Fear of more childcare funding cuts
Thursday 16th September 2010

It is great news that Hackney Council have decided to keep free swimming for under 16s. It’s a shame however that, along with The Learning Trust, it seems intent on cutting services that are far more essential for families in the borough.

Most of the borough’s community nurseries lost about 50,000 from their commissioning funding in April. Only after Friends of Hackney Nurseries – a network of parents, activists and nursery staff – made a fuss, was half of the money returned and a “second round” of funding introduced. Now it seems that, after the commissioning funding fiasco, The Learning Trust has decided to cut another stream of nursery funding.

Under the new Single Funding Formula – the funding stream that pays for the 15 hours of free childcare for 3 and 4 year olds – all nurseries will face a per child funding cut on previous years.

Even though it is clear it is a real funding cut, the Learning Trust has decided to call it an increase. As if that was not enough, it seems that funding for special needs children will also be cut this year.

It’s time for The Learning Trust to come clean and open its books to show the residents of Hackney what is really going on with childcare funding in the borough. It is crucial that funding be fully restored to our community nurseries and the most recent funding cuts reversed.

The Council must guarantee both the existence of community nurseries by providing adequate funding, as well ensuring the total number of nursery places in Hackney is maintained. If anything, the inadequate number of nursery places should be increasing, not decreasing.

Nicholas Beuret,
Friends of Hackney Nurseries

Camille Barbagallo and Nic Beuret look at the role of public services and how the cuts axe is falling

Childcare services in the UK are under attack. Childcare services across the country are being defunded, abolished and downgraded. In this article we start with the specific cuts in Hackney to nursery places and analyse these cuts in the context of the gendered nature of the ConDem’s austerity budget. We explore both what enables these cuts to happen now and what their effects will be and conclude with some reflections on possible paths of resistance within the current crisis of care.

Let’s be honest – the public services that are being cut include things that we need, but we hate how they are given to us: like unemployment benefits. They also involve jobs that we rely on but resent having to do. But what is also true is that they are part of a ‘social wage’ fought for and won by pervious generations.

By ‘social wage’ we mean the services and direct payments provided by the state that enable our subsistence. The health services, childcare, unemployment benefits, social housing – they are our social wage. The social wage has a dual effect. It operates as a method of discipline and control and also as a means of reducing the direct cost (to us) of our own material reproduction. Instead of paying the ‘full’ cost for childcare out of our wages, we get subsidised or ‘free’ childcare. Instead of paying directly for health services, such services are funded by taxation and provided by the NHS. Instead of having to put aside money in case we are sacked, we get the dole.

The social wage is also a way of ‘paying the unpaid’. The primary focus of the social wage is social reproduction and involves labour that would otherwise be unwaged. This has historically been known as ‘women’s work’ such as caring for children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the health of the body and emotional and psychological services such as counselling, etc. The social wage is a way of redistributing income so as to benefit those people whose (unwaged) labour is fundamental and vital for the reproduction of workers and capitalism in general.None of this is to say that the social wage is unproblematic. Obviously it is – under capitalism wage relations are based on exploitation and alienation, and the various elements of the social wage are no exception. We need the services because we have no other choice. This relates to the double freedom that Marx talks about as the precondition of wage labour. Like other wage struggles, the ultimate aim must be to go beyond the immediate relation and create a new social relationship. But we can’t do this by opting out. Not only because dropping out and making our own little utopias does not get us any closer to the necessary transformation of the world in which we live, but because the social wage represents real struggles and gains. We need to be in, against and beyond the social wage.

The Hackney situation

Hackney’s nurseries are under attack ironically not because of the ConDem’s budget, but because the Learning Trust, a private company that controls the funding for children’s services in Hackney, arbitrarily cut nursery funding in April 2010. Friends of Hackney Nurseries (FHN), a coalition of nursery workers, parents and community activists that we are members of, has been fighting to stop these cuts with some success.

