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£3M Cuts Target Children - Sheffield Council


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HOLA441

http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/3m-cuts-target-children.6426668.jp

CHILDREN and young people in Sheffield will bear the brunt of the massive £6.5 million in council cutbacks that must be made by the end of the financial year.

Sheffield Council's education budget will be slashed by £3.15 million - nearly half the savings that need to be made by April to cope with the Government's spending squeeze.

Other savings will be made by cutting £1.2m from the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative - designed to boost some of the most deprived areas of the city - and £90,000 from community cohesion programme Prevent.

Town Hall officers say they have also made "an early start" on working out how to cut 30 per cent of the council's budget - around £220 million - by 2014/15.

The savings are outlined in an interim budget report to be discussed by councillors in an emergency debate on Wednesday July 28.

Compulsory redundancies are expected to be a certainty for council staff and incremental pay rises also look set to be axed.

Around £70m of the four-year funding squeeze will fall on the council's education budget.

Sonia Sharp, executive director of children's services, admitted the situation was "grim".

Cuts this year will fall on dozens of youth schemes, including £400,000 from the Connexions careers programme, £200,000 from the council's teenage pregnancy project, and £180,000 from the Child and Adolescent Mental Health scheme.

Dr Sharp said: "A lot of grants allocated for this year will be going.

"Spending reductions must be made and we are looking at how we can deliver them.

"We will be seeking to protect frontline services but it is going to be very tough. At the moment we have our noses down coming up with suggestions.

"In the longer term there will inevitably be job losses as not everything can be achieved through savings."

The council boom appears to be over.

Some big cuts looming.

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HOLA442

http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/3m-cuts-target-children.6426668.jp

The council boom appears to be over.

Some big cuts looming.

Most of the early cuts are in these non-statutory areas. Unfortunately, many of these non-statutory areas are often more socially "useful" than the statutory ones.

The best youth and mental health projects prevent us all suffering from the maladjusted Raoul Moats' and unwanted children'; the best health and safety laws protect the well-adjusted from themselves.

Both are useful but long term the former prevents far more harm and cost.

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There shouldn't be any deprived areas in the UK after the massive boom that went on. Unless of course it was a purely greedy boom where only a few benefited....

Seriously labour should be put against the wall and gotten rid of for the blox they made of it all.

I don't agree with youth clubs and youth services anyway.

Kids need to be prepared for the long hard slog of adulthood and having to have fun by working out how yourself.

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"We will be seeking to protect frontline services but it is going to be very tough. At the moment we have our noses down coming up with suggestions."

If you want to protect services make pay cuts across the board.

No job losses (and related redundancy pays)

That's if you care about the services that is..

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HOLA446

Some big cuts looming.

But the a r s e h o l e s that run our councils never think about cutting out the unnecessary stuff first. Our local Town Council pays a florist to change the flowers in reception. Why? The reception is actually a lobby that people walk through to get into the building. No-one notices the flowers. Why should I pay tax so those feckers can have flowers in their office. I don't have flowers in my office because they're a waste of money.

They pay to put hanging baskets up throughout the town in the summer and pay someone to water them. Why? Why don't the local shopkeepers pay if they want to attract people into the town?

But, more importantly, they have a load of people working there who only work productively a few hours a day. They spend the rest of the time chatting and fecking about on the internet. Talking of which ...

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Target the children! Yay! It's not like we'll need looking after in our old age or anything...

But how easy will it be for them to get rid of some the numerous middle and higher managers on high salaries though? Those that take early retirement may well do so on 70% of their final salary, those that have been there 15 or 20 years or more may well get generous redundancy payments (as still carry significant pension liabilities somewhere down the line).

Easiest to chop will be the low paid workers who deliver many front line services, and those on temporary contracts, or who have only been there a few years. After all, it's the middle and upper management who will be choosing who gets the chop. Turkeys voting for xmas, etc......

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HOLA4413

massive £6.5 million

Better not tell them how big the deficit is then.

Its future generations, todays children who will benefit most from cuts. They might not realise it now, but lugging around billions in debt isnt much of a legacy.

I stand corrected, the £1bn is the debt that the council carries according to that LINK I posted. Their annual budget is about £1.5bn (they seem to rely on debt/borrowing for revenue). So £6.5 mill is circa 0.4% cut. Their website also says that:

Around 67% of the £1,480 million revenue spending goes on three key services:

  • Education
  • Adult and Children's Social Care
  • Housing

and goes on to say:

Most of our money goes on our staff, who provide these services for the community, and the running costs of buildings, offices, vehicles and other facilities. In 2010/11 our revenue budget is £1,480 million.

Given the cost of making council people redundant/early retired,is it even possible to achieve 30% cuts?

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Its future generations, todays children who will benefit most from cuts. They might not realise it now, but lugging around billions in debt isnt much of a legacy.

Your point would be valid if it was todays children who ran up the debt.

It was not, it was their grandparents.

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interestrateripoff,

For the last two years or so I've wandered onto this site on an evening. In all that time you have posted here every day and at all times. Do you have nothing better to do, or a greater economic contribution to make. Are you so wealthy that you can afford to do this? Sitting behind a pubic sector computer with nothing to do? On the dole? I'm curious.

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