Blog 13th February 2017

Blog 13th February 2017

This Wednesday (15th February) I will be presenting: ‘All You Want to Know about Service Charges in Social Housing’ at the Novotel Waterloo Hotel in London. As usual, this seminar has proved popular and I am looking forward to meeting the delegates. However, we do have a few places still available. For more information or to make a booking please click HERE

The following week I will be presenting this seminar as an in-house session at a housing association in Cumbria. If you would like information about in-house training or would like to book a session, please contact me at Adrian.waite@awics.co.uk

I have had a letter published in this week’s ‘Cumberland & Westmorland Herald’ about how Eden District Council could do more to support the development of affordable housing, including extra care elderly housing. The Editor has given it the catchy title: ‘Eden has enough money to support extra care for the elderly’. A copy can be downloaded from HERE

The editorial in this week’s ‘Cumberland News’ headed ‘Act Now to Save our Care Services’ opens with the statement that:

“If we are not at crisis point over the state of our social care, we can’t be too far from it.”

However, Sajid Javid has suggested to the District Councils’ Network that the government may be considering making further resources available. He said that:

“Of the big issues, number one is making sure there is enough resources and I recognise that is still a challenge – that’s one of the reasons we had some of the changes announced (in the local government finance settlement). I said at the time they were very much short-term measures and I recognise more needs to be done and that is something being looked at.”

The local government finance settlement allowed local authorities to bring forward increases in Council Tax to fund social care and redirected £241million of New Homes Bonus funding. However, apart from the usual words about integration between health and social care, Sajid Javid provided nothing specific about how much additional funding may be provided or where it may come from.

Anthony C Grayling, Master of the New College of the Humanities has written in the ‘New European’ this week about the likely effects of Brexit on public services. He says that:

“The United Kingdom economy will lose not only the money it gets back from the European Union, but it will be burdened with higher costs… which the economy will be able to manage only by making further and deeper cuts in health, education, welfare, environmental protection, defence and scientific research and development.

“If, in response to this battering of the economy the United Kingdom tries to attract inward investment by becoming a low tax haven, the deleterious consequences for health, education, welfare and the rest will be even greater because lower taxes will mean less money available for those services.”

Doubtless, there will be those who disagree with Anthony C Grayling, but I suspect that he will probably be proved correct.

We have re-designed our website and the new site was launched last Friday. The new website contains all the information that is currently on the website and all the same facilities to book onto seminars and webinars and to order books. However, the site is more user-friendly and can be displayed better on tablets and mobile devices. I hope users of the website will like the new site and if any of you have any feedback I would be pleased to hear from you at Adrian.waite@awics.co.uk