Suffolk Outsourcing Debate

M

Thank you for your e-mail and I welcome your comments.

I apologise for the delay in replying to you but this is the first evening I have been in before 10pm, (largely due to tonight's rain), and on returning home I have had a flood of e-mails and telephone calls to answer.

Your e-mail deserved a more comprehensive reply than the short response I would only have been able to provide earlier.

The leaflet was intended to highlight to the public the direction Suffolk County Council were proposing to go with regard to the services currently provided by the Council.

Only by alerting the public and generating loud public opposition will these changes be blocked, if then! The Conservatives have an overwhelming majority on the County Council and in my experience only fear of losing their own seats will shift their position. A resounding Tory defeat is necessary to achieve that, and that will only happen if the public are alerted to the issues at stake. It is the duty I believe of the opposition to highlight the decisions of the administration.

What would Lib Dems do? Well that is intended to be conveyed in the headline 'Save Suffolk Services' As I point out in my leaflet other Counties are reducing the layers of management and cutting the bureaucratic burden. I am well aware that the problem lies just as much with central government as it does with local government however the Coalition is already doing that with the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne actively stripping away the red tape and target culture of his department. This needs to go a lot further.

Part of the cost of public services is driven by unnecessary paperwork created by lack of trust in people and the desire of administrations to know 'everything and control everything.' I appreciate that this may sound glib but there are 30 pages to complete to apply for Council Tax Benefit which local authorities have to administer and manage. 40 pages to apply for pension credit. The police have huge forms to complete which keeps them at their desk rather than on the street, and there are 42 organisations monitoring the health service, none of which speak direct to doctors, nurses, or patients!

All of this has created a huge taxpayer bill to sort out. It all needs clearing away.

The Coalition government are committed to protecting vulnerable services. There is no such commitment in the proposals of Suffolk County Council. I Chair a local Youth Club. I read in the Bury Free Press today that Suffolk County Council intend to axe The Youth and Connexions Service. Did the County consult with me about this before going public? No, they did not. Is it the result of feedback from the consultation? No it is not.

I am also the Treasurer of the Millennium Farm Trust, a charity that provides help to those with learning disabilities. I know this Charity has been presented with many hurdles by the County Council at various stages over the last ten years. It is good that such organisations might be given the opportunity to deliver more local and personal service, but if the unpaid volunteers find bureaucracy showered down on them by a County ducking its own responsibilities I am concerned that the existing difficulties in finding volunteers and Trustees will become even worse.

The Big Society is fine in principle but my experience with voluntary organisations makes me fully aware of the challenges and difficulties. The County Council cannot just cascade down responsibility to volunteer organisations and charities and expect them to do take on such burdens without proper consultation and an effective business plan!

Fortunately the Coalition Government spending review has committed £475 million towards volunteer organisations, though I await discovering how this will work in practice.

I acknowledge the incorrectly placed ? after my statement that 'I believe the answer is yes.' This typo was not picked up during editing. However, this leaflet was sent to the printers without either myself or my agent having sight of it, or the changes that were made to our proposed draft, by which time it was too late to change. Such is the price sometimes of being part of a large organisation.

Yes. The Liberal Democrats In Suffolk would keep the Middle Schools and we have done the research. Education is improved by good quality teaching not by changing the system. There is plenty of hard evidence that changing schools from three tier to two tier has produced no long term changes in school performance in areas where it has taken place. Irrespective of the known facts the Council has already agreed to keep Middle Schools in some parts of Suffolk, but not it seems in Bury St Edmunds where they are of high quality and do work! If something works there is no need to change it!

Poor school performance in Suffolk has been marked in low aspiring communities rather than the system of teaching. That needed more resources and better skilled training. The Coalition Government has agreed to the Lib Dem proposal of a £2.5 billion pupil premium targeted to support schools with pupils whose families are in receipt of benefits. That is the sort of action that will turn around the performance of schools not 'tinkering with the system',

and yes many of the teachers agree with us in this, and yes some don't.

Unfortunately leaflets provide very limited space to get messages across and we know many are simply not read anyway so we have to keep them brief. My web site and the letters posted there provide a much fuller picture of my views and of course the National Party publishes its policies on-line and provides them to interested parties who want to read more.

You asked about our commitment to the elderly. We have always campaigned for Free Care for the Elderly, and despite the financial restraints the country is in we have secured a further £1 billion to pay for local authority provided social care so there is no need for the County to privatise, or close it own care facilities. Once the County does that it is entirely at the mercy of privatised firms, and when they raise their charges the state has to pay the bill for those on limited means. Without its own homes the Council and taxpayers will have to fork out for such higher bills without any competitive alternative available to them. We have also secured a further £1 billion for the care of the elderly being looked after by the NHS so I think we have been very pro-active and successful in this area, particularly in the light of cuts elsewhere.

Thank you again for taking the trouble to write to me and I again apologise for taking a few days to get back to you.

Regards

Cllr David Chappell

----- Original Message -----

From: M S

To: burystedmundslibdems@uwclub.net

Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 7:33 PM

Subject: By-election

May I make some comments on your Election Special:-

1. I find it extremely negative: 95% of the leaflet deals with what Tories and Labour may or may not be doing and nowhere does it say what the Lib Dems would do.

2. There are two vaguely positive statements made by David Chappell. They are:-

• "Is there an alternative? I believe the answer is yes?" - noticeably ending in a question mark which gives the impression that David Chappell may not be too sure about that! Is the answer Yes or isn't it? If it is Yes, then what is the alternative offered by the Lib Dems? Nothing in your pamphlet tells me that.
• I don't think this is the way forward for the care of the elderly." OK, so what do you think is the way forward? Nothing in your pamphlet tells me that either.

3. Some of the services to be outsourced? How would the Lib Dems keep these going in the stringent times ahead?

4. The future under the Conservatives?

Middle Schools. ....... Closure will cost at least £23m. So the Lib Dems would keep them? Have they done any research about this topic? or is their stance based on sentimental expediency? £23m spent for the benefit of our children's future is peanuts in my view. The facts are:-

• In 1982 there were 1,413 Middle schools in England. About one third of them had closed within five years.
• In January 2008 there remained 320 middle schools nationally: By July 2010 this figure was reduced to 244 in 22 of just under 400 local authorities in England.
• In East Anglia, Suffolk has forty Middle Schools: Norfolk has none; Essex has none; Cambridgeshire has one.

If Middle schools' offer is so good, why is every other county in the country abandoning the idea? I can tell you: it is bad educational system, found not to work as the majority of authorities already have discovered. The facts speak for themselves. In this field the Lib Dems appear to have their heads in the sand.

I could expand each of the remaining five sections under this heading: the Lib Dems have not provided us with one positive idea about any of them.

I am one of the so called "Floating Voters" - your literature has not encouraged me one tiny bit to vote Lib Dem. In fact, quite the opposite. I am unable to vote for anyone who just finds fault with everything and offers nothing positive as an alternative.

I suppose the one positive thing that comes out of this exercise is that you will know at least one person has taken the trouble to read your literature!

M S