In Islington, we await the budget with interest

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

Whenever you mention to people from outside the borough that you are a councillor in Islington, very quickly the conversation turns to cappuccino shops, Arsenal and the question about how Labour wins in an area as affluent as ours.

The truth is that Islington is the eighth most deprived borough in the country, with some of the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and ill health. There are massive disparities between the third of the population that live in very expensive owned occupied properties and the almost half of people who live in social housing.

It is said that actually there are two Islingtons – the affluent part and the deprived part – and the inhabitants of these two different places have very little to do with each other.

Along with much of London, Islington Council went Labour on May 6th. The newly elected Labour council’s top priority is make our borough fairer, by which we mean reducing poverty and narrowing the gap between the two Islingtons in the things that matter to the chances people enjoy in life: housing, experience of crime, educational achievement, work and health.

It’s exciting to have been given responsibility for children’s services because so much of what we do can be geared to ensure that children from disadvantaged families get more chances to get on in life. The areas in my portfolio include: nurseries and early years services, schools, 14-19 education and training, children’s social care, child protection, fostering and adoption, the youth service and children’s public health. Over the next weeks I’ll be touching on each of these areas to give LabourList readers a sense of what Labour can do in power in local government and what the constraints we face are.

The major problem we will face will inevitably be the Tory-Lib Dem Government’s attacks on our budget. Even before the budget The Tory-Lib Dem’s have already cut £3 million cut from vital front line services for Islington’s children. We await this afternoon’s budget to learn what else will be cut.

As a handy guide to Labour List readers, the big issues relating to Children’s Services in my view are:

• Local Government budgets: many services for children are funded directly out of the general grant the Government gives to each local Council. How much will the Tory-Lib Dem’s cut these by?

• The Labour government paid for a lot of services for children through specific ring fenced grants. Council’s, rightly, complained that these ‘ring fences’ reduced their independence, but nevertheless a lot of money was channelled into vital schemes in such a way. If on today you hear about arcane sounding items like ‘Area Based Grants’ being cut please remember these grants fund vital front line services for children.

• What will the Government cut to pay for its ideologically driven ‘free schools’ policy? Will the pot of money for free school meals be one victim?

• Labour’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme is providing new and refurbished secondary schools across the country. The Government has said this is under review and will tell us the results tomorrow. The cut to this programme ‘leaked’ to the Guardian would mean that Nick Clegg’s Sheffield would loose its BSF funding so let’s see if he’s fought a battle to avoid giving his constituency its second serious kicking in as many weeks.

• Similarly, the less well known but equally vital Primary Capital Programme, which pays for the repair and rebuild of our primary schools, is also under threat.

• The Lib Dems seem very proud that they secured the ‘pupil premium’ (e.g. paying schools extra to take more disadvantages children) in the coalition agreement. How much will this be worth and how will it be paid for? There is a danger the government designs the pupil premium to ensure most of the money goes to schools in affluent areas who currently do not get any subsidy for taking on a very small number of disadvantages children and the Government needs to decide of the premium will go to deprived areas or become and extra subsidy for schools in well to do Tory areas.

The Government will probably claim that it is protecting money for schools. By this it will mean the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) that provides schools with their core funding. Obviously it is good news is this is left untouched but schools also receive money direct from Councils and a range of other grants that have either already been cut or are at risk in the budget. Unless all of these are protected, the Government will break its promise not to cut funding for education.

We await the budget with interest.