While it seems the political fight against massive council cuts has been lost, one local community group at least has continued to fight to retain essential council services. Royston Wardieburn’s Power to the People group say the cuts – and the ongoing council ‘transformation’ – will damage services and hit poorer communities particularly hard.
The city council must make savings of £148m by 2020 and recently approved cuts of £85m for this financial year – just under two-thirds of the savings in required. With funding slashed, the council has also been going through a ‘transformation’ programme to change the way services are delivered. The ‘transformation’ has meant great uncertainty for council staff, some of whom have been working for over eighteeen months with no certainty that they would have a job at the end of the process, or that they may be deployed into other work areas.
Following a series of interviews staff have now been told whether they were to be retained or whether their jobs had been ‘deleted’. The process has sapped the morale of staff and council chiefs now have a major task in re-motivating staff and preparing them for new roles within new Localities structures.
Senior Lifelong Learning officers organised a teambuilding event to galvanise staff and outline plans at The Hub on 29 March – the event was described as ‘a creative conversation’ with participants invited to ‘help shape and share the vision’.followed by wine and canapies. The Power to the People group lobbied the meeting and presented a list of demands to the event organisers.
Linda Garcia of the Power tot the People group said: “When we heard about the meeting we thought we should take the opportunity to make our feelings known about the cuts and what is happening in this city. It was only a small protest and we lined the corridor heading to the staircase that the Council staff were going up – there was no speech but we sang a protest song before Willie Black presented senior official David Bruce with a copy of our demands.”
Members of the group went on to attend the hustings event at Craigroyston Community High School organised by Pilton Community Health Project. Linda Garcia addressed the meeting on behalf of the group and the list of demands (below) was circulated to candidates.
Power to the People group member Davie Norcliffe said: “We didn’t vote for these cuts, we had no say in them. The cuts will hammer our communities but who is challenging them? The politicians are saying nothing while services are being slashed. We will speak up for communities if the politicians won’t – we will make sure that the community’s voice is heard.”
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