It’s criminal

The last Conservative government, under John Major and Michael Howard, cut frontline policing and we had a massive increase in crime.

Tony ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ Blair invested heavily in both increasing the number of police and modernising the way it operated. The Labour government also introduced new laws to tackle anti-social behaviour. The result? Between 1997 and 2010, crime fell by more than 40%.

Six months ago, the government’s own advisers on policing - Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) - published its own assessment of the impact on policing, nationally and locally, of the coalition government’s policies. With a 20% (£2bn) cut in police budgets, it predicted that, nationally, a minimum of 15,000 police officers would be cut by 2015.

7000 frontline police officers have already been lost in the last 2 years. Despite this, David Cameron promised that police would be more visible and more accessible. However, the government’s own statistics show that ‘visibility’ has fallen by 5% over the last year.

As well as the cuts in policing, there are also huge cuts to come in ‘community safety’ – where local communities come together with their local councils, local police and other agencies to work together to cut crime. Bizarrely, the government is also weakening the tools for communities and the police to deal with anti-social behaviour.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, is proposing to scrap Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and replace them with a weaker alternative that doesn’t result in a criminal record if the person repeatedly breaches it. She is also proposing that no action should be taken – by the police or by councils – on a complaint about anti-social behaviour until there are 3 separate complaints, or complaints from 5 different households.

This is ridiculous. It’s little wonder that community groups and local police officers despair and describe the government as ‘out of touch’. ASBOs aren’t perfect, but they should be improved, not weakened. People should not have to wait until they have complained 3 times to get a response to an anti-social behaviour complaint – the response needs to be swift to nip it in the bud.

The government’s proposals aren’t just daft; they’re criminal.

Cameron's Big Society and One Nation both dead

This week, the heads of Britain’s biggest charities accused David Cameron of abandoning the voluntary sector he once championed as the heart of his Big Society project. 

They say that they have been left out of policy consultations and had their funding slashed. They say that the vulnerable people for whom they care are having state help eroded and are being labelled as benefit scroungers. 

Their frustration has grown as charities have been left out of the Government’s latest reforms, such as the Work Programme, designed to push those on benefits back into employment. The “payment by results” scheme, which has had disappointing outcomes, is now largely run by the private sector.
So, the Big Society is already dead. But, it’s also clear that Cameron and Clegg’s claim to be adopting a One Nation approach to our economic, environmental and social challenges is also deceased. The Government’s approach on welfare has shown them to be more interested in exploiting the challenges the country faces than solving them.

It has looked to divide the country by dishonestly claiming that their welfare policies are targeting the work-shy and benefit ‘scroungers’. But in the weeks since the Autumn Statement the truth has emerged that it’s striving families doing the right thing that are paying the price of their economic failure. It’s working families that are paying the price of their economic failure. Two-thirds of people hit by the cuts to tax credits and benefits in the Autumn Statement are in work, whereas £3bn is being given in tax cuts to the highest paid.

Perhaps the charities should ask David Cameron to approach each of the 8000+ millionaires, to whom he is giving an average £107,000 tax cut, and request them to donate that towards providing some assistance to the rapidly increasing number of working families who are becoming homeless or visiting food-banks or will simply struggle to pay the bills?

Starting up

No-one should under-estimate the essential contribution that small businesses make to the economy. More importantly, the growth of some of those small businesses is essential to the UK’s long-term economic viability.

The last Labour government introduced the Enterprise Finance Guarantee scheme, to boost lending to small businesses following the global financial crisis. However, according to the statistics published just before Christmas, lending under the scheme has fallen dramatically from £737,129,000 in 2009/10 to £201,903,000 in 2012/13

This is just part of a much bigger problem as, according to the Bank of England, net lending to businesses has fallen by £13.5 billion over the past year. The use of external finance by small firms has fallen to its lowest level in more than two years. More than a quarter of small business owners have been forced to inject personal finance into their business in the last year against their wishes according to the most recent SME (small and medium enterprise) finance report.

The government has failed to get banks lending to businesses and the government’s abandoned Project Merlin and credit easing schemes made no real difference. Yet, the same government Ministers are letting the banks break the promises they made more than two years ago to do more to help small businesses get access to the finance they need.

The banks promised to make firms, turned down for finance, aware of an independent appeals process and of alternative sources of finance. Yet only 9% of firms who had a loan application rejected said they were made aware of these by their bank, and even fewer were referred to other sources of help and advice – the most recent SME Finance Monitor (the biggest survey of small businesses’ access to finance) found.

Yet, the six banks and building societies that used the Funding for Lending Scheme sucked £1bn out of the economy in the three months to September, with much of the lending appears to be lowering mortgage rates rather than helping small businesses.

We desperately need our high street banks to better serve the needs of our small and medium sized enterprises, but instead they are turning a blind eye. Ministers have failed to help small businesses struggling to access the finance they need to expand.

As we start 2013, there’s an urgent need to review how new business starts can be supported and how small businesses can be helped to grow.

Fairness? You decide

David Cameron keeps telling us that ‘we’re all in this together’ and ‘there must be fairness in all the decisions we take.’

