Pure class
Meant to publish this at the beginning of the year, but forget to queue it over Christmas.
It's a report from a December 2008 Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting where local spoke against council plans to move the council contact centre to Rochdale.
Thought it might be a timely reminder of the realities of Hammersmith and Fulham council's much-vaunted council tax cuts:
We go to a mid-sized meeting room at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall, where a group of local people and council contact centre staff sit before the cocky, elitist and - in the case of councillor Lucy Ivimy, racist - Tory cabinet, to beg to keep the council's contact centre in Hammersmith, and to keep their jobs.
The locals have exactly five minutes to talk the council out of its plans to move its local contact centre to Rochdale. Those plans include making everyone who currently works in the contact centre redundant, and doubtless form a crucial part of the council's ongoing campaign to move moneyless people who use and provide public services out of Hammersmith, and rich people who don't need public services in, a la Wandsworth and Westminster, etc.
The local people in the room aren't talking about that at the moment, though, because they're being distracted by an unexpected, if revealing, side act. The council's deputy leader - one Nicholas Botterill, who sits alongside council leader Stephen Greenhalgh - is pulling faces and laughing at the local people who've turned up to address the cabinet. It's an extraordinary display, and not a heartening one. Botterill is giggling at the the locals and their plight and screwing his little rat face up at them, presumably for the benefit of Tory sympathisers in the audience. Krissy O'Hagan - the locals' spokesperson, and contact centre union rep - is reading, nervously, a speech in favour of keeping the contact centre in Hammersmith, and public services generally, and Botterill is wrinkling his face up and laughing at her.
He makes such an ass of himself that council leader Stephen Greenhalgh is forced to tell him to shut up.
'No! No! Don't!' Greenhalgh hisses in full view of all. Greenhalgh has grasped that it's no longer the done thing to jeer publicly at low earners, but maybe the message hasn't trickled down to Botterill. Greenhalgh's cabinet has learned that mocking black people isn't on - a full year has passed since the earlier-mentioned cabinet member Lucy Ivimy revealed the H&F Tory hand on race with a remarkably bigoted commentary about Asian hygiene standards - but low earners with working class accents are still fair game.
Doubtless, that's one of the reasons why the low earners in the room aren't holding out much hope for their jobs.
They haven't since the day that they were first told about the plans to move the contact centre to Rochdale says long-time council and contact centre worker Carmel Gardiner. Contact centre workers were given their redundancy figures on the same day that they were told about the plans, so they concluded the consultation process was kind of over.
'They were handing out envelopes to say that was the end of the contact centre more or less. They gave us redundancy figures of what you could expect.'
The council offered Gardiner an interview for another job, but she found out today that someone else got that job. She says the annoying part is that 'I didn't ever even want to work in the contact centre. The (then Labour) council moved me over here (four years ago) out of my job in environment.' She decided to make the most of it, though: she went through a multiskilling training programme, so that she could improve her knowledge of council business and handle a greater range of inquiries.
She thinks the training and her local knowledge is helpful - 'people who ring up often don't know what service they want. They don't even know if they want a council service, so we direct them to other places in Hammersmith if that is what they need' - and she doubts that people in Rochdale could beat it. (Gardiner says that the nine people about to be made redundant from the Hammersmith contact centre are real experts on council and Hammersmith. They have about 180 years' service between them - an average of 20 years).
'We can direct people. It's the length of time we've been here, and knowing who else to contact in the council if the first person isn't there.'
'People don't just ring you with a straightforward inquiry,' contact centre worker Karen Gadsen says. 'They don't know who they want to speak to. They've just got a letter or something.' She's worked at the council for 26 years. She shows me a letter of congratulation for good service that she was sent by another council leader years ago, and wonders out loud if it will carry any weight with the council.
It seems unlikely. Gadsen is working class, a union member, a non-Tory voter, and someone who is likely to need public services at some point in her life. It is unlikely that she and, say, Botterill, see eye to eye on the notion of commitment to community. She's even brought her mother along tonight (so has Gardiner).
In the cabinet meeting, Greenhalgh hurries through the call-centre agenda item in filthy haste. O'Hagan questions the financial benefits of the move to Rochdale (they are negligible), and raises concerns about the council visiting unemployment on borough residents during a recession.
She also questions the legality of the transfer ('management has not provided a business plan, or explained how the service will function from Rochdale. They have not even told us how much it will cost. There are also questions about the legality of the transfer (under EU tendering legislation) which we are still waiting for under freedom of information.')
So the debate begins.
Dealing with the 'making local unemployed' argument, Greenhalgh insists that three of the soon-to-be-redundant call centre staff have already been employed elsewhere in the council.
'No,' O'Hagan says firmly. 'There's only one.'
Greenhalgh insists again that three people have already been employed elsewhere.
O'Hagan says again, 'I've only heard of one.'
'Well,' Greenhalgh says.
He moves the discussion onto the savings the Rochdale move will make for the council - a less than clever move. By its own admission, the council expects the move will save just £150,000 in operational costs - a comparatively tiny amount that locals feel doesn't justify the loss of their jobs and local service. It certainly is a tiny sum in comparison with the millions the council expects to spend on rejuvenating and rebuilding its own offices in King Street in Hammersmith, for example. Greenhalgh moves the discussion on quickly.
The council's legal advisor - a pasty-faced, twitching sycophant called Michael Coghler - stutters through a justification of the council's circumnavigation of European contract legislation in its transferring of the centre to Rochdale.
Coghler concedes that the services the contact centre provides 'are of a nature and size that European contract legislation does apply,' and that the council would normally 'have to go through a competitive exercise.' Coghler says the council can get round that because the move to Rochdale could conceivably be covered by the original contracting exercise that the council went through when it set the contact centre up in Hammersmith in 2004.
'It is absolutely clear you can award a contract to an existing supplier that has already gone through a procurement exercise and you want them to carry out additional works and services,' etc, etc.
Perhaps ten minutes have passed since the discussion opened: Greenhalgh closes it very fast. 'To sum up,' Greenhalgh very hurriedly, 'the redeployment process is underway, there are savings, and we've had assurances around legality of transfer. We've addressed the issues this evening and I recommend that this report is agreed.'
The locals aren't permitted to comment again. They're ushered out of the room, and are back outside the Town Hall - this time without jobs or a contact centre - before they really realise that it's over.
'Is that it?' Gadsen asks. 'Is that how they do it?' Indeed it is. There's no robust appeal process in place at councils - scrutiny panels, which are meant to examine and approve (or otherwise) cabinet decisions - are chaired by Conservatives. There's probably not much point investing in that part of proceedings. Not much choice but to give up, really. We go across the road to a pub.
