Sacking lollipop ladies is no way to save lolly

For more than 80 years, they have been a reassuring presence on our streets, safely guiding generations of schoolchildren across the road. But on current trends, lollipop men and lollipop ladies are destined to go the way of horse troughs and red telephone boxes.

over the past decade, their numbers across england, Scotland and Wales have declined by almost a third. In London and the South east, the fall is even greater — down 44 per cent. According to the latest figures available, there are just over 5,000 school crossing patrol wardens, compared to more than 7,000 in 2010.

Needless to say, the Left know who to blame. rehana Azam, national secretary of the GMB union, raged: ‘Ten years of brutal Tory austerity have left scars right across our society. And now it’s got to the point where our kids aren’t even safe walking home from school.

‘No parent wants to get the call that their child has been involved in an accident, but councils have been left with no choice but to make savings.’

Yes, folks, it’s those ‘savage Tory cuts’ again — this time condemning thousands of boys and girls to run the mortal risk of being mown down by maniacs in gas-guzzling, planet-destroying 4x4s every time they try to get to and from school unsupervised.

Why doesn’t Boris just cut out the middle man, line the kiddies up against the nearest wall and shoot them, St Valentine’s Day Massacre-style?

In fairness, though, the union does have a point when it says that councils have no choice but to make savings.

Ten years ago, Britain was on the brink of bankruptcy. No one knows that better than Labour’s Liam Byrne, the former Treasury minister who wrote a parting note informing the incoming Tory government: ‘There’s no money left.’ ha, ha. Coincidentally, this is the same Liam Byrne who is now running to become Mayor of the West Midlands on an ‘anti-austerity’ ticket. Some people have no shame. Because of Gordon Brown’s profligacy, savings across the board in the public sector were essential. Town halls had to shoulder their share of the burden, especially after getting away with decades of reckless, drunken-sailor spending.

ever since the eighties, councils had been building vast empires, frittering away billions on hiring a standing army of supernumeraries out of the Guardian non-jobs pages.

I made a good living documenting this madness, mocking this inexorable expansion of the burgeoning anti-nuclear, global warming, diversity celebrating, outreaching and co-ordinating classes — all of it at the taxpayers’ expense.

There was always going to be a day of reckoning. Yet when finally forced to balance the books and exercise some modicum of fiscal responsibility, councils chose to start at the bottom.

Inevitably, the axe fell on park keepers, road sweepers, school dinner ladies and, yes, lollipop ladies and lollipop men.

This is standard operating procedure in the public sector playbook when it comes to making economies. Frontline services are always the first to go, purely to make a political point.

Look at the way in which the BBC is currently sacking journalists and scrapping TV programmes in the face of pressure on the licence fee, while the suits survive unscathed.

Whenever the ‘savage cuts’ impact on the NHS, it’s nurses, porters and canteen staff who are deemed expendable. The legions of strategic comptrollers, equality advisers and ‘hr’ executives somehow manage to escape.

There’s something especially grotesque about council chief executives on £250,000 a year, plus perks and gold-plated pensions, deciding to fire low-paid lollipop ladies to save a few quid.

Simply cutting out the salaries of a dozen superfluous senior managers in every Town hall would pay for a lollipop lady on every zebra crossing outside every school in the land.

how much do you think a lollipop lady earns? have a guess. You’re not far out. We’re not talking Gary Lineker here. Depending on where you live, the going rate is around £9 to £10.50 a hour.

Most work between an hour and an hour-and-a-half a day. Call it a tenner, and the typical weekly wage is somewhere around £50 to £75.

In terms of overall council budgets, which this year will top just shy of £50 billion (that’s billion with a B), the cost of employing school crossing patrols is not even a rounding error.

Just think of the mountains of money councils waste unnecessarily. For instance, with the end of the financial year now in sight, the annual festival of digging up the roads is again in full swing.

I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but in my North London manor there are roadworks everywhere — not mending potholes or fixing wonky paving slabs, but widening kerbs and putting in more infuriating cycle lanes.

Surely the best way to calm traffic outside a school is to have someone standing there in a hi-viz coat waving a large lollipop.

Councils plead poverty, but between them take in half a billion pounds a year in on-street parking fines alone. Why not spend some of that rich bounty on subsidising lollipop ladies’ wages?

The truth is that those who run local authorities are no longer interested in providing what most of us consider proper public ‘services’, such as collecting the rubbish every week and helping children across the road.

They only care about raising enough money to keep themselves in the style and comfort to which they have become accustomed.

So they spend their time dreaming up new revenue-raising wheezes, charging us for using the dump or fining us for putting out the dustbin on the ‘wrong day’.

School crossing patrols are a ‘cost’ not a stream of income, so they are dispensible.

WHY waste wages on a lollipop man when you can hire an inspector to sift through recycling bins in search of some stray item which might ‘contaminate’ the waste and therefore incur a hefty fine?

If only someone can work out a way of monetising lollipop men, then their jobs will be safe.

Come on, we’ve got to move with the times. Motorists are already charged for entering cities. Why not make schoolchildren pay to cross the road?

Soon we could see turnstiles with cashless card readers installed on zebra crossings. Lollipop men could become de facto pedestrian-traffic wardens, handing out on-the-spot fines.

how long before the streets are swarming with paramilitary lollipop squads, armed with Tasers and ready to administer a 50,000-volt jolt to the chest of any Jack-the-Lad who attempts to cross the street without paying.

My Boy Lollipop, you make my heart go giddy-up . . .