations.

Blair, along with wife Cherie and eldest son Euan, are believed to own a total of 38 properties. The families’ property portfolio includes flats in north-west England which Mrs Blair and their son let out via an existing company, Oldbury Residential Ltd, which holds investments worth £2.4m in the year ending April 2016.

The family has reportedly banked at least £1.7m in profits from buying and selling nine properties, and they also have an extensive portfolio of private homes, including a £9m five-storey Georgian townhouse which they purchased in 2004 and a £10m Grade I-listed Buckinghamshire manor house.

Now Mr and Mrs Blair have set up another company, Harcourt Ventures Ltd, to let and manage properties, with Tony Blair owning half of the shares and his wife named as the sole director.

Setting up a limited company is one of several ways in which private landlords have responded to recent tax changes within the private rented sector. These changes include increases in stamp duty and cuts to mortgage tax relief introduced in April which no longer allow landlords to offset mortgage interest from their rental income. …

… Buy-to-let landlords are now incorporating their lettings operations as limited companies to avoid the tax changes and to secure additional finances to buy more properties according to industry statistics.

The proportion of homes available for rent in the UK, owned by a company landlord, reached 20 per cent in the first quarter of 2017 – the highest number since records began in 2010. …”

https://www.nationalrentersalliance.co.uk/news/landlord/tony-blair-sets-buy-let-property-company-avoid-tax-rises/

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28 Oct 2017

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What a lovely bunch our MPs are …

“One of Theresa May’s Brexit Ministers was at the centre of a new Westminster sexism row last night after admitting he called his secretary ‘sugar t*ts’ and got her to buy sex toys for him.

The disclosures about Mr Garnier came as:

Former Cabinet Minister Stephen Crabb admitted sending ‘explicit’ messages to a 19-year-old woman after a job interview at Westminster.

Cabinet Minister Michael Gove sparked outrage by making a tasteless joke about Harvey Weinstein on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. …

… Father-of-three Mr Garnier, 53, one of International Trade Secretary Liam Fox’s deputies, last night confirmed the claims. ‘I’m not going to deny it, because I’m not going to be dishonest,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to take it on the chin.’

Campaigning anti-sleaze Labour MP John Mann called for a Commons Sex Pest Tsar to protect women at Westminster from male predators.

Claims emerged that women have had their drinks spiked with date rape drugs in Commons bars.

He denied it constituted sexual harassment. Mr Garnier said that the sex toys were bought after a Christmas lunch. ‘We bought some soap sets, that sort of stuff, scented candles. The vibrator shop was high jinks.’

Mr Garnier said he told Ms Edmondson he didn’t think it was a good idea, but she had gone ahead. ‘I hung around outside and she went into this shop. That was it.’

He said they later ‘fell out’ and claimed that ‘disgruntled’ Ms Edmondson ‘has been using [the incident] against me ever since’.

He vehemently denied sexual harassment, saying: ‘Not at all. It absolutely does not constitute harassment.’ “

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5027709/Brexit-Minister-Mark-Garnier-sent-PA-buy-sex-toys.html

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28 Oct 2017

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“Chancellor Philip Hammond faces backbench rebellion over £6billion tax loophole for foreign ‘non-dom’ property owners”

“Philip Hammond is facing a backbench rebellion over a £6billion tax loophole for foreign non-dom property owners.

They must pay tax on residential property sales but the government is not including profits made on commercial buildings.

It means that foreign owners can declare their flats and houses in Britain are for commercial use before they sell them- meaning they don’t have to pay a levy, reports The Sun.

The omission has created a loophole worth approximately £6billion that is set to spark a Commons showdown, according to campaigners.

Mr Hammond is now facing a rebellion from a cross-party coalition of Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP MPs when the Finance Bill is put to a vote on Tuesday.

Labour MP Stella Creasy said: ‘Why should British businesses have to pay this tax but foreign ones get away with it? …”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5027167/Philip-Hammond-faces-rebellion-6billion-tax-loophole.html

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26 Oct 2017

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“HS2 CFO resigns after report on ‘over-generous redundancy scheme’ “

“High Speed Rail 2’s chief financial officer has resigned after a report raised questions of unapproved redundancy payouts.

In July, The National Audit Office found HS2 had ignored orders from the Department for Transport and wasted £1.76m of public money on an ‘excessively generous’ redundancy scheme.

Steve Allen, the chief financial officer of HS2, will leave the company at the end of the financial year, HS2 announced on Tuesday.