The Hackney Learning Trust – the UK’s first private not-for profit company to take over the responsibility of running all education services for an entire borough – imposed cuts of up to £50,000 to nurseries receiving commissioning grants. Commissioning grants subsidise childcare places for parents on low incomes. Commissioning grants have, until recently, only been paid to the 13 remaining community nurseries in Hackney, out of 68 childcare ‘settings’ in Hackney. These 68 include Council-run children’s centres, community nurseries (not-for-profit parent and staff managed nurseries) and private nurseries (private nurseries make up half of the total childcare places). As a result of the massive cuts to commissioning grant funding and cuts to other funding streams, many community nurseries are reducing both staff numbers and childcare places. Some are even facing closure because of it.

Both the Council and the Learning Trust have, after much public pressure, claimed that the overall pot of money for low-income families in Hackney has not been cut – it has just been redistributed. They have resisted providing evidence of this, and the timeline of action then reaction tells another story – one of incompetence and a slow but steady strategy of privatisation.

When nurseries were first told of the cuts (one month before they were to be implemented), FHN quickly reformed after 10 years of inactivity and immediately set about working with parents and nurseries to put pressure on the Council and Learning Trust to reverse the cuts. This all happened just prior to the general elections this year, making public shaming particularly effective as a tactic. In short order the Mayor of Hackney, Jules Pipe, condemned the Learning Trust’s behaviour and the Learning Trust scrambled to meet with the handful of nurseries that had started to publicly voice their opposition.

Despite saying publicly that the money had not been cut but redistributed, in the end the Learning Trust reversed half of the cuts largely through something they called a ‘cushioning fund’ – a one off grant to help the affected nurseries through the hardship of the cuts. They didn’t say where this extra money had been found.

After this shambles, things got even more interesting. Meetings between nurseries and the Learning Trust were set up then cancelled without explanation. Different letters were sent, seemingly at random, to different nurseries all saying slightly different things. The Learning Trust started contacting community nurseries to offer them help in winding down their operations. During the weeks of confusion and misinformation the Learning Trust announced that commissioning grants would now be available to all nurseries in Hackney, further reducing the amount available to community nurseries (due to increased competition with the private nurseries).

What does all this mean? It would seem that the redistribution of funding from community nurseries to private nurseries is part of the last stages of the privatisation of childcare services.

Over the last 20 years the total amount of money given to community nurseries has steadily reduced. At the same time there has been an explosion of private nurseries in Hackney. Ten years ago there were no private nursery spaces in Hackney. Now, around half of all childcare places are privately provided.

Why does privatisation of childcare matter?

It could be argued, as it has been by many Hackney Councillors, that it doesn’t matter if childcare is provided by the Council, by community-run centres, or by private businesses. So as long as the total number of childcare places in Hackney hasn’t been reduced, does it really matter on what basis they are provided?

The short answer is yes. The case against privatisation can be summed up as follows. A service run according to the logic of the market tends to drive down costs (and therefore quality), reduce staff and employment conditions to the absolute minimum (reducing wages and reducing the quality of the childcare again), increase the costs to the service user (through fee increases) and reduce provision to those areas where it’s profitable (creating a system where having a service and the quality of that service directly relate to how much you earn). There is also the issue of directing public funds (via grants) to private-for-profit businesses. Any one of these outcomes are reason enough to reject the privatisation of community or public services.

But the flip side is that state-run services are also deeply problematic. They provide us with services we need but in relationships of subservience or dependence. It is no wonder that state-run services are so unpopular, with most of the population of the UK preferring service cuts to tax increases. While the services we have are a direct result of the pressure we have been able exert as antagonistic social movements, this pressure has been channelled into the creation of services that follow the logic of the state and serve the needs of capitalism. Our confrontation with capital is over the imposition of waged labour and the form this labour takes. But our struggle with the state is over the overall management of our lives; in particular, the management of our own material reproduction.

Cuts to services are not a removal of the state’s management of our lives, just a reconfiguration. With the move from community-run childcare to either Council or private childcare we lose something essential – control. The only childcare services parents have any control over in a meaningful way are community nurseries. Committees of parents and staff manage them, and parents are encouraged to be involved at a decision-making and organisation level. In contrast Council appointed staff manage Council nurseries and private nurseries may ‘involve’ parents but they usually do so in order to reduce their costs. Privatisation undermines one of our most important gains from the struggles of the 60s and 70s – community services that we manage for our own material reproduction but that have financial resources provided by the state. This is why the slow decline of funding and the latest attack on community nurseries is so important. They are the last of the childcare services we have any control over in Hackney.

