No canvassing today as it is a Sunday!!
Delivering this afternoon and then off to the final campaign hustings for Kingston Churches Together, chaired by John Cole. Interesting hustings as there were few of what you would consider the traditional “Church” questions on abortion, euthanasia etc. There were the usual immigration and Iraq isues but also some on transport and also on the Lib Dem scheme for introducing means testing for personal care charges to the elderly and disabled. Ed Davey put up a defence but I think even he will admit he did not try that hard to defend this appalling policy.
3 comments:
Under the Social Services Act 1983 (might be 1984!) the charging for personal care is one left to each local authority. What other authorities do is for them but in Kingston we have never had to have it as we had a system that worked. My preference would be for the complete eradication of all means tested benefits and charged services across the country. I represent Kingstin and as such believe it wrong that we now have it.
A seperate issue is the complete hypocrisy of a Lib Dem party that fought the general election on free personal care and yet not a single Lib Dem controlled Council in the country has scrapped the charges, even though they have the power to do so.
Kevin. As a councillor you know how tight local authority finances are. If an authority were to scrap all care charges, then it would have to increase council tax, hitting a huge number of vulnerable people exisiting on the financial knive edge of a low fixed income.
Any opposition party would then question the wisdom of poor pensioners subsidising the care needs of wealthy care recipients. But then it always has been conservative policy to take from the many and give to the (wealthy) few.
Council Tax would have risen 0.1% extra this year and slightly less each year for the next five years to pay for the reversal of the Lib Dem Policy. But, I would not have put Council tax up but reduced the massive increase in staff the council has presided over.
Spending is out of control in Kingston and it needs to be realigned so we stop spending money on back office policy officers and communications people and start spending it on residents and front line staff. The current administration have demonstrated they do not have the appetite for change so it is clear we need to remove them. Still not surprising as they are a high tax left wing party!
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