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Category Archives: Policy
Suffolk Lib Dem Group: Suffolk’s 2015-16 Budget
This year we have chosen not to attempt a detailed amendment to the budget but to comment on matters of principal at a strategic level on those service areas we consider most important.
The Liberal Democrat group is fully aware of the overall financial situation and supports the government focus on reducing the budget deficit. However it believes that many services provided by local government are valuable and should not be a first priority for cuts.
We believe that the county should use the resources provided by government and those it raises locally to support the local population and the economy. The Tories have diverted significant funds into reserves “for a rainy day”, and we have seen reserves grow dramatically during the financial crisis. They appear to be saving for a “rainy decade” while cutting services NOW. Funds could be used on today’s issues using reserves set aside for activities that will never occur.
The county must fund infrastructure that supports the local economy and ensure it is fit for purpose. For broadband we can see some progress but highways maintenance is slow and inadequate.
The county should provide services that support a good quality of life for vulnerable people and those who have difficulty getting work. We need to help people into work or help them into work re-enabling people who have had problems whenever possible.
ACS–Services for the elderly and vulnerable Within ACS the administration continuously seeks to reduce demand making no increase for inflation or demographic change. We support continuous pressure to improve efficiency removing bureaucracy and deploying new techniques and technology. However, we must ensure that people are not just forced out of relative low cost services into those with much higher spend. Into acute hospitals due to a lack of care places for instance. The county should collect data on local needs, understand it and focus on those needs. There should be clear evidence that needs are being met.
The cycle we see too often in our divisions, of a chaotic and disastrous end to life bounced from service to service must cease. We find it difficult to believe that this can be achieved in the face of an increasing elderly population while we put money in reserves “for a rainy day”. The problems experienced with care homes within the County’s contract are inexcusable.
The County must watch its strategy closely to be sure that the vulnerable are not being pushed out of the support system. Cost reductions purely from lower wage rates or working hours are not acceptable. They just move the budget problem to the benefit bill.
Public Health Mental health services are clearly inadequate but at national level Liberal Democrats are taking action and we welcome the moves by Norman Lamb to establish maximum times for referral. We believe that the County must play its role in this area.
CYP– Children’s services with emphasis on education These concern us concerns us most. The performance of many of our schools, particularly those in deprived areas lags the national picture. While there are improvements, in key stage 2 reading, writing and maths Suffolk has improved moving us up the Local Authority rankings from 145 to 141 this is not good enough. The Tory response is to cut the overall CYP budget by £6.6 million.
We have the “Raising the Bar” initiative but find it difficult to detect any real enthusiasm for it in Suffolk Schools or a belief that it is an effective approach. A school governors commented recently “If the Local Authority continues to focus on such non-events as the distribution of meaningless and infantile rosettes, I think we can be confident that the Bar will remain firmly on, or near, the floor.” Currently we appear to have a learning inspection service and we need a learning improvement service.
Leadership is essential but the enthusiastic effective leadership teams in our good and outstanding schools just don’t have the budget to cover supply replacements while they help others to make the leap in teaching and learning required. They can’t neglect their own schools and let them fall back.
We still believe that the County should fund supply cover and in addition establish a small number of “excellence” teams who could work with the leadership teams in failing schools to remove pressure, determine what needs to be done and put it in place. Excellence teams would need people with proven track records who enjoy a challenge and would need to ensure that necessary management decisions are taken.
The cost of such teams would not be trivial but would be small compared to the County budget and must be less than the continuing cost of failure.
The Conservative administration have been in control of our children’s education now for ten years and in many areas a whole generation of Suffolk young people have been through a failing education system. This system must be improved and “Raising the Bar” is not working.
And, while the government has made it mandatory for young people to remain in education or training until 17 it seems deeply inappropriate to have no fundng mechanism in place to support the poorest young people of the county for this last year of what is now statutory education, as exists up until 16. Our view is that you need to speculate in order to accumulate – that savings should be measured longterm. A small investment from our our rainy day millions now could reap dividends in years to come
The Suffolk County Council Lib Dem Group
EUROPE: You have a vote today – don’t forget to use it!
Scoring 8 out of 10, Lib Dem MEPs provide best ‘value-for-money’ of all UK parties, according to the Independent
LibDems fight for East of England Jobs
Like it or not, more than 4 million UK jobs depend on Britain remaining in the European Union.
Which is why the Lib Dems want us to stay in Europe, unlike UKIP and the many Conservative Eurosceptics. Pulling out of Europe would be disastrous for the economy – and for Suffolk!
In the East of England a staggering 375,000 jobs will be put at risk if Britain leaves the European Union.
“The facts speak for themselves,” says Lib Dem Euro MP Andrew Duff. “Locally, the EU has provided vital funding for job creation projects and has brought in £millions of investment.
The truth is, the EU needs reform, but pulling out would lead to economic disaster.”
Published and promoted by I Horner on behalf of the Liberal Democrats at Orwell House, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 0PP
UKIP: “Safer lorries? Nein danke!”
Suffolk cyclists and pedestrians will be delighted to hear that new regulations on lorry design were adopted by the European Parliament on Tuesday with a huge majority.
Inadequate HGV design has been implicated as a significant factor in the deaths and injuries of pedestrians and cyclists. Lorries are involved in almost one in five cycle fatalities in Britain.
Under changes pushed by Liberal Democrat MEPs, the design of lorry cabs are set to be changed. Crucially they will have larger windows to the front and side – which will increase the driver’s field of vision and reduce blind spots. New vehicles would also have a crumple zone and a rounder front, with the intention of reducing the severity of injuries to vulnerable road users – in a collision the design would allow a cyclist or pedestrian to be deflected away from the lorry rather than being dragged beneath it.It is thought the proposal could help prevent dozens of fatal accidents each year.
Although the vote was 606 – 54, embarrassingly, more MEPs from the UK than any other country voted against adopting these new rules and half of the 12 were from UKIP 
, including UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Another vote against was from the BNP’s Nick Griffin.
A full list of nay-sayers can be found here.
“This vote show how divorced UKIP MEPs are from any activity except that of claiming expenses, ” says LibDem Transport spokesman Caroline Page.
“I have twice been very nearly killed by a lorry when cycling. In both cases, poor visibility from the cab was the key issue. I am sure that lorry drivers will welcome these proposals as fervently as cyclists and pedestrians.
Lorry drivers don’t want to become killers, any more than cyclists want to be killed. How hard is that for UKIP to understand?”
Caroline Page
NHS Data sharing – it’s your call
Everyone in Suffolk should have received a leaflet through the post (click here) about how the government intends to share your personal health data with a variety of ‘approved’ (but unspecified) organisations and ‘researchers’. The leaflet came without an envelope and will probably have arrived with a lot of other leaflets and many people may have thrown it away unread.
The leaflet tells you, “If you are happy for your information to be shared “ (or if you have thrown away the leaflet unread) “you do not need to do anything. There is no form to fill in and nothing to sign.”
In other words – you will automatically have opted into having your full medical information shared with whoever the government decides appropriate.
Or indeed, anyone who breaks into the HSCIC ‘secure’ system.
“The thing that worries me, is why is there no form to fill in and nothing to sign? The government are leafleting every household in the country,and the form could easily have contained a simple opt-in slip that you could fill in and take to your GP. Almost everything in this country that’s not compulsory requires an opt in – from electoral registration, to becoming an organ donor. If the government wants to start a trend for opting-out rather than opting-in why don’t we start with one or both of these? ” asks Woodbridge County Councillor Caroline Page.
“The second problem I have is can we be identified via this data? The leaflet tells you that your name will not be linked to your data but the parent NHS website confirms that they are linking “your date of birth, full postcode, NHS number, and gender“ will be. That is enough to identify most people.
Theoretically NHS data sharing is a good idea. Nothing would please me – and people like me – more than if a responsible state used our medical data for responsible research to ameliorate our current problems and make life better for the future. But until we can have better guarantees as to anonymity and security this initiative seems to be fatally flawed.
Personally, I’m happy to share my NHS data with my excellent GP practice, with hospitals and with various expert medical personnel. But until we can have better guarantees as to anonymity and security I will not be sharing my data with the state!”
