CUTS BEFALL GLASGOW'S MOST VULNERABLE AS SUSAN AITKEN'S ADMINISTRATION WITHHOLDS MILLIONS

As the Integration Joint Board is forced to cut social care, addiction and homelessness services across Greater Glasgow, Aitken's administration withholds millions in dosh to mitigate pay pressures

Glasgow's Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) is likely something you have never heard about, but it plays a vital role in Greater Glasgow. The Integration Joint Board (IJB) administers social care, addiction and homelessness services across Greater Glasgow. It has recently voted to approve a budget imposing £22m of cuts and 197 full-time equivalent job losses in a desperate scramble to balance the books. This comes at a time where the city has the highest drug and alcohol deaths in the country, homelessness remains a recurring problem as the twin crises of cost of living and housing spirals. We need to discuss how we ended up here, who is to blame and what these decimating cuts mean for the city’s most vulnerable.

Balancing the books

It needs to be highlighted from the outset that the IJB has a statutory obligation to balance its books. This provides an important piece of context, as it can only operate with the budgetary allocations it receives.

Reading through the IJB Financial Allocations and Budgets 2023-2024 reveals a number of serious cuts to service provision. Beyond the £22m in cuts to health and social care, addiction and homelessness services across the city, funding for self-directed support is also being slashed. The self-directed support allows disabled people to organise their own package of care, but is now to endure £2.3m in cuts.

Naturally the statutory obligation to balance the books has not buttered any parsnips with the unions. The GMB union has - entirely correctly - warned these cuts would have a “devastating” affect on service users in the city. The GMB Scotland organiser Sean Baillie told the BBC that Glasgow's community health teams were being “absolutely destroyed”. He went on to spell it out, saying “It's going to have a huge, huge devastating impact not only to workers and service users but also the wider communities”. He is not wrong.

Unison has even mobilised already, staging a protest outside HSCP headquarters.

But are the unions targeting the right people for blame? I know for a fact Mr Baillie has already been told that Glasgow's HSCP expects to run out of funds by September. So clearly Mr Baillie and GMB Scotland have figured something out that has eluded Unison. If the HSCP has an obligation to balance its books statutorily, and faces running out of dosh by September unless serious cuts are imposed, why do they believe protesting outside HSCP HQ will help matters?

We need to ask ourselves how we have ended up in such a dire financial position. For that, we should discuss where funding comes from, and why it’s so cash-strapped.

The budget for the IJB comes from two places. “The budget for health and social care services is made up of a contribution to the Integration Joint Board from Glasgow City Council and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board”

So, let’s start here. According to the HSCP

“The pressure on public service budgets is significant - and high inflation means that this year has been a particular challenge.”

High inflation is a reality, especially pay inflationary challenges for bodies including the IJB. And the IJB must balance its books, relying on funding from Glasgow City Council (GCC) and the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board.

If we examine the IJB Financial Allocations and Budgets 2023-2024 we can discover that Susan Aitken’s GCC has made the conscious policy choice to withhold money from the IJB, specifically regarding pay inflation.

Now, unless I am very much mistaken there is only one way to read this section. GCC has made a policy decision not to pass on to IJB any share of funding which Holyrood has allocated to local governments to help deal with pay deals (pay inflation). This choice by the SNP here in Glasgow has cost the IJB approximately £7.8m it would otherwise have had, had Ms Aitken agreed to give it its proportional (“pro-rata”) share.

So, right away we can see that some of the savings being imposed on essential services could have been mitigated, had the SNP chosen to do so. They have not, but why? Is it because Susan Aitken and Glasgow SNP simply don’t care?

Well, one thing we do know is that GCC is facing a budgetary crisis of its own, with a funding gap of £49.3 million in the new financial year. This blackhole at the heart of the City’s finances didn’t come out of a clear blue sky, nor can we just lazily blame brexit or the pandemic. The truth is, Susan Aitken has been justifying, defending and passing on Scottish Government local government cuts for neigh on a decade.

By March 2021 we already knew that the SNP at a national level had imposed a shocking £937m cuts to local governments over the prior 8 years. Since then Kate Forbes budgets have merely added to this, so fast-forward to today we can say categorically that the SNP at a national level have imposed more than £1bn of cuts to Scottish local administrations for over a decade.

And as all of that was happening, let’s not forget Susan Aitken channelling her inner Thatcherite to justify all of those local government cuts. In The Herald’s Neil Mackay’s Big Read Cllr Aitken made a few startling insights into her worldview.

When pressed about what the role of the City Council should be in the 21st century Ms Aitken denounced “the old-style socialism of Scottish Labour”. Revealingly she insisted they days of “statism” were over, explaining the SNP wished to end the mentality of “the council knows best”. As Nicola Sturgeon’s Holyrood administration imposed nearly a billion pounds of local government cuts, her pal Susan Aitken was celebrating an end of “paternalism”. Mrs Thatcher would be nodding in such violent agreement had she still been drawing breath.

So, the calculation being made here is obvious. The SNP in Glasgow would rather acquiesce to their colleagues cuts being imposed at the national level, rather than actually push back. And the IJB is paying the price, having to impose cuts deeper and more severe than it otherwise might have had to do. GCC won’t fork over that £7.8m for pay deals to the IJB because they have made a long term choice not to ever push back on ‘Team Scotland’ (as the SNP like to call themselves, as if everyone else in every other party from Alba to Labour are somehow anti-Scotland)

Meanwhile…

Glasgow remains top of the Scottish league tables for avoidable drug deaths. The most recent statistics from National Records Scotland show Greater Glasgow and Clyde has a death rate of 33.7 per 100,000 perishing.

But hey, Susan Aitken wants to call time on “paternalism” and ““the old-style socialism of Scottish Labour”. We can’t be having that “statism” anymore, you plebs need to learn to solve your own problems. That way the Glasgow SNP don’t need to push back on their colleagues nationally as they continue to impose Freddy Krueger cuts. That way nobody needs to confront the realities that the HSCP and IJB are victims of this deliberate political calculation by ‘Team Scotland’.

If this SNP lot represent ‘Team Scotland’, then count me out. I suspect my pro and anti independence folk will agree, discovering themselves aligned on one important point: the real Team Scotland doesn’t justify brutal local government austerity on the basis of ending “paternalism”.

In other news…

And in other news, it turns out that SNP Cllr Margaret Morgan - who I previously reported had been given the boot from Chairing the Licensing Board - has managed to wangle her old job back. A source tells me she was elected back as chair of licensing on Friday. Apparently the Green Councillor abstained saying it had all got too political, and Scottish Tory Cllr Thomas Kerr actually voted for her, similarly claiming that it had all got too political, complaining of leaks…

Guess this is another example of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…

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