Tories rejects Lib Dem plea to think again on children's services cuts (Twickenham & Richmond Liberal Democrats)

Tories rejects Lib Dem plea to think again on children's services cuts

September 8, 2010 10:55 AM

• [Sep 07] RICHMOND'S Conservative cabinet rejected pleas from the Liberal Democrat Leader of the Opposition last night and pushed through cuts to the borough's children's services. Dismissing the Lib Dem pleas, Conservative Deputy Leader Geoffrey Samuel dismissed the services being cut as "totally peripheral" and "a distraction from real education", saying "these are services we would never have wanted in the first place."

Amongst those services being hit are:

• Advice to schools on health issues;

• Cutting a number of youth projects, including the Outskirts magazine, the Kicks project in Ham and any educational input into the local Youth Offending Team;

• Drastic cuts to the Connexions service which provides education and careers advice to young people, reducing its opening hours from 35 hours a week to just 16 hours;

• Scrapping work to ensure every young person between 16-19 has an opportunity to be in education, training or employment;

• Scrapping of all positive activities for young people projects;

• Scrapping of work tackling teenage pregnancy;

• Scrapping the young people's substance misuse service, stopping important preventative work;

• Training and support for primary school teachers in raising standards of literacy and numeracy;

• Training and support for secondary school teachers in raising standards in English and maths and in tackling poor behaviour and attendance problems.

Cllr Stephen Knight, Leader of the Liberal Democrat Opposition on Richmond Council said: "These are brutal and shortsighted cuts to preventative services and support for young people. It is a policy that will not only quickly backfire and ruin the lives of many young people, but also incur extra costs for the Council in the longer term. The extremely successfully Positive Activities for young people programme, operated during holiday periods, is to cease. This programme has been shown to have drastically reduced youth crime levels in some of our key wards. These services are very important, and are one of the reasons why under the Liberal Democrats Richmond Council was in the top ten for children's services in the country. The amounts of money saved are relatively small when compared to those being spent to subsidise reduction in parking charges for large polluting cars. Again the new Conservative administration shows where its true priorities lie."

Richmond upon Thames Liberal Democrats: