April Fools! 

More redundancies as New Deal - BCAF row deepens

The New Deal Partnership Board has decided to become an organisation that can employ its own workers. As a result, Burngreave Community Action Trust have lost the contract for managing the New Deal team and over half of BCAT’s staff will lose their jobs.

Accountable what?

New Deal plans to spend £4 million in the area over the next year on around 75 projects. To do this it needs:
· An ‘Accountable Body’ to guarantee money is spent properly.
· ‘Delivery Agencies’ to help manage projects.
· Staff to organise the process.
Until now the City Council has been the ‘Accountable Body’, with overall responsibility for the way the New Deal money is spent, BCAT were making plans to take on this role. BCAT have acted as a ‘Delivery Agency’, and have also employed the New Deal staff team on behalf of the Partnership Board. 

Partnership plans

The Partnership Board have decided to directly employ the New Deal staff team and become the ‘Accountable Body’ themselves. It will take at least six months to set up the new organisation and in the meantime the City Council Education Department will take over from BCAT, the payroll will presumably be handled by CSL. 

BCAF protests

BCAT are not happy with the proposal. They say it threatens their ability to develop as ‘Delivery Agency’ and ‘Accountable Body’, and wastes years of hard work. While some funding will continue in the short term, all BCAT staff have been handed redundancy notices. Steve Cooke, Chair of BCAF condemns the ‘systematic targeting’ of BCAF and BCAT by the New Deal executive team and members of the Partnership Board.

Locally accountable?

Everyone agrees that local skills and expertise need to be developed and that in the long term the ‘Accountable Body’ should be a local, independent organisation, answerable to the community. BCAF has widespread, but not universal, community support, and some people are not sure if BCAT is the right organisation to take control. The Partnership Board’s plans for the new ‘Accountable Body’ have not been decided, but it will answer to the Board and its locally elected community representatives. 

‘Tough decisions needed’ 
Steve Jones, New Deal Chair

“When I was given the role of chairing New Deal in December we had agreed that progress had been too slow and things had to happen. 
We started by fast-tracking projects that had been planned for months, particularly the police project to help tackle crime and improve relationships. Then we moved on to restructure the staff team to bring in new expertise and training opportunities for local people. This is a hard process and has meant uncertainty for staff whose contracts run out in April, but we need to
have the right balance of skills to deliver.

The New Deal needs to employ its own staff and have systems that work in the interests of our area. Until this is done in the early autumn, the tough decision has been taken for the Council to do it. Everyone agrees that New Deal must provide opportunities for the local community to develop its own capacity and for us to do things for ourselves. This is why we are all committed to ensure a future for existing community organisations like the Community Action Trust, over the lifetime of New Deal and beyond. 

Burngreave has to demand and get action from service providers. We must ensure that projects actually develop the potential, talents and life-chances of the entire spectrum of our population, including hard-to-reach groups and the very poorest individuals and families. So let’s embrace that vision for our area. There won’t be full agreement about all the practicalities but the aim is clear: delivery of what people want, good communication so everyone has a say and a better and brighter future for all our people.” 

‘Partnership Board failures’ 
Richard Belbin, union rep

Current changes in the staffing and structure of New Deal fail to serve the interests of anybody, except members of the Partnership Board and those lucky few appointed to the well paid managerial positions.

By rushing these decisions through without any real consultation, the board have created a disastrous situation where faith and trust in New Deal has practically been destroyed. A community led organisation now appears to be being taken over by the various statutory agencies. 

The new staffing structure offers no prospects for progression within the organisation – except for those at the very top – and as such is likely to lead to a rapid turn over of staff and a lack of continuity within the programme. Whilst the Partnership Board made a great deal of seeking ‘excellence’ in new staff, the way they have acted has actively discouraged potential candidates from applying for jobs they see as short-term and with an autocratic and unsympathetic management.

PB and management have attempted to blame everybody else for the shortcomings of the programme – the previous management, the workers, the theme group coordinators, everybody apart from themselves. It is time they accepted their responsibilities, and faced up to the fact that it is they who are failing New Deal.

‘Its a Disgrace’ 
Rashid Ahmed, BCAT Chair. 

Burngreave Community Action Forum (BCAF) and the Burngreave Accountability Campaign (BAC) have teamed up to campaign for the retention of local control of New Deal.

The Partnership Board’s decisons not to renew the contracts of the local staff, and to transfer employment responsibilities from BCAT to the Council - threatening more local jobs - is bitterly opposed by BCAT trustees and the workers’ union.

’It’s a disgrace’, said BCAT Chair Rashid Ahmed, ‘Instead of involving local people in New Deal, our own elected representatives have voted to hand over the project to a City Council which has no track record of improving the lives of local people. We feel that once the project is in the Council’s hands they will find ways to use the New Deal cash to pay for improvements that they and other public bodies should really be responsible for’. 

BAC’s Alan Dawson said, ‘We’ve seen consistent indicators that New Deal wants to become a top down, centrally controlled organisation with little community input’. Well paid consultants are substituting themselves for the local community groups and individuals who have previously led New Deal plans. Now CSL will be managing New Deal salaries rather than BCAT.’ ‘Effectively BCAT, a local community organisation with a good track record, could be replaced by a commercial colossus which has a very poor reputation for paying housing benefits in our community’, explained BCAF chair, 
Steve Cooke.

What do you think? Join the debate on our Local Government and New Deal bulletin board