Allen said in a statement: “The weaknesses highlighted by the NAO report resulted in both the HS2 executive and board being misinformed about the status of critical approvals for redundancies.

“Those assurances were given by teams for which I was responsible and, obviously, I regret that.”

HS2’s chief executive Mark Thurston said he respected Allen’s decision that it was the “right time for him to move on”.

He said the CFO had been “absolutely critical in identifying the ways to rectify” isssues with administrative controls and mechanisms on redundancies agreed by the company.

But, he added, Allen had now done that and allowed him to “build the executive team for the next phase of the project” with his “honourable decision”.

The NAO report found the company has made redundancy commitments of £2.76m, of which an estimated £1.76m comprised unapproved enhancements.

The report said the actions showed “an example of ineffective communication both between the company and the department, and within the company.

“Whilst deriving from a single redundancy scheme, these findings highlight the need for improvements in the company’s general control environment, where the company has itself acknowledged areas of weakness.”

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2017/10/hs2-cfo-resigns-after-report-over-generous-redundancy-scheme

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22 Oct 2017

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Accountability, Conflict of interest, Democracy, Planning System, Sleaze

Cabinet Office minister “broke planning law”

“Caroline Nokes, the Cabinet Office minister, is facing calls to resign after planning laws were broken in obtaining permission for a new set of stables and a double garage at her constituency home.

A planning application to develop her £1m family house on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire was submitted in the married name of her sister, who was identified as the property’s owner.

The form was submitted in the name of Elisabeth Bellingham and included a “certificate of ownership” signed on Bellingham’s behalf by Nokes’s agent.

[the article goes on to say she has criticised property developers for manipulating planning laws and her father is leader of Hampshire County Council and the New Forest National Park Authority says prosecuting her is not in the public interest]…”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/minister-broke-planning-law-720djmcr7

Source: Sunday Times (pay wall)

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21 Oct 2017

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Accountability, Conflict of interest, Developers/ Development, Planning System, Scrutiny, Sleaze, Transparency

Hammond’s threat to “hire builders” for green belt – conflict of interest?

[see post earlier today]

The question mark about conflict of interest is because, with this government, NOTHING EVER seems to conflict.

Is it a conflict of interest to threaten to put “government employed” builders on to the green belt if you are an MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer AND you own MASSES of land adjacent to said green belt?

If you are a Conservative MP and Chancellor, with the opportunity to get shedloads of money from it, apparently not. At least in their universe:

“Chancellor Philip Hammond could make millions of pounds if green belt land he owns gets planning permission for new homes in the future.

The Tory minister purchased three acres of greenbelt land neighbouring his family home in Surrey from housebuilder Martin Grant for £100,000.

He then came to an “option” agreement with the housebuilder in the 2008 sale that allows the housebuilder to buy the Chancellor’s land back in the future and any uplift in the value of the land would be split equally between the two.

A local property expert has estimated that should Hammond’s land get planning permission then it could be worth £2m an acre, netting him a potential £3million profit.”

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/chancellor-philip-hammond-could-make-10765588

“Dispatches discovered that one such landowner who could benefit from such a windfall is the Chancellor Philip Hammond. In 2008 Hammond bought 3 acres of greenbelt land neighbouring his family home in Surrey from housebuilder Martin Grant for £100,000. Martin Grant Homes is planning to build 1,700 homes on greenbelt land near Mr Hammond’s home which has already been rezoned for housing.”

http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/secrets-of-britain-s-new-homes-channel-4-dispatches

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20 Oct 2017

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‘Decisions are being taken out of our hands’ – social workers on care cuts

“More than two-thirds of social workers responding to Community Care’s survey said they were expected to cut care packages for vulnerable adults because of budget pressures within their council.

*Some names have been changed

Social workers feel under pressure to reduce care packages for vulnerable adults, with some fearing the reductions are unfair and unsafe, a Community Care survey has revealed.

More than two-thirds (68%) of the 469 social workers and other care assessors in England who responded to the survey said they were expected to cut people’s care because of budget pressures within their council.

More than a quarter of respondents (28%) also said they did not feel confident that the reductions they have made to care packages were fair or safe.

The survey was carried out by Community Care and the Care and Support Alliance, a coalition of over 80 charities representing older and disabled people and their carers.

It also found:

Less than half of respondents (43%) felt decisions about a person’s care and support were being left to their professional judgements.
More than a third (37%) said they felt unable to get people the care they need.

Less than half (38%) felt supported to have difficult conversations with service users and their families about meeting needs and changes to their care.

