Horsham council decided in the full council meeting on Feb 24th to cease their play schemes in order to save an estimated £52,000. The budget report also included the transfer of about £400,000 to reserves so the scheme could easily have been saved by reducing the transfer accordingly.
The Liberal Democrat leader proposed an amendment to defer the decision in order to study the impact of this cut. Unfortunately this lifeline was ignored and so we will be able to see the impact all too clearly if working parents find that they cannot afford private child care and have to give up jobs or decide to leave children unattended. When the Easter holidays arrive we are sure they will be letting us know exactly how they have been affected.
The Conservative party's own website outlines their so-called family-friendly policies and states "if we want to give children the best start in life - whatever background they are from - the right structures need to be in place" and yet where such structures already exist they are dismantling them!
In a TV interview during the Tory spring conference Theresa May talked about how children whose parents do not work are more likely to not work themselves and how that must be addressed, and yet her colleagues in local government are taking decisions to make it more likely that working parents will have to give up their jobs. The gap between words and actions is all too clear,
Deferring the decision would also have allowed some investigation of just why the play schemes had an attendance that dropped year-on-year since 2007, despite being less than half the price of some competing private schemes. Surely this is what the scrutiny system is there for: to find out why the council can't find sufficient business for a service that undercuts private provision so much.
The council took its decision with a complete lack of transparency, without making it clear what levels of attendance would have been acceptable, what the maximum capacity of the service is, what efforts had been made to reverse the drop in numbers between 2007 and 2008, or any other substantive information. There was not even any scope for identifying whether any of the individual schemes were viable: it was all or nothing, and we ended up with nothing.
The cabinet member has said the council will be talking to familes to make sure they are aware of access card discounts, but in the Labour party we are wondering whether talking to families last year and the year before to make them aware of the council's play schemes would have been a much better idea.
We do appreciate the efforts of the Liberal Democrat councillors in their last-minute attempt to rescue this service, but it really was too little, too late. Why had they not challenged this when it was mentioned in the preliminary stages of the budget process? They did not even all support their own leader's amendment at the full council and at least give the appearance of an effective opposition!
If there was even one Labour member of Horsham council, they would have raised their concerns as soon as they were aware of the plans, giving enough time to gather information and investigate alternatives. The Liberal Democrats, although well-meaning, just did nothing until Horsham Labour Party wrote to every councillor this month urging them to not make these cuts in services.
