Cuts to services will have a negative impact on young and old.

 

The Green Party candidate in the Penkhull and Stoke by election has criticized plans by Stoke-on-Trent City Council to close the city’s Meals on Wheels service and to axe 10 health visitors and school nurses.

 

Adam Colclough said, “at a time when people in our city are facing unprecedented challenges these cuts will have a negative impact on young and old alike”. He added that “if elected I will oppose these and all other cuts to services on which the most vulnerable members of our community depend”.

 

The Meals on Wheels service, which previously faced closure in 2015, has had its funding extended until the end of 2022 but its future beyond then is uncertain. Information from a report by the city council published in the Sentinel shows that the number of people using the service has gone down from 123 in March 2020 to 84 in February this year.

 

Council plans to cut £1 million in funding from children’s public health services currently provided by Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust could see 3000 households adversely impacted.

 

Speaking to the Sentinel Frank Keogh regional officer for Unite said that years of ‘austerity and attacks on NHS and local government funding’ had already hit services hard, further cuts would put ‘the physical and mental health of thousands of the city’s families’ at risk.

 

In March 2020, the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) published a report into the health of children in the UK, one year on in the wake of the pandemic they updated their findings. They found that progress has stalled in some key areas and things have even started to go backwards. These include tackling obesity, named by the government as a priority, with 34% of children aged between 10 and 11 still overweight or obese. These are links, the report suggests, between this and a rise in child poverty among working families [1]

 

Writing in the Sentinel (Personally Speaking 18^th June) Andy Day coordinator of North Staffs Pensioners Convention says that the fall in users of the Meals on Wheels service is not the result of a reduction in need so much as the service not working properly. He emphasizes the importance of the service to the wellbeing of older people, writing that if it is withdrawn, they are at a higher risk of becoming isolated and depressed and may be less likely to eat properly.

 

Research published by Age UK highlights the impact of the pandemic on the physical and mental health of older people. The data collected in the report The Impact of COVID-19 to Date on Older People’s Physical and Mental Health shows that one in four feel less confident being active than they did previously; one in five felt their memory had declined during lockdown, and 24% of older people living with a long-term health condition felt less independent now than they did before the pandemic [2]

 

Stoke-on-Trent City Council reported, last week a ‘significant’ underspend of £16.4 million and that it would be spending £1.75 million on consultants to help ‘transform’ its services. In February the Conservative controlled council pushed through £6.4million in cuts and raised council tax by 4.99% [3]

 

In a letter to the councilors Lorraine Beardmore and Ally Simcock, the cabinet members for public health and adult social care Adam Colclough calls on the council to reconsider the proposed cuts considering its budget surplus.

 

[1] https://stateofchildhealth.rcpch.ac.uk/evidence/at-a-glance/#page-section-7

[2]https://www.ageuk.org.uk/globalassets/age-uk/documents/reports-and-publications/reports-and-briefings/health--wellbeing/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-older-people_age-uk.pdf

[3] https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/stoke-trent-city-council-records-5538148

 

 

 

Candidate Backs Call For more Support for Young People’s Mental Health Services

 Green Party candidate in the Penkhull and Stoke by election Adam Colclough has joined mental health charity MIND in calling on the government to do more to help young people struggling with their mental health.

 

In a letter to Nadine Dorries MP Minister for Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health Adam Colclough calls on the government to fund a network of support hubs for young people aged 11-25.

 

These would provide easy access to support services without the need for a referral and be in places that are easy for users to get to.

 

Adam Colclough said: “I have been a volunteer for local mental health charities for almost ten years and over that time have seen that difficulty accessing services is a major barrier experienced by people seeking help and one that has only been made worse by the pandemic”.

 

He added to this that things can be particularly challenging for young people saying “CAMHS services have been seriously underfunded for years, even though this is seriously counterproductive since people who get help with mental health issues early on tend to experience better long-term outcomes”

 

Data from a report published by the Centre for Mental Health based on 200 academic studies from around the world suggests 10,023,453 people, including 1.5 million young people, could need mental health support over the next three to five years [1].

 

Office for National Statistics data published in June 2020 show that 19.2% of adults polled said they had experienced feelings of depression due to the pandemic, many also reported feeling more stressed and 84.9% said their personal relationships had suffered as a result [3].

 

Young people have found the past year of restrictions and lockdowns particularly challenging, and this has had an impact on their mental health. Figures produced by NHS Digital in April show that rates of mental health problems in young people have risen from 10.8% in 2017 to 16.0% in 2020 [2].

 

Adam Colclough said: “supporting people who are struggling with their mental health due to the difficulties of the past year has to be an integral part of our national recovery plans. That is why I am backing MIND in their call for the opening of mental health hubs for young people”.

