On a council estate in Bradford live a typical family whose lives are about to be shattered by the LibDem/Tory coalition. They are nothing remarkable. In fact it is their very normality that makes what is about to happen to them, and thousands like them, so devastatingly frightening.
I am going to call them Steve and Susan, not their real names of course.
Susan, Steve and their three kids live in a council house on low wages but with hope. Steve in particular has a history that is common to many. His early home life was so bad that as soon as he could he left home and spent a period of his life indulging in drugs, alcohol and petty crime. Susan came from a more stable background and when they got together Steve was able to overcome his addictions.
Two of their three children are by and large fine. The third, who is 8, has some learning difficulties, these are not so bad that he has a defined learning impairment but he clearly struggles at school and needs help to make the most of his chances. However, because he has no recognised condition, that help that is already hard to come by, is about to get a whole lot harder to find.
This is a family that needs a fair amount of support to continue to function as a unit. At the moment Susan manages to cope with life pretty well. Steve struggles with life still but with Susan and outside assistance manages to keep going. Low level support from various agencies and benefits makes the difference. They are not a family that has major intervention or that costs a great deal to support. A bit of parenting help, support from teachers and assistants at school and occasional help from the local family centre is all that it takes to keep the family going.
There are families all around that need far far more than that. Like our family they are about to lose the majority of those services and nobody in the government seems to understand the consequences of the support they currently receive being ripped away from them.
Steve may well end up drifting back to a life of drug and alcohol abuse. Susan cannot face that prospect and will certainly suffer and may well leave home, with or without the children. The 8 year old deprived of extra help at school will drift who knows where as his limited potential is further eroded by the lack of support coming from school. Educational underachievement is only the start of what is probably in store for him, with a life of petty crime, substance abuse and failure very likely. Should things go really wrong the three children will end up in care, Susan depressed and on medication and Steve an addict again or in prison.
Currently the rumours are that Bradford council will have to cut £150m from their total budget. This level of cuts means that ALL early intervention work, that hundreds and hundreds of families like ours depend on, will be cut. It may even be that the council cannot even meet some of its statutory responsibilities. Bradford won’t be the only place where this happens, across the country hundreds of thousands of people who depend on early intervention services will find that their support has gone.
If that only meant that those people had a tougher time then maybe, just maybe, cutting those services could be justified. That of course that is not the case, with support removed people’s lives will spiral downwards, leading to more anti-social behaviour, more crime, more disorder, more mental health issues, more health problems, more educational underachievement, more children in care, more lives blighted and a more unequal society than we have now.
It is storing up a huge set of problems for the future, sadly when those problems start to manifest themselves, the very people and agencies needed to cope will be gone because most of the projects and programmes that support people in need will have been starved of the money they need to continue. Restarting them will cost far more than scrapping them will save. In the meantime the costs of the consequences will grow and grow as emergency assistance, prison, police, probation, mental and physical health services and more agencies have to swing into action.
In between the cuts and the realisation of what has been done the best former employees will have found their way into other jobs. Others will have lost their homes and their livelihoods. They will be on benefits not paying taxes, they will spend less and local businesses will suffer, leading to greater levels of unemployment and more, not less, welfare payments. They will be part of the problem not the solution. There will be less police but more crime, many people in need but few to help, more in need of education but less to teach. Short-sighted doesn’t even come close to describing the course of action that this ConDem government is hell bent on implementing. This kind of social vandalism is expected from the Tories but that the Liberal Democrats are involved is simply staggering.
It is unlikely that a cabinet that contains 14 millionaires will have any idea at all about the consequences of what they are about to do. It is however the task for all those who do to make it very clear NOW that this is folly in the hope that at least the very worst of this impending disaster can be averted. It is clear that if we fail a huge swathe of what is currently offered will be gone. Organisations will disappear. Projects will cease to operate. Work that has taken years to develop will be swept away. By the time either the ConDems wake up and realise their folly or a new government is in place it will be too late. Not even a drubbing for the ConDems at the polls in the council elections in May can prompt a vast amount of damage being done because huge amounts of funding run out in March. With no commitment to continuing funding the projects will die.
The real losers will be those who currently depend on these services. Their lives will be worse. Society will be worse and yet the ConDems try to pretend that these cuts won’t hit the poor hard. How Liberal Democrats square that with their beliefs, their manifesto and their past I simply do not know. And what have they got in return? A handful of cabinet seats, a referendum on a voting system they opposed and a few minor concessions on tax and civil liberties. They are indeed a very very cheap date.
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