Cuts totalling over (100m are being imposed by 31 Social Services Departments in England as they grapple with budget reductions for 1997/98, according to a sur**The Association of Directors of Social Services found that cuts averaged 4.3%, and have already led to at lease 700 residential places and home care packages for the elderty requiring care as the NHS backs out of supporting the frail elderly.
Virtually all the authorities cutting back on these vital services are Labour-controlled, as are the councils slashing services in Scotland and Wales: but Tony Blair's office in M bank nas been working overonk to suppress any concerted opposition to the cuts, which arise from Kenneth Clarke's cynical tax-cutting budget, which deliberately shortmer at the Environment office Gone, and forgotten: Labour's pledges - and Margaret Beckett slapped a brutal "cap" on spending Blair's leutenant Frank Dobson has been touring town and county halls, warning that a May victory for New Ser wo nordes Tory spending limits, driving councillors to nod through a modest 6.6% average increase in council tax, at the expense of axing cherished services.
The crackdown on council spending forms the key backdrop to Stephen Dorrell's White Paper pro. posing the wholesale privatisation of social services, reducing councils to the role of "purchasers of care trom a masseiy expanoco private sector.
Dorrell and the Tories are driven by an ideological agenda: there is no popular demand for these services to be privatised, and no evidence that care in private, often desperately under-staffed profit-seeking homes is any superior to that pro. vided by local authorities. Of course claiming that private residential homes are up to (40 per week cheaper.
This type of cost-cutting has been the driving force pushing councils like Labour-controlled Kent towards wholesale privatisation, following the inglorious examples of Labour councis like Southwark eagerly purting services out to competitive tender, And with New Labour's policies well-to-do and revolving around the deluded notion of a "partnership" between public and private sectors, the Party is ill-equipped to combat these latest penny-pinching Tory • The Law Lords ruling on March 20 that councils are the most seriously disabled in is a serious reversal of the 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act. math of this landmark ruling, which demolishes the pretence of any enti. tement to community care, was Labour's front bench team. Since limits, presumably Labour, like the Gloucestershire appeal, and will CORIE SE SATE ORD