Hackney Council passes budget for 2011/12

In a heated and charged evening in the council chamber of Hackney Town Hall last night, the council overwhelming passed the budget for the upcoming year.

Despite the attempts to disrupt the meeting, the entire meeting was held in public with a large number of members of the public able to attend, hear what was being said (most of the time) and see what was being proposed.

We have always been clear about the challenge that Hackney was facing once the intentions of the government became clear. With massive cuts to councils up and down the country, places in most need like Hackney were always going to bear the brunt of the Tory cuts.

Over the past few years, Hackney Council has been prudent. Millions of pounds have been saved and re-invested into front line services. Council tax has been frozen for 5 years in a row, ensuring that the council looked to itself to find the savings it needed to invest in priority areas. However, with a cut of £44 million to our spending in this year alone - some difficult decisions had to be made.

Despite the complete removal of "Area Based Grant" which was central government money directed to the poorest areas of the country, we have managed to find £3 million to contribute towards maintaining services that would otherwise have been axed totally: help for domestic violence victims and youth crime intervention work.

No youth facilities will be closed, no libraries shut, no reduction to key services like recycling or street cleansing, no restrictions on care to be provided to our oldest and most vulnerable of residents.

There have been redundancies - to date about 190 voluntary redundancies have been taken up. Other positions which were unfilled, or occupied by agency staff have been removed. Senior management has been scaled back. Some fantastic officers who all three of us have worked with as members of the Cabinet have left, or will be leaving at the end of the month. None of these are to be welcomed, but these decisions have allowed us to preserve the services at the frontline and which are needed by our residents.

But the vote last night is only part of the story. Next year we face additional cuts of £26 million. To deliver those savings will push us even harder and will be even more difficult. To be honest, we don't know where those savings will come from yet. But we will continue to do our best to ensure that the impact of the cuts made by this Tory government are minimised.

Those who protested last night wanted us to resist the cuts and refuse to set a budget. If this "principled" stance were to have been taken, then nurseries, meals on wheels, youth work, social services, libraries and leisure centres would now be closed up or been stopped. The decision taken last night was to refuse to play politics with people's jobs or people's lives.

We hope that the anger, resentment and justified horror at what is being done - at a rate and scale that far exceeds even Thatcher's vigour - is directed at this rotten government that has directly targeted the poorest areas for the majority of the cuts. We will be portesting at the national, TUC organised march on 26 March - to tell this government that they have neither the electoral nor moral mandate to do what they are to our vital public services.

More details of the march can be found here.

More details on the budget passed last night can be found here.

Please let us know about what you think are the most important services that you wish to see maintained next year in the next budget where even more savings have to be found.

(Photo courtesy of Hackney Citizen and remains the copyright thereof)