First up was the admission that no cabinet member had been to visit a sheltered housing scheme as part of the consultation process. The reason? – too upsetting. Basically it was clear that if Cllr Cornelius (the cabinet member responsible) had gone then the emotions evoked by some very upset and angry residents might have swayed his decision. Never mind the poor staff from Barnet who were sent to defend the indefensible. I know for a fact that many of them found the experience traumatic. I’m reminded of Cllr Brian Salinger the previous leader of the Council before the coup. I disagreed with him on many things but I am sure that he would have gone and presented his case to the residents.

Then we moved onto the future provision. Jack asked how many people in there own homes would be helped by the new arrangements. After all this is one of the justifications for doing it. Answer – We don’t know. Well if they don’t know then how are they going to manage it? There will have to be a budget. Will they start turning people away when the budget is spent? The inability of the cabinet member to produce a clear business case for his proposals was frankly shocking. We are putting all these vulnerable people through hell and we are not even sure of the benefits of doing so!

And then came the vote. The Tory councillors all voted against apart from Cllr Scannell who abstained. The Chairman Cllr Prentice used her casting vote to push the measure through.

It was clearly wrong to start this whole affair as part of the budget setting process. If we were going to look at Sheltered housing provision then it should have been a piece of work done ahead of the decision (not after it). There needs to be a robust needs analysis and a real consultation so that any conclusions are based on evidence and not simply the desire to find budget cuts.

The ‘consultation’ carried out by the Council showed that a massive 88% of those consulted disagreed with the proposals to some extent with 81% strongly disagreeing with the proposals. The paper to cabinet outlines 4 options, option 1 being to proceed with the original plan and Option 4 being to leave things as they are now. Options 2 and Option 3 tinker with the number of people who would still get an alarm service and how that service would be provided.

The recommendation before cabinet is to go for Option 3. This option would retain the alarm system for all residents of sheltered housing but the site based wardens would be lost and replaced by a ‘hub’ based system. Option 3 amounts to a cut of £400,000 (known as efficiencies in council speak).

Whilst the retention of the alarm system is welcome this options does not recognise the fundamental value of site based wardens. Having recently had to visit my Aunt in Scotland who is in a sheltered housing scheme I can personally vouch for the value of site based support. Without it my Aunt would be in a nursing home at much greater expense. I really don’t care if the current system does not meet some strategy or target. It works very well and is well liked and valued by residents of sheltered housing schemes. The money can be found for this and I have plenty of suggestions as to where it can be obtained starting with the scrapping of multiple special responsibility allowances for Councillors.