Now they want to charge for CSA

How low can this government go, first we see them try to force through the Lords welfare reform and fail, I’m glad to say and today we find they want to charge people for using Child Support Agency (CSA) The charge will consist of an up front cost then a 10% to 12% charge, how can people on benefits pay for this. The government call on parents to work together to come to an agreement and as we all know the reason people involve the CSA is because the negotiations have broken down.

If you have children you should bring them up in a right and proper manner, there are too many people willing to walk away from a relationship nowadays instead of working to try and keep the family together. I respect those that after a relationship breakdown accept their responsibility, I deplore those that just walk out and negate any responsibility. This is a time when the government should be helping not making the innocent pay the price.

TATA Pensions

I hear on the grapevine that TATA employees have received letters from their pension scheme saying that they are looking at the future of the scheme and it could end up the same as local authorities where they will pay more into the pension for a longer time and getting less at the end of it.

I would be interested in any comments that employees of TATA have to say on this issue

Consultation

As some people might know I’ve been badly for the last year and had to give up my cycling.

After my treatment ended at the end of last year and feeling a lot better I decided to go back into the gym and get myself ready for the spring to get back on my brand new bicycle (replacement for the one stolen)

Imagine my surprise talking to people in the new Pods about the consultation on sport, leisure and culture when they told me they had no idea what I was talking about, so I feel I need to ask people again to look out for the consultation document and fill it in. You only have a WEEK left, consultation finishes on the 25th January

Questions on Sport, Leisure & Culture Review

After getting a paper copy of the sport, leisure & culture services consultation “Your chance to have your say Sport, leisure and culture – the future”
I read the questions and saw there was nothing in the document to have the “status quo” option available.

On the back of the questionnaire where you are asked to put your name and address there is a box that is asking if you have “any further comments” If people think that we should not be selling our leisure to the private sector, I urge that they should fill this in objecting to the sell off.

The deadline for responses is the 25th January.

Unions Stance on Public Sector Pensions

Looking at the stance that has been put forward by six of the trade unions that have an interest in public sector pensions, it can be seen by the latest information gathered that four look likely to refuse acceptance of the Heads of Agreement scheme put forward by the coalition government on the 19th December 2011, Unison, it seems are making no comment about it’s meeting on the 10th January at this moment

Unison, Unite, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) and National Union Teachers (NUT) and Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), have all published their latest information on their websites which is as follows

Unison:- The NHS Pension Scheme Heads of Agreement (HoA). will be considered by the Health Service Group Executive on 10 January 2012.

The NUT will call for further urgent discussions with Government on the future of teachers’ pensions. Before Christmas, the NUT reserved its position on the Government’s proposals. The NUT, the largest teachers’ union, has now agreed to continue to pursue further changes to those proposals.

The NUT remains concerned that proposed increases in employee contributions and pension ages at a time of real terms pay cuts, will lead many teachers to opt out from pension provision and threaten the future of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. The NUT is also concerned that a large majority of teachers will not be able to work successfully in the classroom to age 68.

The National Executive of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union met on the 6th January to consider the DfE proposals for the reform of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme which were presented to teacher unions on 20 December 2011.
The National Executive endorsed unanimously the stance taken by the NASUWT negotiators not to sign up to the Government’s ‘Heads of Agreement’ and to reserve the Union’s position.

The National Executive based its decision on the fact that:

• the Heads of Agreement document is incomplete and lacks an appropriate assessment of the impact of the changes on teachers;

• the manner in which the DfE conducted the process of seeking to reach agreement has been completely unsatisfactory;

• critical issues of concern remain, including the contribution rates and the normal pension age..

PCS
The proposals will be put to the PCS National Executive when it meets on January 10, but in the present form they will not be recommended as they do not provide a basis for agreement. This same offer was unanimously rejected by the NEC on December 6, and rejected by senior reps from PCS Groups at the NCLG meeting on December 14.

UNITE
The government’s latest proposals to cut local government pensions were rejected by Unite, Britain’s biggest union, on Monday, 9 January.
The Unite local authority national industrial sector committee (LANISC), which met 9th January, rejected the ‘principles document’ as a basis for a satisfactory outcome. Last week (5 January) Unite’s health sector national industrial sector committee (HSNISC) also rejected the government’s latest proposals on the NHS pension scheme.

The only union I can find with a different stance is the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), and their comments from 6th January are as follows
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), said: “As a democratic and member-led union we are putting the government’s offer on teachers’ pensions to our members, and this will influence the decision of our executive committee on 28 January.

“The government was quite clear that the offer it made on 19 December was a final offer, and that any further industrial action would not improve it.

“In the current economic and political climate we believe that the 19 December offer is the best deal we could get through negotiation. Further prolonged industrial action, which is the only alternative, could lead to the government imposing significantly worse terms than are currently offered.”

This is the latest information I have to hand. I will be watching with interest the outcome of the two unions, Unison and PCS, meetings today, the 10th January.

