Promises by Prime Minister David Cameron to protect frontline services from cuts have been broken within the first weeks of his ConDem Coalition Government, says Reading Labour Leader Jo Lovelock, as Tory Ministers last week cut Reading Council’s budget for the current financial year by £1,600,000.

The cuts just announced by Eric Pickles and Michael Gove include, she says:

• £406,000 from money spent on improving our schools
• £317,000 from the Connexions service, which helps young school-leavers to find apprenticeships or full-time work, and other young people to plan their careers
• £202,000 from Positive Activities for Young People, which funds projects to keep teenagers off the streets, particularly in school holidays
• £100,000 from the Supporting People project, which provides homes for people with learning disabilities, mental health problems and physical disabilities in the community
• £84,000 from the Children’s Fund for disadvantaged and disabled children
• £76,000 from other work with children, £27,000 of it from work on reducing Teenage Pregnancy - putting at risk the major reduction that Reading had achieved, and another £27,000 from transport to school
• £70,000 from the road safety budget
• £38,000 from services to children in care
• £30,000 from crime prevention

“Philip Hammond also just chopped £860,000 off our funding for road schemes this year,” she says, “meaning that many schemes approved at TMAP on 10 June are in jeopardy.

“The revenue cuts are frontline services in anybody’s language. While Mr Cameron kept on talking about tackling waste, we warned that he meant was real cuts, and now the truth is out. Reading’s new ConDem Coalition will have little room to make alternative ‘savings’, as the carefully worked through Labour budget in February of this year included efficiency savings of nearly £1million and carried a health warning from the Council’s senior managers that to take any more in the coming year would be high risk.

“This Coalition will need to cut services and jobs as a result of their own Government’s announcements. On top of that their only real local policy is a 0% Council Tax increase in 2011-12 and that will means yet further cuts.

“ All Parties knew the recession was going to make things tight, but these savage ConDem cuts are being implemented at speed, with no attempt to assess their impact. Labour believes, and has shown nationally and locally, that budget reductions can be achieved over time, which do not destroy frontline services - and make fewer people unemployed. The ConDem approach will leave many people without services on which they depend and will push more people into the dole queue, adding to the benefits bill and putting economic recovery at risk.

“I don’t know how many people who voted Conservative, let alone LibDem, thought they were voting for cuts of this sort, but Labour will do our best to protect public services on which so many depend. We seem now to be the only party who will.”