SchNEWS 210, Friday 30th April 1999

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WAKE UP! WAKE UP! IT'S YER SUMMER PARTY AND PROTEST...

Published in Brighton by Justice? - Brighton's Direct Action collective

Issue 210, Friday 30th April 1999

FAT CAT SLIM

"The Private Finance Initiative means paying more for less."
- Dr.Jean Shaoul, accountancy expert Manchester University.

Public services sold off to big business. Private firms in our schools. Worse pay and conditions for workers. Adverts on fire-engines. Who could possibly be behind such dastardly schemes?
New Labour, silly.

Welcome to the world of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), which in plain English means privatisation by the back door.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE TUBE...

The London Underground is already the most expensive in Europe, and with plans for it to be sold to private companies, fares will spiral even higher. As with the fragmentation of British Rail, health & safety will be put at risk, services will be cut, and large scale redundancies and casualisation are on the cards.

THEN THEY CAME FOR OUR SCHOOLCHILDREN...

In Haringey four private companies have been short-listed under the PFI to take over schools, including Rentokil Initial (who in the past have been removed from one in three of its school cleaning contracts).

School buidlings will effectively be privatised, as private companies will take control for up to 30 years, and they will decide how schools will be used outside of school hours, to make profits.

In Haringey this will mean the privatisation of cleaning, caretaking and repair and maintenance work, threatening jobs, pay and conditions. Despite widespread opposition, the Council is pushing ahead spending £250,000 just to prepare its bid.

If that's not enough New Labour have also come up with Education Action Zones, allowing big business to get involved in running education. In Sheffield the main sponsors are Midland bank and Yorkshire Water. Meanwhile in Surrey, the council have announced plans to privatise the teachers of one of its schools.

THEN THEY ATTACKED OUR BRAVE FIREFIGHTERS...

"It's privatisation through the back door. All companies work for profit and this is just not appropriate within a public service."
- Fire Brigade Union spokesperson

Fire-fighters are on the brink of their first national strike since the seventies over plans to break up the national framework, which sets a minimum standard of working conditions around the country and replaces it with "local bargaining." Fire-fighters rightly see this as a first step towards privatisation. One union spokesperson commented "We've seen what damage local bargaining has done to our public services,our railways and our ambulance service. First they carve up the workforce then they sell bits off and the public end up paying for a worse service."

Just to show how keen they, the London Fire Brigade this month made a multi-million pound Private Finance Inititave deal to fund their fire-fighting fleet and equipment.

And there's more…London are also looking into the raising cash through private sponsorship, which could include advertising on the side of fire engines!

NEXT IT WAS THE HOSPITALS...

"It's (the PFI) like taking out a mortgage from a loan shark to buy a house which you already own - and then discovering, 25 years down the line, that the property has been repossessed by the lender anyway"
- Francis Wheen, journalist

Dryburn hospital in Durham due to open in 2001 will be built, financed and owned by a private sector consortium, Consort Healthcare. In return for use of the hospital, the local health service trust will pay the consortium £7 million every year for the next 30 years. Consort will also provide most of the hospital's ancillary staff, at a cost of an extra £5 million a year.

Offically, PFI schemes are given the go-ahead only if they offer better value for money than other options. But a study by the union UNISON shows that the cost of the PFI scheme over 30 years will be over £22 million more than if the public sector had built and owned the hospital.

There will also be a reduction in services with only half the hospital beds originally planned and a 22 per cent cut in clinical staffing budget over the next two years

Workers at the University College Hospital in London recently went on a two week all out strike over privatisation plans.

THEN THEY WENT FOR THE HOUSING BENEFIT DEPARTMENTS

Housing Benefit and Council Tax staff in Brighton and Hove are preparing to take strike action after the Council revealed it's plans to sell off their department to a private company called Capita. The announcement , made only three weeks ago, was followed by an immediate meeting where 180 people voted unanimously for a strike ballot to defend their jobs, and two mass pickets of the Town hall while the issue was debated left Councillors in no doubt as to what the mood was. The proposals, which will remove the entire Housing Benefit operation to Falmer, will mean an inevitable drop in the quality of the service: long delays in processing claims, no local service points, no flexibility when it comes to overpayment demands. Capita have a past history of incompetence(in one mistake 4,600 pensioners were accidentally sent a letter informing them that their housing benefit was being cut, along with an increased council tax demand!), lying about their efficiency rates -and redundancies. The most interesting thing about the company is that Labour Council leader Lord Bassam lists a consultancy with Capita in the House of Lords Register of Interests! When news of the privatisation broke, Capita's shares rose 39p-more money for Bassam's chums.

The Council, worried that this is becoming a local election own-goal have decided to 'review' the decision-a stalling tactic if ever there was one. But with Unison deciding to introduce a voluntary levy on all it's Brighton and Hove members to support a prospective strike, the Council may have bitten off more than it can chew.

LIFE AFTER PRIVATISATION

"Strikes in the future are not just going to be won by the withdrawl of labour - they are going to be won by employing other methods. Having people like Reclaim The Streets(RTS) involved could go a long way to winning other disputes in the future. RTS get publicity and cause the bosses serious financial distress - and they can't be sacked."
- Steve

Steve Hedley was on strike with other railway maintainance workers and engineers over pay and conditions. Since privatisation the companies that bought British Rail have been making around £1million a day profit and Railtrack a similar amount. Meanwhile maintenance workers are taking home around £135 a week after tax for a 37-39 hour week.

During the dispute Steve was at Euston Station on a picket line when a scab van drove straight at the picket line. On its way past it was alledged that a wing mirror was cracked on the van and Steve was blamed. However two independent photographers and even Railtracks own CCTV showed that Steve wasn't the person. Still, the Railtract sub-contractors sacked him and even though the case was thrown out of court, the company have refused to give him his job back.

A recent report which studied 41 local authorities involved in Private Finance Initiative schemes, has concluded that 150,000 jobs will be transferred to the the private sector in the next 10 years. Job losses are estimated at 30,000.