Building Schools for the Future (BSF)

These cheeky Tories on NLC, I don’t know how they have the nerve to go into print and say what they say. In today’s telegraph I see an headline about the Cabinet Member for Adults and Children Services welcoming the BSF programme by saying and I quote “Building Schools for the future provides a fantastic opportunity to bring our school buildings into the 21st century with modern, vibrant facilities to help nurture young people and encourage them to do well,”

His government tried to cancel the BSF programme nationally but Scunthorpe was so advanced that they couldn’t do it. Then he has the cheek to say at the end of the article “I am pleased that the Conservative-led Government has prioritised our area and has been able to continue with an additional £20-million investment programme set to transform secondary education in Scunthorpe.

As can be read in the article here:- http://www.thisisscunthorpe.co.uk/Progress-report-delivers-marks-pound-87m-schools/story-14334932-detail/story.html It took 18 million just to build this one school so what will we do with this gift of £20m I will wait and see.

A couple of questions I feel need to be asked.

1 If this programme had not been instigated by a Labour Government, would this government have done anything? My personal feeling is NO

2 Would these Tories want to do anything for Scunthorpe? That can only be answered after their term of office, I think and I’m sure a lot of people in Scunthorpe already know the answer to that one but we will wait and see

As a last thought I keep reading about “CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO PROMISES” I didn’t see a manifesto put out by the Tories. I would be pleased if someone could point me in the right direction to read one.

Nominated Car Parking

I had a rye smile to myself this morning when I looked on Steve Swift’s blog and read about Leader, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Members of the council looking to getting nominated car parking spaces at the newly named Civic Centre.

It doesn’t matter what time you go to Civic Centre at the moment you struggle to get a parking space at all, so what will it be like when these councillors with their bloated egos get parking spaces for themselves. Just goes to show the sort of attitude these people have got.

You can just hear them saying ” We are important people with an important job to do and we should not be running around looking for somewhere to park and especially as we have to come from outside of Scunthorpe.”

Well I can assure you “important people” that if this does happen and I’m there with nowhere to park you will find my car there instead.

My Comments on 2011

Here are some comments of mine about 2011

The people of Nth Lincs in May 2011 decided they wanted a change of leadership at Nth Lincs council and accordingly voted in a Tory controlled council and I don’t use the word “controlled” lightly, as we found at the first meeting of full council. The meetings were cut down to four, of which only two allowed the Tory Council to be held to account with numerous restrictions on what could be asked or challenged. On the very first meeting two Labour councilors were reported to the standards board for comments made but when investigated there was no case to answer.

During the year there has been some bad decisions made and I’m glad to say they’ve been challenged at every toss and turn. The crafty Tories even called in decisions their own cabinet members have made so they could control what was asked and what was challenged.

There have been and still are numerous reviews of services to assess staffing levels, some of the reviews have even been instigated because some of the Tories have had problems with some members of staff. When an officer was asked how many reviews were being carried out they couldn’t answer because they did not know.

I will give what I believe to be my predictions for 2012 in another blog in the New Year

Humber Bridge Proportionality

I sat the other night listening to Andrew Percy MP on Look North spouting about the allocation of the Humber Bridge debt between the four Unitary Authorities surrounding the River Humber. His reasoning was that each should accept the same amount of responsibility for the debt, which is 25%.

Cllr Chris Shaw, leader of NELC put an alternative argument forward saying that the debt should reflect the proportionality of the numbers of people living in each area. He was only asking for the same that is happening on the Humberside Police And Fire Authorities. Andrew Percy then went on the attack saying that this was a good deal and NELC should grow up and not try and put up barriers to spoil this deal.

After seeing figures earlier today I can now understand why Percy was so strong on his views. The new figures on proportionality are as follows NLC 18%, NELC 17%, Hull 24% and ERYC 41%. So Andrew Percy expects NLC to cough up 7% more, NELC 8%, HULL 1% and an overall saving to ERYC of 16%, After the boundary review goes through is Percy looking for a seat on the North bank of the Humber?

Don’t forget if NELC are not in this deal and it goes ahead, we in North Lincs could end up with 33% of the debt, which is double what is on offer at the moment. If you are expecting the Tories on this council to come to your rescue. Forget it, they are only interested in promoting the two tory MPs representing this area and their national party.

Leisure Service Review

Here we go again another attack on local authority staff by the local tories on North Lincs Council employees under the guise of a review entitled ‘Continuing The Development Of Modern Leisure Services In North Lincolnshire’. We should all know by now that this so called review is only a way of looking how to off load staff and costs to the private sector.

The Tories tried to do this last time they were in power in 2003-2007 and thankfully we won the election in 2007 and saved the leisure centres from privatisation.

My personal thoughts on this is that the tories will bring in a “Leisure Trust” that will erode peoples pay and conditions. OK so they will say that employees will be transfered under TUPE legislation but as any trade unionist knows that after the day of transfer TUPE is not worth the paper its written on

If you are an employee of NLC and reading this, you should be aware that no employee is safe in any job on NLC while this lot are in charge.

My fellow councillor, Cllr Swift has blogged on this issue as well and I must say he goes into more detail then I do