Cabinet Review - Dhek Bhal and Adult Learning

Last night's city cabinet meeting was one of the best attended in recent history, with a list of 177 statements from the public - enough to fill half a ream of A4.

The two largest contingents represented the Dhek Bhal care project in Barton Hill (website still under construction) and users of Bristol's Adult Learning Service (Night School, for my one American reader). The Marksbury Road Library is also getting a reprieve.

Dhek Bhal is one of those interesting voluntary groups that has almost no public profile, and yet provides an invaluable service to its niche customers. Their business is the provision of care to elderly people from the Sikh, Hindu & Muslim population of Bristol, in particular those for whom English is a second language. The organisation has been caught short by recent changes in the disbursement of public funds - they didn't jump through the correct bureaucratic hoops, and the absence of the correctly completed forms in triplicate means no cash.

Ideologically, I'm keen for services like this to operate outside the funding sphere - and thus the control - of government. But with 40% or Britain's income going to the state, it's understandable that people don't have much left for charity. Dhek Bhal now have a difficult deadline to meet: they have to get their funding request into the council before the Budget meeting on February 28th.

It was a better night for Adult Learning, as the required £160,000 (0.81 pence for every Bristolian tax payer), has been found by a bit of financial jiggery pokery described in council papers as

"Delete provision for VAT changes, in the light of the latest proposals from HMRC"

I've got no idea what this means, but kudos to John Goulandris and others for applying pressure in the right place. (But see below)

Again, ideologically, I think Adult learning - indeed, all education - would be more effective if the state got out of the business of service provision. Adult learning would be a good place to trial a system analogous to school vouchers, in which government funds education from general taxation, but leaves provision to the private sector. Get it right there, and perhaps we could use the same process to create some genuine change in Bristol's Schools.

One particular item of paperwork that hasn't made it to the website yet was the pink sheet entitled "Revenue budget 2008/09 - General Fund" handed out on the day. Here's the content:

--- S:\Reports\2007-08\Executives 2007-2008\Cabinet\reports\10-04Feb08\final reports\revenue budget amendment.odt ---

The Cabinet thanks the many individuals and organisations who have responded to the draft budget proposals published in December. With some specific exceptions, there has been broad support for the proposals which, taken in conjunction with the capital programmes and bids for further funding, will deliver significant improvements in our priorities of:

• Our city: ambitious together
• Our city: making a difference
• Our city: safer and healthier
• Our city: better neighbourhoods

In the medium term, there will be spending pressures above the rate of inflation in areas such as waste disposal (increasing landfill tax) and social care (demographic growth). To provide for this and to create headroom for further investment in corporate plan priorities, officers have been asked to prepare departmental plans for efficiency savings for 2009-2011 averaging approximately 1.5% p.a. net (£9m over two years) and , with KPMG, for additional savings from the Business Transformation Programme (£10m over two years).

--- S:\Reports\2007-08\Executives 2007-2008\Cabinet\reports\10-04Feb08\final reports\revenue budget amendment.odt END ---

As the designated kill-joy for the day, it's up to me to point out that the savings listed above are the product of accounting finesse rather than actual budgeting.

• 400k from a revised contingency means next year we're likely to have an "unexpected" overspend due to lack of contingency funds.
• 90k from one-off resources brought forward means a future one-off extra resources required.
• A revised estimate today means a future "unplanned" rise in costs tomorrow.
• I've already commented on the VAT item - still no idea what this actually means.

Budgeting means deciding on your priorities, and spending money accordingly. It means making decisions about the relative importance of different ways of spending your money. As individuals, by and large we successfully manage to make rational decisions about when to buy food and when to buy an Xbox 360; when to pay the rent and when to go on holiday; when to use our savings and when to use our credit cards.

To the extent that government can budget sensibly, it's simply impossible if the leadership cannot express its priorities. One wonders whether the team from KPMG and the Business Transformation Programme suggested a bit more work on goal-setting by the City Cabinet, as in the absence of some sensible goals the money spent on said consultants is completely wasted. To remind you, our city's priorities, in no particular order, are:

• ambitious together
• making a difference
• safer and healthier
• better neighbourhoods

It makes you weep, doesn't it? Others have already commented on these, including the mysterious Bristol Blogger.

And a final point - £75,000 for a Rape Crisis Centre/Service. According to the Leader of the Council it's "shameful" that we don't have one (1:37 on the web cast), and it will service as a "single point of contact" (SPOC) for victims of sexual attacks. But what is a Rape Crisis Centre/Service? The website for the "Rape Crisis Movement" doesn't go into too much detail.

The word "crisis" implies immediacy, but we've already got the Police for emergency response. Avon & Somerset constabulary also have a dedicated Sexual Assault Investigation Team, and a Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) funded by the Home Office along with specialists in abuse and violence taking place within a Domestic context.

And there are numerous public services and charities for follow-up work, including Social Services, The Bristol Crisis Service for Women, Kinergy, Avon Sexual Abuse Centre, and apparently there is a Bristol Sexual Violence Forum, not to mention the Violence Against Women Research Group at the University of Bristol.

If £75,000 will reduce the incidence or impact of sexual violence against men and women, then let's write the cheque today. But what is the mechanism? What capability does the city get for the money? And shouldn't the Police already be the single point of contact for victims of sexually aggravated crime? If they're not, that needs to change.