Hammersmith and Fulham Budget (Hammersmith and Fulham Liberal Democrats)

Hammersmith and Fulham Liberal Democrats <info@hflibdems.org.uk>

Hammersmith and Fulham Budget

November 4, 2009 10:19 PM

Hammersmith and Fulham Council this week agreed its budget for 2010/11, which will include another year of higher charges and cuts in services. The Council's prospective 'achievement' in cutting council tax by 3% would be more laudable if it were not at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in the Borough.

The council's publicity about the tax cut explains some of the savings it says it has made:

1000 fewer council staff (H&F Direct is dealing with four times as many calls, with two thirds of the staff)
out-sourcing services (such as the school meals company which tried to recruit owner-drivers to deliver meals to schools in their own cars), and
competing with the independent local newspapers for advertising in the Tory Council's 'propaganda' newspaper.

The council does not mention the massive increases in charges to the most needy, including increased charges for meals-on-wheels, and the introduction of means-tested home care charges (of over £12 per hour) for the elderly and disabled which it has already imposed, or the further increases it may have forced itself to impose in the future.

A number of disabled residents recently brought a judicial review application to quash the existing charges on the basis that they breached the Council's statutory duties to the disabled. Their application was dismissed by the Court of Appeal, but only on the purely procedural basis that the charges had to be imposed because of an earlier council tax cut, which had not been challenged in time, and could not now be reversed. Expressing 'very considerable misgivings' about having to determine the case 'against the backdrop of a predetermined tax cut', Lord Justice Sedley said:

"The object of the exercise was the sacrifice of free home care on the altar of a council tax reduction for which there was no legal requirement. The only issue was how it was to be accomplished.... There is a major question of public law: can a local authority, by tying its own fiscal hands for electoral ends, rely on the consequent budgetary deficit to modify its performance of its statutory duties?'

Commenting on the budget, H&F Lib Dems chair Henrietta Bewley said: "This Council has a track record of announcing unfunded council tax cuts which create an obligation to impose future charges on the elderly and disabled. The Tories should come clean on how the Council will pay for the latest tax cuts, not tie the Council's hands now in order to allow it to evade its legal duties in future."