One Nottingham VCS Board Member Elections and Workfare

One Nottingham, the 'strategic partnership' has a management board with various posts reserved for representatives of particular sectors e.g., business, higher education and the voluntary sector. Currently, elections are underway for the voluntary sector posts which include a 'faith' representative, a BME representative and a sort of general 'everybody else' representative. More on the choices of these categories another time, maybe.

In the meantime, let's concentrate on the 'general' post. One of the candidates is Andrew Redfern, the Chief Exec of Framework HA which has deservedly attracted controversy and outright hostility for its participation in the Tories' take on modern slavery that is workfare. Have a look at their Facebook page to see some of the comments.

Because of this involvement in workfare, it would send a message if Redfern was sent packing in this election. Therefore, if you have any influence at any voluntary sector organisation in the City I urge you to persuade your organisation not to vote for him. It would also be very useful if any organisations exercising their vote in this way made it very clear why.

Framework has repeatedly refused to answer key questions about its use of workfare, particularly about whether it has reported participants for transgressions, putting them at risk of benefit sanctions and thus homelessness. It is an extraordinary course of action for an organisation which is supposed to be helping the homeless.

In the meantime, you may be interested in joining in with an internet blockade against Framework during the upcoming week of action against workfare.

Framework's Judicial Review of City's Supporting People Cuts Failed

One from earlier in the year that I missed. Can't really find anything in local media and blogs either except in the NCH Bulletin.

It seems that Framework Housing's application to have NCC's Supporting People cuts Judicially Reviewed was refused back in March, according to an article in 'Inside Housing'.

It's not overly surprising, judicial reviews of governmental policy decisions, both local and national, are somewhat hit and miss but what is interesting is IH's reporting that correspondence between JoCo and DCLG "...indicated that the city’s formula grant allocation for the coming year includes at least £19.8 million for Supporting People..." whereas NCC cut its SP budget by 45% to £12.4m.

That £19.8m figure appears to have come from this letter from Grant Schapps to JoCo sent in January. The thing is that 'Supporting People' no longer has a ring fenced amount provided by central government. It was decided to roll SP into the overall 'Formula Grant' from this year (a decision actually made by the previous Labour administration) meaning that councils can more or less spend it as they see fit. This is probably why the JR action was refused; it was a local decision as to how to allocate formula grant to SP and other services and NCC's decision was not considered to breach the limits of 'rationality'.

I've touched on this before but as JoCo is still going about the place saying that it was the Tory Government that cut SP by 45% not NCC, it perhaps bears repeating. The Tory government axed NCC's overall 'spending power', a new measure which includes contributions to NHS and other services and thus probably disguises the true extent of cuts, by 8.9%. NCC calculates that this is equivalent to a cut to the actual council of 16.5%. Lets make no mistake this was an appalling and unjustified cut and we must continue to challenge it.

However, it was NCC that decided to disproportionately cut Supporting People by 45% rather than apply a proportional cut of 16.5% (or less for that matter), while at the same time protecting funding for Community Protection Officers (waste of space and a remnant of Labour's authority wank) and children's centres (more justifiable). We must all continue to challenge this with equal determination and Collins could do us all a favour and come clean.