BASW said the findings highlighted the complexity of adults’ social work and the “increasing pressures of budget and target driven demands”.

UNISON said the impact of council cuts had been “devastating” and social workers’ professional judgements should not be “restricted by dwindling budgets”.

The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services said social care remained at a tipping point and the survey laid bare the “invidious decisions” social workers are making every day.

‘Cutbacks’

The findings are set in the context of six successive years of cuts to council budgets. Since 2010, directors have made £5.5.bn worth of savings from adult social care, and estimate that another £1bn needs to be found this year. Efficiencies and back office savings options have been exhausted, which means care packages have come under increasing scrutiny.

Last year, ADASS said 24% of planned savings for 2016-17 were due to come from reducing people’s personal budgets, or cutting back services. This fell to 19% for 2017-18.

In November 2016, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman reported that in 2015-16, it received 600 complaints about assessments and care planning; more than any other area of adult social care. It upheld 59% of the 300 complaints it investigated in detail.

The ombudsman’s report also warned that while the pressures on council budgets were well understood, local authority care provision should be determined by an individual assessment of need and take into account a person’s preferences.

Community Care also found eight examples of cases investigated by the ombudsman in the past 12 months, where councils were criticised for reducing care packages without a proper assessment of need, without explanation, or without considering the impact on individuals.

The majority of respondents to the survey (83%) had cut at least one care package in the past 12 months. Most (54%) said they had cut between one and 10, while 13% said they had reduced more than 20. The three types of support being cut most frequently were social and leisure activities, domestic tasks, and support to help people access their local community.

‘Losing a lifeline’

“Transport seems to be a major cutback. It used to be a local authority-run service but is now commissioned out. We’re encouraged to use the ‘door-to-door’ service because it’s cheaper and something that the service user can pay for.

“However, it doesn’t turn up at the times the day centre opens and so service users miss several hours a day of the centre experience. This is a big deal to people who use those centres as their lifeline.”

Source: a respondent to the survey

‘Change in need’

Respondents were also asked to list, in a free-text box, the reasons why they had reduced care packages. While a change in needs was listed as the most common reason, many also cited budget pressures and restrictions around the types of support their council will fund.

Some social workers said they were facing pressure from managers to reduce people’s care and support, or that the ‘strengths-based’ approach, a model of assessment which focuses on people’s strengths, rather than what they can’t do, was being used as a guise for cuts.

A number of respondents also pointed to a rise in the creation of funding panels, which are usually made up of service managers, to make decisions about care packages.

Earlier this year, a legal expert warned panels were now “rife in local authorities”, but were not being used in line with the Care Act. The guidance says panels might be appropriate for signing off large or unique care packages, but should not be used to “amend planning decisions, micro-manage the planning process, or be used purely for financial reasons”.

One social worker responding to the survey said:

The council has decided they will no longer fund medication or lunchtime calls. These reductions are being agreed at a panel without social work recommendations.
‘No choice and control’

More than three quarters of respondents (83%) to the survey did not think there was enough varied and quality provision in their local area to ensure service users had genuine choice and control over the care they receive.

Under the Care Act, local authorities are expected to shape local care provision to ensure it meets the needs of all people who require care and support, regardless of who funds it. The guidance states that councils should encourage a “diverse range of appropriate, high quality services” and ensure “the market as a whole remains vibrant and sustainable”.

More than half of respondents (51%) also said their council was placing exclusions on what people could spend their personal budget on to meet their eligible needs. Transport, social activities, shopping and other domestic tasks were again frequently mentioned.

One social worker responding to the survey said:

It has become so much more stringent lately. Everything has to be itemised and decided upon in advance. It removes the spontaneity of choice – and that, in itself, is restrictive
‘Uncomfortable position’

In-depth interviews with social workers who responded to the survey further highlighted the difficult decisions they are having to make in the current financial climate.

Sarah*, a social worker in the West Midlands, told Community Care that the atmosphere on the frontline in adults’ services now felt “very restrictive and frustrating”.

“As a social worker you come into the profession because you want to help people improve their quality of life, but it feels like you are becoming increasingly limited in your ability to do that and there is an ever-growing number of hoops to jump through,” she said.

Sarah said the toughest conversations were with service users who had received support for 20 years and this was now being questioned, despite there being no change in their needs.

“I find that very difficult and I’m not sure how comfortable I feel with that legally,” she said.

“We’re not supposed to do reviews just to cut care packages and you’re not supposed to necessarily cut things unless there has been a change in need.”