 

[1]https://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/sites/default/files/publication/download/CentreforMentalHealth_COVID_MH_Forecasting4_May21.pdf

[2]https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2020-wave-1-follow-up

[3]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/coronavirusanddepressioninadultsgreatbritain/june2020

First Potteries Treatment of Drivers in Unacceptable and Will Make Building a Modern Transport System Harder.

 

Last week First Potteries, the company operating public transport in Stoke-on-Trent, told its drivers, many of whom had worked throughout lockdown, that their contracts are to be changed.

 

First Potteries claim the changes are due to fewer passengers being likely to use busses as the country emerges from the pandemic and are necessary to ‘secure a sustainable business and protect jobs’.

 

The changes could see drivers lose part of their holiday entitlement and their right to a free lift home after a night shift, they will also have to take a 90-minute unpaid break during every shift.

 

First Potteries managing director Nigel Eggleton told the Sentinel “As we move out of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, we like many other businesses are looking towards the future and ensuring we have a sustainable business that can secure jobs and continue to deliver a network of bus services to people in the Potteries” [1].

 

Drivers for First Potteries are represented by the UNITE trades union and Regional Organiser Stephen Blakemore told the Sentinel they were “currently engaged in constructive dialogue” with the company and were “confident that we can get a resolution that works for our members, the company and for the people of Stoke-on-Trent (our passengers)”.

 

Far be it from me to cast a bad spell over the negotiations at this early stage, but my experience of having any kind of ‘dialogue’ with First Potteries has seldom been anything like ‘constructive’.

 

Public transport in Stoke-on-Trent is, as anyone who has tried to use it will attest, a bad joke. This has very little to do with the impact of the pandemic, it was a shambles before Covid arrived; and everything to with decades of underinvestment.

 

I find myself in the unlikely position of agreeing with Stoke South MP Jack Brereton when he says, as he did in parliament in January 2020 “bus services are too few, too slow and too infrequent [2]”.

 

The debate maunders on from there with contributions from Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme), Karen Bradley (Staffs Moorlands) and Jo Gideon (Stoke Central) among others. Grand plans to link busses and trains, convert the busses to electric power and revamp Stoke Station to rival Grand Central in New York are floated in almost every intervention.

 

This is rounded off by a cheery, if lengthy, homily from Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Transport Nusrat Ghani, about busses Ms Ghani says “we are all agreed that bus services matter. They are the best way for people to travel, being the cleanest and the cheapest, whether for getting to work or for accessing social services. We are all agreed that buses are our most vital form of public transport system”.

 

She might want to check that last statement, I am certain that quite a few of her fellow Tories have never been on a bus in their lives, Jacob Rees-Mogg running for the number 22 to Hanley is something I would pay to see.

 

Leaving stereotypes aside the real flaw in this debate and most of the conversations about public transport in Stoke-on-Trent held in parliament or the council chamber is that elected representatives have their heads in the clouds. Meanwhile First Potteries are down in the pantry paring the cheese for all they are worth.

 

In this instance they have decided that the pandemic is a crisis too good to waste since it allows them to engage in their favourite hobby of cutting things. Services have been cut to the bone, a process that began long before March last year, so staff terms and conditions are in the frame.

 

I am not sure which is worse, the predictability or the crushing myopia, either way it is a disaster for the environment and the economy of the city. Stoke is a city plagued by poor air quality, getting traffic off the roads is the best way of improving things, cutting congestion would also make the city more attractive to outside investors.

 

If I and pretty much anyone standing at their local bus stop can see that; why can’t First Potteries? Because nobody pushes them to do so, the city council and the MPs are too busy building castles in the air.

 

Building a decent, affordable, and modern transport system is fundamental to making Stoke-on-Trent into a city with vibrant economy and addressing its deep-seated social problems. To do so First need to park their outdated business practices and our elected representatives need to roll up the grand plans and focus instead on unexciting, but vital realities.

 

A twenty-first century public transport system is one that engages all its stakeholders equally. The council must be more than a cash cow to be ignored when it fails to fill the provider’s pail with enough in the way of subsidies and passengers must be engaged with meaningfully, ideally by giving them a stake in owning the network through something like a cooperative society.

 

Treating the drivers and other staff who keep the network running must be an integral part of this, if they are dissatisfied and demotivated neither this nor the grand plans debated in parliament will get off the ground. More to the point we the people who use busses in this city will be left standing at the stop for even longer.

 

 

[1]https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/bus-drivers-face-losing-one-5460335

[2]https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-01-23/debates/52E01B50-00FE-4FDA-9950-AB69B5D45019/PublicTransportNorthStaffordshire?highlight=enhanced%20partnership%20stoke#contribution-0DC7A29D-9D07-4FBA-AFA7-EDB13396B994