Surely all councillors can agree the cuts are going far too deep
THERE are council cuts, and then there are cruel council cuts. The fact Lancashire county council was even considering freezing the pay of its lowest paid staff made my blood boil.
It emerged last week that the Conservative-run authority, which has recently been boasting about re-opening libraries and finding extra cash for road repairs, had been looking at scrapping its commitment to pay the Foundation Living Wage.
The FLW is currently £8.45 an hour. It is an advisory figure worked out by the Living Wage Foundation to reflect what it says is the true cost of living.
Instead, Lancashire county council wanted to just pay people the bare minimum wage, which stands currently at £7.50.
What this would have meant for the county council’s lowest paid is that their wages would have been frozen until 2021, at which point the minimum wage would have passed £8.45. Of course by then, the FLW would have moved on too.
The proposal was revealed in cabinet papers published a week ago, but a backlash to the plans in the week which followed ended with the leader of county council, Geoff Driver, saying the county council would instead focus on saving staff costs in other ways.
He said: “Cabinet concluded that it would not be right to make changes which would affect our lowest-paid members of staff, so we will continue to pay the Foundation Living Wage, but we have agreed to consult on general terms and conditions, such as unpaid leave and sick pay.”
So in other words, another attack on staff to come.
The fact is a proposal to cut the real salaries of the lowest paid at the county council should horrify us all. Papers for meetings like the Cabinet should not contain surprises for the councillors who receive generous special allowances for being on top of their areas of responsibility.
Those who sit around LCC’s cabinet table should be asking themselves what sort of culture they’ve instilled since taking power in May which means that senior officers thought forcing down the real salaries of the poorest paid would ever be acceptable.
The Conservatives in Rossendale cleaned up in the county elections in May. I don’t remember seeing ‘ensuring senior officers think it’s acceptable to try and reduce the real pay of our lowest-paid’ on their manifesto.
To give you a sense of why this matters, here in Rossendale, up to a third of workers benefit whenever the minimum wage is increased.
Local councils need to be seen to be pushing the private sector to improve wages, not indulging in a shameful race to the bottom.
Labour, by the way, expect the sudden and controversial changes to senior management at LCC to cost an extra £1m in the short-term.
Of course, the Tories have to find savings. There’s a very real risk LCC won’t be able to pay its bills in two years’ time.
What strikes me as odd is that amid all the crisis financial planning, the big change between the old Labour administration and the new Tory one is that criticism of the government’s cuts to council budgets has stopped.
Why is that? We all suffer from council cuts - surely the one thing our local councillors, regardless of political colour, can agree on is that the cuts are going far too deep, and need to stop.