Workers at Kirklees Council represented by UNISON lobbied the council ahead of its meeting yesterday (Wednesday), over planned cuts to address financial pressures faced by the authority.
UNISON Kirklees branch secretary Mick Donoghue also addressed the council meeting. You can watch his deputation below, or read it in full.
“Thirteen years of Tory mis-management have brought the country to its knees. Our infrastructure is literally crumbling, more than four million children are in poverty, and we are in the midst of a mental health epidemic. During that time the richest in the country have seen their wealth increase significantly, with a 20 per cent increase in the number of billionaires in the last three years alone.
Kirklees Council, like other local authorities, has been left to try to plug the gaps that the government has created. Council services provide a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable in our society.
13 successive years of inadequate and unfair funding settlements have brought Kirklees Council to the brink of collapse. While affluent areas have prospered, Kirklees is presiding over service closures and mass redundancies as it tries to bridge a £47 million forecast budget gap for 2024.
The council says the cuts are necessary if it is to avoid following Northampton, Croydon, Thurrock, Woking, Slough and Birmingham into bankruptcy. We believe the cuts will just kick the can down the road. Without a fair funding settlement, it is only a matter of time before Kirklees cannot afford to run even its statutory services, including Adult Social Care, where we are currently seeing more than £400,000 of service cuts, even before the proposed cuts are implemented.
The council’s response to the funding crisis has been to issue an HR1 notice, which will see 250 redundancies; this is only the first phase of up to 750 redundancies across the council. This is in addition to proposed service cuts that we know about in partner organisations such as Kirklees Active Leisure, as well as those that we anticipate will result from the council’s precarious financial position.
No details have yet been provided to the trade unions as to which services or posts will be directly affected, but the loss of 750 jobs will inevitably hurt those most who rely on council services the most. The announcement of redundancies with no further information has done nothing but unsettle and demoralise the council workforce.
As a significant stakeholder, representing some 9,000 members across Kirklees, UNISON is calling upon the government to provide adequate funding to Kirklees Council, including emergency funding to protect vital services. We have written to the local MPs to ask them to raise the issue in Parliament and to support the Early Day Motion calling for a parliamentary debate on council funding. We have also encouraged our members to contact their MP. We call on the council to join with Kirklees UNISON in our campaign for adequate funding from central government.
We also call on Kirklees Council to re-think its plans, which will decimate services, cast hundreds of workers into unemployment and have a detrimental impact on the local economy, not to mention the health and wellbeing of Kirklees residents – particularly the most vulnerable.
Questions are understandably being asked about the wisdom of continuing with capital works projects, when services are facing cuts or closure. Improvements to public realm will be of little benefit to those who rely on essential services if those services are cut.
The council should immediately cease the use of consultants and should not pay a penny more to the firm that is advising it on how to make cuts to Adult Social Care.
Until such time as adequate funding is made available by central government, the council’s spending plans should be determined by what is needed to provide vital public services rather than what is needed to balance its books. If the cuts go ahead they will do irreversible damage to the Kirklees community.
Kirklees Council should not be doing the Tory government’s dirty work by passing on Tory funding cuts that will hurt its residents.”