Outside the laboratory

Hackney has always been something of a laboratory for New Labour, and the Learning Trust is a perfect case in point. However it is not just in Hackney these cuts are taking place. Across the UK, at a borough level and at a University level, childcare services are facing declining funding and further cuts. At least 20 universities are cutting childcare services, many other Councils are cutting provision, rents are being increased and central Government is looking to cut funding streams.

As other observers have pointed out, the difference between New Labour and the ConDems is a difference of degree. It is clear that had New Labour won the election they too would be embarking on cuts to the social wage. In fact the cuts in Hackney were announced prior to any central Government cuts, and are taking place as part of a broader historical tendency – neo-liberalism.

Clearly these cuts need to be stopped, and sufficient funding restored in the short term. In the longer term there needs to be a conversation at both a community level and a national level about how we want our children to be cared for, outside of the logic of the market and beyond just making it possible for women to re-enter the workforce in greater numbers. Before we can begin this conversation, we need to understand why these cuts are happening now, and what they mean.

Cuts to public services are not just about reducing state expenditure on the social wage but also about regulating the labour market and producing a specific kind of subjectivity. The current economic crisis is being used to continue the social project of neo-liberalism, even as the engine of capitalist growth, the financial sector falters. The neo-liberal project has developed along two axes – winding back the social wage and introducing the market as the basis for all social relations.

However the difference between the current cuts in the UK and the earlier phases of neo-liberalism both here and elsewhere around the globe is twofold. Firstly, capitalism has no need to increase the labour force in the UK – if anything, the total numbers available for paid work needs to be reduced to make sure that the numbers of unemployed do not grow excessively and that an entire generation of workers are not lost. Secondly, there is a need to ensure that there is not a reproductive crisis in the working class (this is expressed by Cameron as the desire to ‘fix Broken Britain’). The government needs to find a way to reduce state expenditure on the social wage without significantly undermining the continuity of care and continued reproduction of the working class.

The post-feminist discourse of ‘free-market’ feminists, ‘liberal’ feminists and the all of the major political parties enters into this crisis as an organising ideological force. It is through the discourse of ‘choice’ that women are being encouraged to either move away from waged labour and back to the home or resume the gendered ‘second shift’ of unpaid work in the home as well as working outside the home for wages. The return to the home is not only being proposed to women– men too, but only as long as their partners earn more than they do. The idea that life decisions are rationale choices made on a cost-benefit analysis pervades current responses to both the paucity of care, the disparity between men and women’s wages and an ever-present desire to escape waged labour.

It’s through the discourse of choice that the state can withdraw funding from services without endangering social reproduction or provoking confrontation. The choice of love, family and community over money and careers is at the heart of post-feminist discourse. It is also at the heart of Cameron’s Big Society. This ‘choice’ takes place within the context of a massive economic and political assault on women. According to the Fawcett Society, 72% of cuts from income due to tax and social security changes will fall upon women. They make up the overwhelming majority of part time workers in the public service and are the first to face redundancy. They are also far more likely to be the beneficiaries of social services. The reality is that the latest cuts are overwhelming directed at women. So the ‘rational choice’ ends up being not a choice at all but instead a necessity to return to the home to perform unpaid reproductive labour.

The aim of the Big Society is to reduce the social wage, and to return social reproduction to the realm of the unpaid. It is also an attempt to change historical expectations – not a return to the fifties, but the creation of a voluntaristic morality that serves the same function of relocating people (women for the most part) back into the home to perform unpaid labour. The rational choice of generally lower paid women moving back to the home to perform unwaged labour also reinvigorates traditional gender relations with a neo-liberal logic of rational choice.