‘Expectation to reduce’

Lucy*, an agency social worker who has worked in Greater London and the North of England, said she has seen an increasing use of funding panels, with one council she worked for using a panel to agree “every financial decision or review”.

The social workers would often decide what would best meet the needs of a person, only to be told to try something else, she said.

“Things were taken out of our hands. At that point the panel were almost making casework decisions and telling you what you needed to do,” she said.

“I really hated that and so did all the other social workers I came across.”

She added that there was “no doubt” decisions about care were being financially driven, and sometimes “your professional opinion is overridden because of the need to reduce costs”.

“At each review there is an expectation [to reduce] – it’s dressed up in terms of value for money, because that doesn’t sound quite so bad as reducing people’s care,” she said.

“But that’s what service managers do, they sit in their office and work out how to reduce these expensive care packages because that is what the council is expecting them to do.”

‘Devastating consequences’

Maris Stratulis, manager at BASW, said: “The survey results highlight the complexity of social work with adults and the increasing pressures of budget and target driven demands. Social workers are experts in their own profession and need to be afforded the respect, value and support to do their job effectively, remaining person-centred at all times.

“BASW, ADASS, the Local Government Association, and other user and carer groups have an important role to play in highlighting the impact of budget restraints and finite resources to MPs and ministers. We must constantly strive to ensure high standards of professional practice and keep users of services and their carers at the heart of what we do.”

Matthew Egan, social care officer at Unison, added: “Social workers and other staff should be able to make care assessments based on their professional judgement and not be restricted by dwindling budgets. The huge cuts ministers have made to council budgets have had devastating consequences for the provision of care to those people in need.

“We see people effectively being abandoned and let down. It is not fair on social workers and it’s certainly not fair on care users.”

‘Invidious decisions’

Caroline Abrahams, co-chair of the Care and Support Alliance, said it was impossible not to be “angered and saddened” by the social workers’ descriptions of what the cuts mean for older and disabled people, and those with mental health problems.

She added: “It is though important to remember that while social care is a service administered by councils, the buck stops with ministers, and the suffering that vulnerable people are experiencing today is the direct result of the decisions successive governments have made to underfund social care.

“The extra £2bn this government has pledged will certainly help but the funding gap is far larger, so the situation is certain to worsen without further action.”

Margaret Willcox, president of ADASS, said: “This telling and poignant report lays bare the invidious decisions that are having to be made by social workers and managers every day.

“Working within finite budgets is challenging and staff have to consider how best to meet assessed needs within those financial parameters. Adult social care remains at a tipping point and this survey is further evidence of why the issue needs to be treated as a national priority. We look forward to contributing to debates about funding a long-term sustainable solution to adult social care funding and delivery.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health said: “We know social workers do incredible work and we want to make sure that everyone, especially older and vulnerable people, receive compassionate care. That is why we have enshrined in law in the Care Act that local authorities must assess and meet the needs of people in their area.

“We have provided an additional £2 billion for social care and have committed to consult on the future of social care to ensure sustainability in the long term.”

‘We are not a load of tins in a supermarket, we are human beings’Rachel, 30, is visually impaired, has dyspraxia and autism.She received 17 hours of support a week for eight years, to help with cleaning and cooking, managing her medication and personal care. Two years ago her care was reduced at a review to just five hours a week.

Rachel was left with no one to help manage her medication and this meant she missed doses and had a seizure. To make things worse, while recovering she mistook her dog’s flea medication for her own and ended up in hospital. Rachel says these two incidents knocked her confidence and she became demotivated. She also stopped taking her anti-depressants

“Being in hospital left me feeling anxious and upset and I worried if something else might happen once I got home,” she says. “It had a massive impact on me.”

“I kept forgetting my tablets and I was struggling to keep a lid on my depression. I wasn’t interested in doing anything, I would only go out to take my dog out.”

Rachel’s care was reinstated and she now receives 20 hours of support a week. She says things are much better now because she’s “not being left alone for days at a time” and is on top of her medication.

She also receives some social support to help her get out and about.

She adds: “I don’t want this to happen to someone else. I was lucky that I had support from other people [when my care was cut], but there are people who don’t and that’s dangerous.

“We are not talking about a supermarket and a load of tins here, we’re talking about people, human beings, and I think sometimes that gets forgotten.”

COMMENTS ON THIS ARTICLE:

Neil Seach September 20, 2017 at 9:53 am #
I have had my budget slashed by almost a third resulting in many needs not being met and having to rely on family and friends to fill the gaps. Days they can’t it’s no physio exercises for me, no eating and drinking, really is no fun at all

Bobby September 24, 2017 at 7:27 am #
Carers have to be willing and able to care. If you are genuinely unable (as defined in the Care Act) to complete these tasks, then you need to complain. Not eating or drinking will most definitely have a significant impact. As long as you aren’t declining support, you should be recieving help with this. If the local authority doesn’t listen, you need to take it to the ombudsman.

chrissie September 20, 2017 at 11:12 am #
If any professional thinks it is unsafe then they MUST refuse to do it – they are the voice of the person and they have a duty of care.

Martin Porter September 21, 2017 at 8:45 am #
Social Workers very much need to be the voice of their service users. However they can’t refuse to implement cuts as they don’t ultimately control budgets.

All care packages need signing off by a manager, and often as not taking to a panel, so you can put your plan forwards as many times as you want, but the client won’t get you the money unless management agree.

Bobby September 24, 2017 at 7:29 am #
Then you all need to make a stand. Speak to your union, or find a LA to work for that operates ethically and legally.

Peter Endersby September 20, 2017 at 2:13 pm #
This just proves that evidence based practice is a myth as it is always subject to budgetary constraints which is what really drives practice. Where else in adult and children’s social work is there there a clear connection between budget cuts and practice? Social work will have to grow up as education has and accept that practice is driven by politics and money.

Louise Johnson September 20, 2017 at 5:30 pm #
This practice seems to be endemic. How can it possibly reduce costs when services are cut and there is an inevitable deterioration in the quality of people’s lives? Needs don’t just go away because funding is withdrawn – they pop up elsewhere. The quality of people’s lives cannot be reduced to a £ sign. We all know this is a result of the Tory’s austerity policy, and the opportunity they have taken to ‘cut the state’, but why isn’t there more resistance? Why do families and individuals find themselves in this Kafkaesque world where their support is blocked, reduced and taken away and the very professionals who are supposed to support them almost seem programmed to behave heartlessly. This is leading to misery and penury. Life in this country is now of such little value.

Martin Porter September 21, 2017 at 8:47 am #
It reduces costs by passing them to another agency. If someone is admitted to hospital because of inadequate care then the NHS pays, not Social Services.

This is not in the interests of tax payers any more than it is in the interests of the service user, but when middle managers are stuck between a rock and a hard place it happens.

J September 20, 2017 at 6:11 pm #
I have had my social care budget cut from £30k to zero. I went from being a vulnerable adult with severe mental health needs at risk of harm who my family couldn’t fully support to someone who was recently assessed as having no needs that couldn’t be met by my partner who is himself unwell. I challenged the assessment and was told if I had any other needs go speak to the Link visiting scheme. I used to have carers 6 days a week. respite stays in a care home when things got difficult, some activities were paid for to help me get out etc

Now I’m too scared to go out, I’ve become very depressed and get panic attacks, my partner is getting unwell and losing weight and shouts at me a lot of the time. It has put our marriage under strain. I have become suicidal as I also lost my mental health support because I’m told they no longer give long term support.

Bobby September 24, 2017 at 7:34 am #
Complain, or go straight to the ombudsman. This does sound right. Saying they don’t provide long term support is outrageous. I’m assuming the is an integrated mental health team for younger adults? If so, they have taken on the duties of social care, and do provide long term support to those who are eligible.

keithbc6472 September 21, 2017 at 1:41 pm #
If needs can be met through friends and family, then those needs should not have been agreed for local authority funding in the first place.

Alex September 22, 2017 at 10:35 am #
The Care Act is clear that local authority support must be made available if those needs cannot be met without having a significant impact on the wellbeing of the informal family carer or on the sustainability of that relationship. If, as the commentator above describes, the carer’s health is declining as a result of the demands of their role and the relationship itself is at risk of breaking down, her needs cannot reasonably be assessed as ‘able to be met by family and friends’.

Bobby September 24, 2017 at 7:36 am #
Carers also have to be willing and able. The ethical dilemma comes when the person themselves doesn’t want the carer to undertake the tasks. This however should be the choice of the person if their well being is being considered.

June Ross September 23, 2017 at 10:16 am #
Social Workers should be rigorously recording unmet needs and carrying out separate risk assessments where they believe cuts are placing individuals and/or families at risk. Also, carrying out a risk assessment of their own working conditions and presenting it to management can be a powerful and empowering strategy.”

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2017/09/19/decisions-taken-hands-social-workers-care-cuts/