Dignity? There won't be much dignity attached to Adult Social Care in the near future, as the Salford City Council-inspired `mutual', Aspire, charges around Greater Manchester trying to flog its services to stay afloat.
Elderly people, adults with learning and physical disabilities, and children with learning and physical disabilities will become "income opportunities", to create a profit, or "surplus" from the "market", according to a 24 page Council report. Up for sale are "activities and care offered in day services", "the specialist respite care service at Granville" and "supported tenancy management" services.
Aspire assumes in its business plan that it's going to take 10% of the `supported tenancy management market', presumably taking jobs from other councils. It also assumes a profit, or `surplus', of £1.082million to split with Salford Council in five years time. In the meantime, there are no savings for the Council for at least two years, if at all.
The whole logic of setting up the mutual is to save money for Salford Council but its own Strategic Finance Manager states in the report that it could end up leading to even more cuts to services...
"The council's budget proposals for 15/16 includes a savings target of £0.5m from 2016/17 (nil for 2015/16) for the creation of an adult social care mutual" she writes "The projections indicate that this level would not be achieved until 2017/18. In 2016/17 there would potentially be a shortfall of around £190k and alternative savings would need to be identified."
"In considering the financial risk associated with this proposal it is important to note that the additional costs of £400k [set up, insurance, VAT etc] would primarily be incurred from day one of the mutual whilst the achievement of savings/efficiencies and the anticipated business expansion will be incremental" she warns "Slippage in these areas, particularly in the early years, could result in the mutual not achieving a surplus."
Despite Salford Council and the Mayor blaming the cuts for the formation of the mutual, in two years time austerity is supposed to be over, particularly, we keep being told, if there is a Labour Government. Only last week, Ian Stewart stood up at a full meeting of Salford Council and said that the £6billion devolution of health and social care to Greater Manchester would allow more funding. So what's going on?
Residents could be forgiven for thinking that the privatisation, or mutualisation, of Adult Social Services is ideologically driven, rather than financially driven. They might well be asking why a Labour Party Council and a Labour Party Mayor are privatising everything in sight with a General Election around the corner. This week Salford Council also formally handed over what's left of its council housing to Salix Homes.
By the time the Election comes around there'll be fewer Salford Council services for the 13 Deputy and Assistant Mayors costing Council Tax payers almost £200,000 to control.
Indeed, the Council report on the mutual almost boasts that "Salford's Adult Social Care budget accounted for 22% of the Council's overall budget...23rd out of 24 (ie. 2nd lowest proportion of Council budget allocated to Adult Social Care in the North West region)... average for North West Authorities was 32%".
While this begs the question as to why the proportion of Adult Social Care spending in Salford is so low when all local authorities in the North West have seen huge cuts, staff working for the new mutual might find themselves taking a massive gamble with their future jobs.
When the idea of the mutual was first mooted publicly in June last year, staff had a controversial ballot with only one question asked and no explanations... "Do you want to change to a mutual?" (see previous Salford Star article `Mayor Imposes Staff Ballot' click here)
Unsurprisingly, given the pressure they were put under, 59% of those who voted agreed to the change. The Council has guaranteed the new company a five year contract but while current terms and conditions are being guaranteed for existing staff, `productivity efficiencies' are expected to save £163,000 by 2019/20, there will be a `review' of new appointments and a reduced pension scheme for new recruits.
Furthermore, what happens at the end of the guaranteed Council contract when Adult Social Care services have to be tendered on the open market?
"This is not an ideal step as far as UNISON is concerned" says Salford City UNISON branch secretary Steven North "All too often the setting up of a social enterprise is the first step to outright privatisation and we are concerned that in three years' time Aspire could find itself the losing party in a bidding war with a private sector care organisation that can deliver this service for less money because it pays bargain basement wages and subjects its clients to fifteen minute-only visits.
"It is now the duty of Salford City Council to ensure that doesn't happen" he adds "In our view the most practical way it could do this is by adopting UNISON's Ethical Care Charter. Doing so would ensure that the provision of services for vulnerable people could only ever be delivered by organisations that pay the Living Wage, that properly train their staff and that treat their clients with human decency. If the Council wants this social enterprise to succeed it will adopt the Charter."
The not-for-profit mutual, in which the four hundred staff jointly own the company, is just one type of what councils call `alternative delivery models'. Recently some have gone very wrong...
UNISON members in north London, working for Your Choice Barnet (YCB) and caring for adults with disabilities went on a series of strikes for five months fighting an imposed 9.5% pay cut. Barnet Council set up YCB as a local authority trading company in early 2012 and there has since been a thirty percent cut to staffing levels with financial problems caused all over the place by the company taking out a £1million set-up loan.
"We've watched experienced staff driven out of the job" said one striker "This council is too business-minded and don't care for our clients like we do. These are vulnerable people we care for but they are not being valued and don't get continuity of care, which is so important....We should be taken back in-house."
In Sefton, New Directions faced a £3million funding cut from its budget from the council and is proposing pay cuts averaging 12%, rising to 28%, and up to 124 redundancies. It was claimed that the terms and conditions of staff who had TUPE transferred from the council were too expensive. A two year collective agreement ended in April 2013, resulting in further proposals for cuts to terms and conditions and jobs. Sefton Council has now decided to decommission some services, leaving the company facing heavy losses.
Individual Solutions SK (ISSK) in Stockport was set up as a trading company owned by Stockport Council in 2009, with a view to making adult social care and support services more cost effective. However, by 2012 the council had serious concerns about both the value for money and quality of care of the company. It stated that the costs of the service were higher than expected and that the company was not performing in line with the projections made for it. Redundancies affecting around half the workforce were proposed. A period of consultation led to a decision to take back in-house some of the key services that had gone out to the company.
Behind the Council hype of the new mutual are eight hundred local residents with substantial and critical needs whose services are now dependent on the whims of the `market', `income opportunities' and `surpluses'. Not so much radical, as risky.
* Why Salford Council has to adopt the Ethical Care Charter - click here
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