In, against and beyond the social wage

Among the demands for childcare in the 60s and 70s was the demand for community run and controlled nurseries. Feminists who struggled over questions of childcare and campaigned for community control of nurseries won this demand with varying degrees of success. To be sure, these nurseries have their problems. Like much of the labour involved in providing social services, looking after children is demanding, underpaid and undervalued. People’s capacity to care and love is relied upon and it often means people accept conditions they might not otherwise. To begin to navigate a path of resistance out of the current crisis, we need to return to the question of what kind of reproduction we want.

For the nursery campaign in Hackney, this will mean reinvigorating the community nursery sector. Community nurseries need to not just be defended but expanded, with the state footing the bill. The question of work needs be at the centre of our struggles – waged and unwaged, concerning both conditions and compensation. But this must take place at a general level across all social provision of services, and not be allowed to become a question of shifting resources from one group of workers to another. And this demand must take place in a broader conversation about care – what is it, where does it happen and who does it. It is within this conversation that the question of the social wage can be raised once more from its starting point – as wages for the wageless.

More generally there is an urgent need to refocus anti-cuts campaigns around the question of our material reproduction and place demands for control at the heart of them. Here, ironically, the Big Society’s rhetoric of mutualism could be used tactically. Clearly the ConDems see this aspect of their project as merely the means to both “do more with less” (by doing more through unpaid community labour) and forcing workers and communities to implement their own cuts (by giving them much reduced budgets to work with). However by starting from the idea of worker-user alliances, there is a possibility of constructing a social force powerful enough to resist funding cuts and create worker-user allliances that co-manage and co-controll public services. By forcing the state to continue to fund our material reproduction, and using their rhetoric to push for more control at the same time, we can attempt to ensure this crisis becomes a crisis for capitalism and the state – and not for us.

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The Learning Trust imposed with no notice cuts of up to £50,000 to nurseries commissioning grants. Commissioning grants subsidise childcare places for people on low incomes. To put this in context, it is one of 3 to 4 sets of funding nurseries receive to cover the cost of childcare provision. If there were no grants, childcare would be extremely expensive and out of the reach of most families. As it is the grant that supposedly pays for the basic 15 hours a week free childcare for low income families does not cover the cost of provision – i.e. the nurseries have to pay for some of the free childcare themselves. Put together with the cuts in commissioning grants, affordable childcare in Hackney is fast disappearing.

On top of the cuts – cuts that were imposed with no notice and no consultation, let alone any explanation – the Learning Trust has introduced changes to the rules as to who can apply for the grants. From next year any nursery will be able to apply for them, including the Council’s Children’s Centres that already receive money form both the central government and the Trust – in effect meaning the Trust’s own centres could get one set of grants from the central government and two from the Trust! If this happens it means that there will be more nurseries chasing less money leading to closures and job losses and fewer childcare places.

This is not hype – already workers have lost jobs, and at least one nursery in Hackney is set to close. More are looking to do the same. All this without any explanation or transparency. We are demanding that the Learning Trust open its books and show us where the money has gone and give us an explanation as to what has happened and why. The Trust needs to operate with complete transparency from now on.

Hackney has always been something of a laboratory for New Labour, and the Learning Trust is a perfect case in point. The Learning Trust is the UK’s first private not-for profit company to take over the responsibility of running all education services for an entire borough. With the prospects of more cuts next year, it is imperative that we stand together to demand quality affordable community controlled childcare in Hackney. As Hackney Council takes back control of the trusts given out by central government for children’s services over the next two years, there must be a public commitment to the children and families of Hackney that this sort of arbitrary and unaccountable attack on our services ends. The Trust and the council must recognize that childcare is not a luxury but a fundamental right, and ensure that they are fully funded for all of Hackney.

We have invited Rita Krishna, member of Cabinet with responsibility for Children and Young People (and member of the board of the Learning Trust), to receive the petition from us before the Full Council meeting, which starts at 7 p.m.

Thanks to vigorous campaigning by Friends of Hackney Nurseries, some of the 13 nurseries who had their commissioning grants arbitrarily removed in April have had most of their money restored. However, several have not, and have had to cut wages, number of childcare places, and are still in danger of closure.