Well, I’ll let you decide on the fairness of the decision to cut the incomes of millions of ordinary working families – a one-earner family on £20,000 with two children will lose £279 next year, and this is after the impact of the personal tax allowance increase, but does not include the £450 a year worse a family will be as a result of the VAT increase – so that millionaires can have a £100,000 tax cut.

And, you might also want to reflect on the fairness of the recent local government finance settlement. The 20 most deprived authorities will have their spending power cut by an average of 8.0% between 2012-13 and 2014-15. However, the 20 least deprived authorities will have their spending power cut by an average of just 0.7% between 2012-13 and 2014-15.

Locally, our councils have been hit hard again. Chesterfield is proportionately the hardest hit with a 14.5% cut in its spending power. NE Derbys 7.8% cut, Sheffield 7.3% cut, Rotherham 6.4% cut, Barnsley 6% cut, and Doncaster 6.8% cut, are all near the top end of losses. Meanwhile, David Cameron’s local council, West Oxfordshire, gets a 1.1% increase. Suffolk gets a 6% increase.

Even the coalition government’s informed supporters don’t think it’s fair. The former Conservative chair of the Local Government Association, Baroness Eaton, described the effect of local government cuts as 'detached from the reality that councils are dealing with'. Her Conservative successor, Sir Merrick Cockell, called the cuts 'unsustainable'. And the Tory Leader of Kent says his county 'can’t cope' with further reductions and 'is running on empty'. And their councils are getting the best deals.

Anyone who thinks that the scale of cuts being required of local councils will not have a big, negative impact on local services – like libraries, sports and recreation facilities, Sure Start centres – is just fooling themselves. But no-one can deny that the poorest communities will get the hardest hit.

Is it fair? You decide.

No crib for a bed

This week, in thousands of schools, nurseries and churches, the Christmas story will be being re-told. Parents will be enthralled as they watch the re-enactment of Joseph and Mary’s search for a bed. So, it is timely to reflect on the search for a bed in the UK today.

Back in 2008, David Cameron said "I think that it is simply a disgrace that in the fifth-biggest economy in the world that we have people homeless, people sleeping on the streets, sofa-surfers, people in hospitals."

I agreed then and agree now. Perhaps it was just an error on his part that he forgot to mention that, under the Labour governments, homelessness had fallen by 70% from the inheritance of the previous Conservative government. That hadn’t happened by chance. It happened because of a concerted effort between central and local government, through the introduction of the Supporting People programme.

But what has happened since David Cameron took control in 2010?

• Homelessness has risen relentlessly. Statutory homelessness, where families without a roof over their head are accepted by their local council as homeless, has risen by nearly a third since the general election.

• The number of people sleeping rough has risen by 31%. Even more worrying, the number of young people sleeping rough has increased by 66%.

• There are now more than 75,000 children living in temporary accommodation, and the use of bed and breakfast hotels has tripled since 2010. There has been a near 200% increase in the number of families in bed and breakfast accommodation for more than 6 weeks.

This isn’t surprising when you realise the scale of the government cuts. There are 1544 fewer bed spaces for the homeless compared to just 12 months ago, and 60% of these projects have already had significant funding cuts this year and expect more next year.

When this is taken together with the continuing reduction in new housing starts – which have fallen in each successive quarter since 2010 – and the 60% cut in the affordable housing budget, we shouldn’t be surprised by the impact. And it will get even worse next year, when the housing benefit changes are estimated to result in a further 40,000 households becoming homeless. Will we see headlines confirming that stables are to be used to provide emergency shelters?

None of this has happened by chance. It’s happened because David Cameron has chosen to do it.

Failing the test

In 2010, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne said that there was one simple test by which the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government should be judged. The test they chose was “to balance the books and get the debt down by 2015”.

Last week, in his Autumn Statement, George Osborne confirmed that the government would fail this test. Borrowing and debt figures have been revised upwards and the economy is shrinking. But, instead of a change of course, Osborne confirmed we’re going to get more of the same failing policies.

Over the last two years our economy has grown by just 0.6% - compared to the 4.6% the government promised, 3.6% in Germany and 4.1% in America – and this year is now predicted to contract. Growth forecasts have been downgraded yet again for this year, next year and every year up to 2016.

Nearly 1 million young people are out of work, long-term unemployment is rising and the claimant count is forecast to be 275,000 higher by 2015. Prices are forecast to carry on rising faster than wages for at least another year.

George Osborne was forced to confirm that he will not meet his fiscal rule to get the debt down by 2015, and that his pledge to balance the books by 2015 will also not be met until 2018 at the earliest. Borrowing and debt figures have been revised up this year and for future years. The government is set to borrow £212 billion more than they planned – more than the plans the government inherited and condemned at the time for not going far enough. The reason why borrowing and debt has been revised up is because slow growth and high unemployment means tax revenues are down and the benefits bill is up.

The government has decided that people on low and middle incomes should pay the price for their failure. They are pressing ahead with a £3 billion tax cut for the highest earners in the country – worth an average of £107,000 for 8,000 people earning over £1 million. Yet at the same time people on low and middle incomes are being hit hard with higher VAT, the granny tax, and real terms cuts to tax credits, jobseekers allowance, child and council tax benefits.

What kind of government believes that low-paid working people will only work harder if you take away their tax credits and make them worse off,  but millionaires will only work harder if you give them a tax cut to make them better off? One that fails the test.