What are all the cuts achieving?

With the New Year we can only hope that some peace of mind comes to those of us who live and work in Peterborough. On one hand the Government tells us that the spending power of the council has gone up, and then in your paper we are informed to be wary of budgets for the coming year. We are under no illusion that this Government has NOT increased the budget for 2013/ 14 to PCC. As we come to the closure of another pantomime season – oh yes we are. We are full time Unison officials who work for PCC - ( boo from the galleries of Tax Payers Alliance and our local MP). This means we work within the public sector ( more boos and hisses from folk). Our Prime Minister in his new year message tells us that ‘ tangible progress is being made’, is it really - what about the people of Peterborough what do they think and feel, what do they see; outsourced services which seem to be less effective than was promised. They see their streets are left messy and dirty! The Prime Minister told us ’ we are all in this together and that the private sector would pick up the slack’. George Osborne predicted 70,000 job losses in the public sector but it now totals nearly 300,000 across the country. We now have redundancies within the private sector as well so I ask whowill pick up the slack? Well what this Government does is attack those on benefits! They conveniently forget the shameful public sector work- ing at Westminster who claim so much in expenses. And also conveniently this seems to have been given a back seat. Who else can say ‘ If I buy some sweet or a bottle of water I can put that on expenses’? What about a more radical idea – scrapping the extremely long holidays that the MP’s have? What is happening about the very rich people who legally avoid paying tax, this please needs to be looked at with real tangible progress and feedback to the public! Yes they will tell us how they work during those parliamentary breaks, but then moan at teachers for the same sort of breaks or even deputy heads who in these tough financial times PCC can authorise to send to a very expensive hall for an away day. Was there really nowhere else to hold this meeting, somewhere cheaper and nearer? With budgets so tight we are sure that more cutbacks within the public sector will take place this year, placing more people out of work, placed on benefits, or some more outsourcing from PCC. But hand on heart can they really say that plan has worked so far? But not all is lost, we enjoy working for PCC and so do most staff and we all work hard to try and make a difference, ( more boos from thegallery) so we shall continue to do our best, and with a bit of luck our local MP will say something good about Peterborough – eventually!