There are still many unanswered questions about the future of our nurseries, especially in the light of proposed cuts to all public services. And the Learning Trust is still not making itself transparent and accountable to the people of Hackney.

Everyone who cares about nurseries, and indeed all the children of our borough, is welcome to join us – come and show the council and the Learning Trust that we will not be fobbed off.

Friends of Hackney Nurseries is committed to good quality, affordable childcare for all who want it, and demands transparency and accountability from the Learning Trust about how our money is spent.

Sign the petitition here http://www.petitiononline.com/fhn/petition.html

Friends of Hackney Nurseries Strategy Planning Afternoon
Sunday 27 June 1.30pm – 4.30pm
Hackney City Farm, 1a Goldsmith’s Row, London E2 8QA
[creche: you need to call 07981070417 in advance to let us know the age and number of kids attending - so we can plan activities and staff levels]

Friends of Hackney Nurseries (FHN) would like to invite you to join us for an afternoon of information sharing, discussion and planning for the campaign for quality, affordable childcare for all. The FHN campaign is at a crucial point – with the Hackney Learning Trust refusing to be honest about its internal processes and with the prospect of further funding cuts being implemented next year, it is imperative that we join together, share information and get organised. The recent campaign has shown that people working together have the ability to create change.

Some initial questions for the strategy day:
- what do we want to achieve with our campaign – in the short term and in the long term
- who do we want to get involved in the campaign
- how do we get them involved
- what actions and mobilisations do we think will work / are we capable of doing
- when should FHN hold our regular meetings and activities

We need community controlled, quality affordable childcare
No nursery cuts in Hackney!

hackney solidarity network stall at the Fun Day

kids making a 'save our nurseries' banner at the Fun Day

These beautiful images were created by the london anarcha feminist kolektiv – they are drawings from photographs taken at the Friends of Hackney Nurseries Fun Day

the amazing cake stall

We, the undersigned, call on the Hackney Learning Trust to
1) immediately reverse the decision to cut funding to nurseries’ commissioning grants
2) have full consultation with community nurseries about funding and answer our questions on how money is being allocated

Sign the petition here: www.petitiononline.com/fhn/petition.html

Face Painting / Raffle / Lucky Dip /Banner Making /Story Telling / Teddy Bears Picnic

Come and join us!

Enjoy a day out meeting other people who care about community childcare

Show support for the Friends of Hackney Nurseries’ campaign to resist cuts

To help organise the Fun Day or for more info e-mail FHN@live.co.uk

At a hustings meeting at North London Muslim Centre on Sunday, Jules Pipe again claimed there were no cuts in the Learning Trust early years’ budget, but simply a reallocation of resources. He did concede that the way the nurseries were informed of the cuts was “disgusting”, but his assertion that the budget was being redistributed “on the basis of actual need within each nursery” denies the fact that all the nurseries suffering the huge cuts already care for a significant number of vulnerable children and many with special needs.

Several of the nurseries being targeted with cuts face closure if these issues are not resolved quickly, which would have a devastating effect on the workers, parents, and children concerned, who would thus be driven into poverty themselves, if they are not suffering already.

Whatever the outcome of the election, Friends of Hackney Nurseries insists that this outrageous situation must be dealt with.  We know of at least eight nurseries which are under threat, but we have yet to discover any that are expecting an increase.

Even Rita Krishna, Cabinet Member with responsibility for Children and Young People and Board Member of the Learning Trust, has continued to claim that she has no knowledge of how the Learning Trust allocates its funding.

So today, Friends of Hackney Nurseries announces that we are seeking legal advice, as the information regarding nurseries’ cuts in no way matches our experiences.  We find the Learning Trust’s processes opaque and unaccountable, and this situation will continue whoever wins tomorrow’s election. They have never revealed any criteria on which they have based their decisions, and it is impossible to run our nurseries in this climate of anxiety and manipulation.

We call on the Learning Trust to halt its devastating and unaccountable behaviour forthwith, and to answer our simple questions about the future of all Hackney’s nurseries.

For more more information about our campaign, please contact Friends of Hackney Nurseries at FHN@live.co.uk.