Back to index of Nerve 16 - Summer 2010

At the end of 2008, Wirral Borough Council announced a so-called ‘Strategic Asset Review’, planning massive cuts in public services: to close eleven libraries and forty-nine community facilities such as community and leisure centres, a museum, a theatre and swimming baths. Nine hundred jobs in social care and transport were meant to be contracted out. In this way the council planned to save £3.1 million... so that they could borrow £20 million to build new ‘state of the art’ buildings! Better not try to find any logic in it. At the same time local trade unions exposed the fact that the librarians, teachers and school headteachers were banned from talking about these plans or from joining any protests. However, the local politicians forgot the old saying, that you reap what you sow...

Rewriting the First Chapter
Wirral against the cuts

By Leo Singer

According to Fred MacCormack, a resident from Moreton, the discontent and anger of inhabitants had been strengthened by the fact that Wirral Council was not seriously interested in hearing the opinion of local communities, which stirred them into action. Jo, who lives in Port Sunlight, recalls with enthusiasm: “It was a groundswell from the bottom up. People were writing letters, sending emails, signing petitions, discussing on Facebook, talking to their councillors, going to consultations, demonstrations. Everybody was talking about it.”

Hundreds of protesters poured in to the session of the Council’s Culture Committee discussing the cuts in December 2008. People abhorred the superficial way the Council was planning to consult the residents. They forced the councillors to organise four consultative ‘area forums’ in Birkenhead, New Brighton, West Kirby and Port Sunlight. Despite the fact that they were all packed into one week in the beginning of January, hundreds of people attended each of these meetings. Wirral TUC estimate that 35,000 people took part in the consultation in some way. Let’s add to it the two mass actions in freezing January, organised by trade unions, the march to Wallasey Town Hall on 11 January and the protest at the Civic Hall a few days later. More than three thousand people joined the Facebook group ‘Save Wirral Services’.

The trade unions launched the Wirral Against the Cuts Campaign. Their goal was ‘to coordinate all the different groups, to argue for all the libraries, not just any local library and to make the case for bigger political arguments’. Elaine Jones from Wirral TUC says: “We set up organising committees at eight of eleven libraries, organised public meetings (in Eastham we had four meetings, each over two hundred people) and coordinated the input of the committees into the inquiry as well as producing our own. We organised monthly Wirral Against the Cuts committees to coordinate the activity.”

Local politicians tried to calm people down. Their alternative to the closures was for the local community to take over management and maintenance of facilities under threat. However, this vision - called Community Asset Transfer - has been rejected by the popular movement. Jo says: “I don’t feel it works. It is very difficult for people to run them a on community basis. You just will get completely exhausted while trying to find funding for running these facilities. Just look at what happened with Byrne Avenue Baths!” The swimming baths was a registered charity which had leased the building from the Wirral Council fourteen years ago. It shut down in February 2009 due to a lack of grants, despite massive popularity and the local community helping with repair.

Alan Gibbons, a Liverpool writer who got involved in the campaign to save libraries, is not in favour of Community Asset Transfer either. “The position of our ‘Campaign for the Book’ is: taxpayers pay for these services. The services should be administered by local councils. That way you will get the statutory protection of the law for these services to exist. What you do is you make people in charge of an ever diminishing budget and ask them to choose what not to have. I don’t think that’s how you administer public services. I think you set up statutory minimum levels, that’s what we are fighting for. What I hate is all these reports that come out with titles such as empowerment and enhancement, they mean nothing. Unless there is a rigorous plan that sets out the minimum standards, they are a fraud.”

In April 2009, the former Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, ordered an inquiry into Wirral library closures. The ‘Campaign for the Book’, alongside thousands of others, targeted Burnham. Alan Gibbons recalls: “We were sending protest letters. The Culture Secretary responded that he “was not minded” to overturn the council decision. But the campaign against cuts kept going. A few months later, in April, he called the inquiry and he did it only because of the public and popular pressure.”

The central government inquiry closed in October last year, concluding that Wirral Council’s plan would have broken the law, specifically the 1964 Libraries and Museums Act. The document said the council “displayed a lack of logic” and “failed to make an assessment of local needs”. People on Wirral burst out in celebration.

Elaine Jones summarised the victory: “We co-ordinated and organised the anger that existed and as such were able to stop all closures.” On the other hand, in Jo’s opinion, “there was no overall coordination, apart from Facebook and Alan Gibbons’ blog where people could get information and download the letter to councillors”.

So what’s going to happen to the community and leisure centres, cultural facilities, swimming pool? NERVE asked Wirral Council. The information manager Jane Corrin replied in a very brief email, confirming the concerns that Community Asset Transfers are going ahead, advertised in the local press, one by one, each separate. “The timetable for the closure of buildings … remains.”

For many years public sector workers in the UK observed how businesses had tended to suck public services dry, and introduced the profit motive into them. The latest recession is just the peaking of this viral self-expansion of profit, with its ‘managers’ having lost any control over it. And as with any other virus, simply taking a pill does not help us in the long run. Perhaps we need more radical changes in the economy than simply fixing the recession.

If your community facilities are under threat, you may find the following sites useful:

Statutory Guidance for Closing a School: www.dcsf.gov.uk/schoolorg/guidance.cfm?id=3
Parents Against School Closure: parentsagainstschoolclosure.davesinfocafe.com
Save Our Schools - Glasgow: sosglasgow.wordpress.com
Defend Education in Lewisham: defendeducationlewisham.wordpress.com
Cambridgeshire Against the Cuts: www.cambridgeshireagainstthecuts.org.uk
London Coalition Against Poverty: www.lcap.org.uk

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