A proposal – which will be discussed next month – could additionally give access to our data to non-NHS bodies, including private firms. Make a positive decision as to whether you are opting in or out. Contact your GP surgery
Caroline Page
Carers should have rights every day of the year!
Today, 29th November is officially Carers Rights Day – the day when the UK celebrates family carers and tells them what they are worth.
” I am offended by the whole concept. Carers Rights Day seems to be a day when well-paid professionals and media pundits gather together to pat each other on the backs and declare they care. The brutal truth is that they don’t. Society doesn’t. Successive governments don’t. And when I once asked Unison strikers why they were not striking for family carers they memorably replied “Because you don’t work!” ,” says Woodbridge Councillor, Caroline Page
“Carers wouldn’t need a Carers Rights Day if the state had ever given Family Carers any meaningful rights. And the right to be accepted as a worker rather than patronised as a rather dim and unworldly saint comes top of the list,” Cllr Page – a longterm family carer – maintains.
“If carers were seen as the workers they are, the real cost of that care: the working hours, the loss of careers, the impact of poverty and poor health, the absence of employment-related pensions – all these might be factored into the support offered to them. As it is, people suggest they may like a session of aromatherapy!
“The welfare state has traditionally relied on the love carers feel for those they care for to save the state the real cost of that care. Yet carers suffer from blighted careers, poverty, poor health (fulltime carers are twice as likely to be in bad health than their peers) and can look forward to little more than an impoverished old age. Thousands of people like myself have worked unsupported 168 hour weeks for years. It is perfectly possible we might just get worn out!”, says Caroline Page. “This is not only sad and wrong, it is also very expensive. How much does it cost to replace 24/7 specialised, knowledgeable care? Five years ago the cost of home care was estimated as between £18 and £27 per hour depending on whether it was daytime, evening or weekend. Goodness knows what it is in 2013.
“Every day should be Carers Rights Day – and everyone should recognise and remember they are a single step away from being either a carer or someone who needs care.”
Caroline Page is calling on the government to look at and act on her wish-list :
- Carers Allowance should be viewed as a wage rather than a benefit, awarded to all full-time carers . Currently family carers can claim £59 odd a week -if they don’t earn more than £100: meaning carers are expected to live and further their careers on £8368 a year. If, of course you earn a little more than £100 a week, you get no carers allowance at all. Yet the constraints on your lifestyle of fulltime caring are very equivalent to those of disability.
- The state must further relax rules on ‘other employment’ to allow carers the ‘luxury’ of being able to work, and have some non-caring life outside their responsibilities.
- The state should pay into the equivalent of an occupational pension for carers to accurately reflect (ok at minimum wage) the real hours spent caring. This could be established by reference to the cared for’s DLA returns and would give carers the prospect of a securer old age with recognition of what can be decades of real – if unpaid work.
- When a family carer is bereaved they are simultaneously made redundant. The state should set up robust and appropriate training to provide carers for genuine, satisfying jobs when their caring roles (often sadly) end. This isn’t a luxury – it is a reward for all the unpaid work they have done without prospect of career advancement.
Caroline Page
A14 – why should years of underinvestment take an unjust toll?
Suffolk Lib Dems are deeply critical of proposals to toll the A14. “We are saying to government “You have got this wrong! Listen to us and to what the people of Suffolk are saying and revisit your decision to toll the A 14.” And the majority of Suffolk organisations, both private and Local Authority-led, are with us, ” Leader David Wood told October’s full council meeting last Thursday.
The Lib Dems amended the Conservative motion (to persuade the government to reconsider the need for tolling on this much-needed infrastructure project) by adding in reference to Suffolk’s pressing need for investment in sustainable transport from Felixstowe to Cambridge and beyond.
” The A14 is an esssential conduit between East Anglia and the heart of England – and yet for years there has been underinvestment by various governments in major infrastructure projects in East Anglia. Imposing a toll on the new road would be a further tax on Suffolk,” said Cllr Wood. “We have the largest port in the country, major industry that is expanding, a growing tourist economy – the two AONB’s alone are worth £300m annually- and yet we are being told that if you want this highway (its not even a motorway) you must pay for it!! We wouldn’t mind so much if this were government policy across the country, but it isn’t. Of all the current planned road-building schemes, only the A14 is planned to generate income, ”
“We recognise that Suffolk must be at the table when this subject is being discussed if we are going to put the point across successfully. This is why we were unable to support a Labour motion to withdraw the £1m funding SCC’s putting towards this major project. A million pounds is a huge amount of money but Suffolk County Council must be at the forefront of every discussion – putting the case for the people and industry of Suffolk to have its say and obtain a fair deal.
Investment in major infrastructure projects for East Anglia are long overdue which is why we are insisting that rail links between Felixstowe to Cambridge and beyond must also be looked at. Suffolk is an important player in the UK’s recovery and deserves investment without taxation,” said Cllr Wood.
Lib Dem spokesperson for Transport , Caroline Page, who seconded the amendment, adds ” years of underinvestment in Suffolk railways has left us with rail services from Ipswich to Cambridge and Peterborough which fall well short of what is required for effective day-to-day operation. In its current state the rail system is unable to provide a viable alternative to a tolled A14. This makes any decision to toll doubly unfair, because there isn’t the capacity for a reliable public transport alternative. ”
Pupil Premium – a fairer society in Suffolk?
A fascinating new interactive map will show you exactly how much extra funding your local school has been able to claim via Pupil Premium
An extra £25,000? £75,000? £242,000?
Woodbridge county councillor Caroline Page is delighted to point out that ” this school year, Woodbridge’s excellent and inclusive Farlingaye High School has been able to claim nearly a quarter of a million pounds to provide additional support to pupils from hard-pressed homes. This is thanks to the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition government.”
The Pupil Premium – which is additional to main school funding – is an initiative introduced by the Liberal Democrats in government which intends to address the current underlying inequalities between children eligible for free school meals and their peer. It is doing this very practically by ensuring that funding to tackle disadvantage reaches the pupils who need it most.
You can click here to seach the map for yourself and find out for yourself what your school has been able to claim.
However, getting the funding is only the start. “Its quite a revelation to see how much money is going into Suffolk schools. We now have to see what they are doing with it, ” points out Suffolk Lib Dem schools spokesperson, Penny Otton
Lets stop being modest about LibDem achievements
On this Sunday’s Politics programme, SCC Lib Dem leader Dave Wood will be voicing robust support for his party at both local and national level in advance of the Lib Dem party conference.
“After the initial shock at finding ourselves blamed for everything the Coalition government does, and the protest vote that cost us seats, we’ve realised that people have got into the habit of relying on us to hold the worst excesses of the Tories at bay, without acknowledging any of the good things we do. They’re having their cake and eating it! “ he says.
“So, instead of just getting on and doing the job – as we always do – we have to start shouting about our local and national successes. It’s up to us to bring our out light from under the bushel because it is clearly in the interests of both Tories and Labour to keep it hidden. But we do a lot. Let’s stop being so modest about our achievements.
Locally our hard work and dedication is acknowledged and respected. This is why no sitting Suffolk LibDem councillor lost their seat in the 2013 election. Yet for far too long we have been hard-working councillors that everybody knows and relies on without expecting the pat on the backs we deserve. We need to be proud of what we have achieved and be proud to tell everyone about our successes. In Suffolk, our local defence of local services saw off Andrea Hill’s New Strategic Direction, while nationally, we are behind all those many innovations like the triple lock pension, tax-cuts for the low paid, the pupil premium, and bringing record numbers of poorer students into higher education etc. These are improving life for so many of us in Suffolk – and in the UK as a whole.
We need to confront people with the reality: ask them what the Tories would be doing if we Lib Dems weren’t there to rein them in and keep watch on things. Unlike a lot of other European countries, the UK is not used to Coalition governments and hasn’t fully understood how they work. Too many people choose to see this Coalition as a friendship group, rather than what it is – a temporary alliance of very differing views. It suits the Labour party to support this view – after all the Coalition only exists to deal with the mess they left this country in.
We must not be afraid to tell everyone what we are doing and be proud to do so.”