'Massive cuts' in services in Fife

The Campaign Against Charges group have extended their remit to include fighting against the cuts to services announced by Fife Council as part of the budget in February of this year.

The first announcement was the closing of the shopping delivery and pension collection service which affects over 1000 people. In addition the annual spring clean is to go and the cost of the community alarm is to increase by 50% to £1.50 per week.

At the same budget meeting the fate of the rail concessions was finally unveiled – disabled and older people will be unable to use their ticket to go outwith Fife.

If all this wasn’t enough within a week of these announcements a diligent councillor, after doing some deep digging into the minutiae uncovered a paper which outlined the decision to cut non-personal care unless it is required for medical reasons. They define non-personal care as cleaning, laundry and bedmaking.

Despite the fact that all these decisions will have enormous impact on the people who use these services, none of it was brought to the Social Work and Health Committee for discussion and debate. Why? Because they had hoped to bury it all and slip the cuts through without anyone really knowing about it until it was too late and people are left without.

However CAC and the opposition politicians have used the media to make people aware of what the Council is up to.

The response from Social Work is that “no one who needs a service will do without”. However that begs the question of what they mean by “need”. It now seems that if someone has family or friends and neighbours who can help with any of these tasks, they will have the service withdrawn. Letters are going out telling people that “in order to continue providing services to those who need them most, the Council will have to make decisions about the level of service it can continue to provide….. A member of staff will visit you in the next few weeks to review your needs, the care and support you currently receive and discuss any changes there may be in your level of care.”

We at CAC have received dozens of calls from anxious people, mostly in their eighties and nineties and mostly practically housebound, worried sick about how they will manage. In addition they all want to do something to fight to keep their services so have agreed to let CAC complain on their behalf. We have counselled everyone who has called us to refuse to be coaxed into saying they can do without the service. The difficulty is that many people will not want to go against the flow and may talk themselves out of the service.

We take the view that when people were first assessed they needed the service whether or not they had friends and/or relations to help and, unless their situation has improved, the service should continue.

It’s a big ask to expect others to keep such a continuous commitment 52 weeks a year.

Sadly there are many others who have no one. How can someone eat if there is no one to do their shopping? How can the council expect that people can continue to live in a house which is not cleaned, sleep in a bed that goes unchanged and unmade, wear clothes and use bedding that goes unwashed? Any alternatives which the council might suggest will need to be paid for and most people cannot afford this and should not be expected to have to.

The Disability Discrimination Act says that where the council is changing a policy it must carry out an Equality Impact Assessment before a decision is made. It has recently been confirmed by the council themselves that they failed to do this in advance of the decision to bring in the home care charges and here they are doing it all over again – breaking the law.

We at CAC are disgusted by this all out assault on disabled people and will fight against the cuts. Whether you get services or not we would ask you to do the same by:

• Writing to the newspapers
• Writing to your local councillors
• Writing to your MSP
• Supporting disabled neighbours, family or friends to fight to keep their service
• Encouraging any organisation that you’re a member of to join the fight and invite someone from CAC along to speak
• Joining the Campaign Against Charges and Cuts – tel 01592 200597
• Joining the demonstrations that’ll be coming up – tel above number for details

Maureen Closs