Your Choice Barnet: cuts WILL affect quality

There is a lobby tonight of the Your Choice Barnet board. Campaigners against the planned cuts will be there, including parents and carers of the adults affected by the changes.

They will be objecting to the fact that their voices are being ignored. There is an interview with one of the parents, John Sullivan, in this New Statesman article.

Barnet Unison, the trade union that represents many of the staff whose pay and conditions are being cut to make ends meet, has published the following figures:

YOUR CHOICE THE FACTS

Your Choice is claiming that the proposed changes to staff terms & conditions are not going to have an impact on service quality.

For the sake of transparency UNISON is providing the [figures on] cuts and changes for staff and we will leave it for you to decide if service quality will change.

Currently Support Workers are paid £12.40-£13.56/ hr and Assistant Support Workers are paid £9.49-£10.07/ hr

* As & When hours: Your Choice rely heavily on As & When hours. We learnt that staff now working As & When have already had their rate cut by 25% before the consultation began.

* 28 support workers posts to be reduced to 8 support workers posts.

* Creation of 20.5 assistant support worker posts

* Enhancements for working evenings to be stopped

* Enhancements for working weekends to be stopped  (these are paid at time and a half)

* Staff working a 5 day week to be moved to a 7 working week with no extra pay.

* Up to a sixth of the workforce have requested and been granted voluntary redundancy.  This will have a massive impact on a client group who have built long term relationships with workers in which ‘trust’ is a critical feature of this relationship.

* Your Choice has commissioned a consultant to carry out a benchmarking exercise with the market competitors. UNISON is already aware that many of the competitors are paying 30% less and some of these well below the London Living Wage.