UK Tory Council Running Barnet "Like Budget Airliner".

[Big Orange]

If this is the prototype for how the Tories will run the rest of Britain, then this is potentially worrying if they're going to cut off the old and vulnerable:

Welcome to Barnet, the Tory test-pilot of no-frills government
*Borough wants to emulate budget airline price model
*Tories aim to tailor social services to fit users' needs

Thursday 27 August 2009 19.52 BST

From the millionaires' mansions of Mill Hill, to the workers' cafes of Finchley High Road, a new experiment in Conservative party radicalism is under way, and it is already proving divisive.

The leadership of the London Borough of Barnet is test-driving a brand of Tory government which some believe could sweep the country if David Cameron wins the next general election.

Margaret Thatcher's former constituency lies within the borough and once again Thatcherite buzz words are in the air. The talk is of "outsourcing", "privatisation", "small government" and "consumer choice" as the council attempts the trick of slashing millions from its costs while keeping council tax down. But it is not Thatcherism, rather another free-market innovation that makes what is going on in Barnet controversial: the council wants to emulate the business practices of the no-frills budget airlines easyJet and Ryanair in an attempt to create what a spokesman has dubbed an "EasyCouncil".

Residents such as 87-year-old Sarah Walker and John Frindall, 78, are at the sharp end of this political experiment. They don't know each other but, in Walker's case for better and in Frindall's case for worse, they are the subject of reforms engineered by Barnet's Tory council leader, and ambitious would-be MP, Mike Freer.

In his day job Freer, 49, is a consultant to the banking sector and he has worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants, to draft plans to save up to £16m a year from the council's costs.

It is an ambition which the Labour opposition casts doubt on by pointing out financial blunders under Freer including the freezing of £27.4m of council assets invested in the collapsed Icelandic banks Glitnir and Landsbanki.

One of Freer's most controversial reforms so far has been to cut live-in wardens from sheltered housing for people such as Frindall. He lives in sheltered housing in Prospect Place where a live-in warden, Janet Conway, is effectively on call 24 hours to help care for the residents. She checks on Frindall and the other residents at 9am each day, keeps a lively communal room for the residents and organises evening events such as beetle drives and singalongs. She helps with medication and runs errands, but most of all, she is there for residents who often complain of feeling desperately lonely.

Emergency cord

The council says this level of support is too costly and it is planning to replace live-in wardens with "floating" wardens across the borough, possibly run by the private sector. John and his fellow residents have been told that in future they can pull the emergency cord in their rooms if they are in trouble and a warden will come. They are worried for their health and safety and, for John, it seems emotionally "cold".

"It is essential to see somebody and know somebody cares about you," he said. "I have suffered a lot of depression over the last few years and Janet knows if I am down or not. She comes and chats, sits in your flat and speaks to you like a mother or a sister. When she is away, the place is like a graveyard."

Beatrice Ige, 73, was worried that using the emergency cord might be too slow. "By the time you have tried to call the agency with the cord, you might have died," she said.

For Bill Kelly, 68, replacing Janet with a remote service has echoes of Big Brother. "I can see Mr Freer giving us all ankle tags so they know where we are," he said. The council spends almost £1.3m on support services in sheltered housing each year and a consultation document on the proposed cuts states: "There is no good evidence to support the present amount of funding for sheltered housing services. A reduction in funding would enable other kinds of services for older people in Barnet to be maintained."

For Nick Walkley, the council's chief executive who forecasts that the council may need to save as much as £25m a year in the coming years, seeing it any other way is delusional. "The wider public sector, if not necessarily local government, has done pretty well over the last few years but everyone understands that things are going to change," he said.

"I do think the kind of changes that we are currently talking about in Barnet will come thick and fast across the public sector in the next few years, irrespective of party politics."

There is also another agenda at play, and one senior council officer said the live-in wardens "smack of the state replacing the family" and that is not palatable to the Conservative administration.

Walker, by contrast, is happy. She also lives in Finchley and broke a bone in her neck in an accident in April, forcing her to spend three weeks in hospital. When discharged she had to use a walking frame, struggled with the stairs and couldn't cook meals or make her own bed. She worried the local authority would want to put her in a home, but because it now has a policy of trying to avoid expensive long-term care, it instead offered a burst of intensive help in a bid to help her regain her independence, and it worked.

"I had three carers a day for the first week," she said. "One in the morning, one at lunchtime and one in the evening. They gave me the confidence to get back to doing things for myself. At the end of six weeks I was managing quite well and I am independent now. It would be a waste of money if they were sending someone once a week for evermore, so this was the right approach for me."

John Hart, a 77-year old retired army officer who has served for 15 years as a Conservative councillor for Mill Hill, puts it bluntly. "We are all for decentralising and letting people do their own thing," he said. "It is cardinal Tory stuff. People should be as independent as they can for as long as they can.

"With council tenants, and I'll admit I am putting it crudely, it has been a lot of 'my arse needs wiping, and somebody from the council can come and do it for me.' That attitude is dying out now."

He believes tenants of Prospect Place should accept the removal of the live-in warden. "They won't be left to starve and die," he said. "Like the generality of old people, they will have the alarm button around their neck and that means they are reliant on themselves. It is surprising how able even so called vulnerable people are. Helping people help themselves, that's the new Conservatism."

Blind spot

It is an approach which upsets the opposition, which believes the Conservative administration has developed a blind spot for the poorer areas of the borough and focuses instead on appealing to affluent residents of areas such as Mill Hill, with its manicured golf courses.

"There is a real danger of problems in the local community and that vulnerable people will lose out," said Labour leader Alison Moore, who opposes the reforms . "People who are dependent on care services may find they aren't there at the same quality as before."

Her deputy, Barry Rawlings, added: "They have set themselves up as the voice of the suburbs and they seem to have a very twee idea that the suburbs is all about tree-lined avenues."

The council document, Future Shape, reveals the ideology and some of the realities of the proposed reforms. Two main goals are "facilitating self-help through behaviour change" and "more services delivered by organisations other than the council". The strategy anticipates negotiations with unions about layoffs and transferring staff to the private sector. The council officials have looked carefully at how the budget airlines have given customers control over what they buy with their travel budget and wants to do the same with council services.

"In the past we would do things to our residents rather than letting them choose for themselves," said Freer.

"We would tell them they need one hour help shopping, one hour cleaning, meals on wheels, and they would get it, like it or not. Instead we will assess what level of personal care they need, place a value on it and give them that budget. If they say 'Frankly, I'd like a weekend in Eastbourne,' they can have it. There have to be checks and balances so they don't blow it on a cruise to Barbados, but this will reduce the burden on hospital care, residential care and nursing homes."

These are the battlelines that are being drawn across the country where more than half of all councils are now under Conservative control and the parlous state of public finances has emboldened the most radical Conservative thinkers. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies government funding of local authorities is likely to be down by £26bn a year by 2013.

Barnet's leadership says it is trying to make services more responsive, but the leadership talks a lot about "having conversations with residents" about everything from how much rubbish they can expect the council to collect to whether they or the council should clear the snow on their street.

It is one of the reasons why they admire the budget airlines: they have made the price of everything transparent to their customers.

"The snowfall this winter was a good example," said Walkley. "A lot of people phoned the council to ask when we were going to come along to clear the pavement. In the past most residents would have got out their spades and cleared the pavement in front of their house … We need to think about which of those approaches is the right model."

The answer is clear. Residents of Barnet: prepare to start digging.

guardian.co.uk