May 2nd, 2011 by Mark Rusling

A new report by the Campaign to End Child Poverty has shown that child poverty in Walthamstow is nearly double the average in England. 37% of children in Walthamstow live in poverty, against an English average of 21.3% (in the borough as a whole, 35% of children live in poverty).

The previous Labour government created a target of ending child poverty by 2020. The current government has kept that target. The report shows that, from 1998 to 2010, the number of children living in poverty dropped from 4.4 million to 3.5 million. This didn’t happen by chance – it happened because the government wanted it to happen, and created policies like Sure Start centres (now called children’s centres) to help families to raise their children free from the blight of poverty.

However, the independent report makes clear that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat government’s spending cuts are hitting areas with high child poverty the hardest. Areas like Walthamstow that need the most help are being hit with the biggest cuts.

Government funding for children’s centres has dropped by 11%, and Waltham Forest is facing a drop in funding of £80 per person. I recently wrote about the ways in which we are trying to help our poorest young residents – have a read. Our own children’s centre on Church Hill has just been rated by Ofsted as providing a good service with outstanding features, but surely they will be hit hard by the government’s spending cuts?

Conservative and Lib Dem ministers try to convince us that ‘we’re all in this together’, but it doesn’t look that way to us. People living in places like Walthamstow are bearing the heaviest load. We will continue to reform the way the council provides services, to protect residents as far as we can. However, make no mistake – the government’s children’s centre cuts will hit this borough hard.

February 15th, 2011 by Mark Rusling

The borough received the fantastic news last Friday that its case in the High Court against the government’s axeing of Building Schools for the Future has been successful. Waltham Forest had been allocated £300 million to re-build secondary schools, bringing them to the standard of our ward’s own Walthamstow School for Girls.

The council had spent £17 million preparing for the scheme. However, the new government ended the whole programme last year, without consulting Waltham Forest about the impact of this decision. The judge last week ruled that this was “so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power“.

The Secretary of State, Michael Gove, now has to re-consider his decision meaningfully, and to take into account our schools’ representations. We are not intervening with the government’s right to decide, and we know that there is no guarantee that new money will be coming to the borough. However, the judgment is an important recognition of the hardship caused by Gove’s decision, and of the need for the government to take that into account. Gove responded to the decision in Parliament yesterday - click here to listen to this.

The decision to take the government to court had been opposed by local Lib Dems and Tories, who have yet to respond to the judgment. The judge ordered that the government should pay the council’s costs.

If you would like more information on this, get in touch. Otherwise, here are links to write-ups of the story:

Waltham Forest Council

BBC

Guardian

Independent

Standard

October 18th, 2010 by Mark Rusling

One of the first decisions of the coalition government was to remove funding from the Building Schools for the Future programme. Waltham Forest had planned to invest over £300 million in renovating the borough’s schools – through the same programme that has made Walthamstow School for Girls so impressive.

We had already invested around £17 million in preparing for the borough’s other secondary schools to be brought up to standard, but the government’s decision has put a halt to that.

However, as the Waltham Forest Guardian noted last week, we ‘will not take no for an answer’. We have launched a judicial review application in the High Court, calling for the government to reconsider its decision to withdraw funding from our school building programme. Click here for more details.

The Guardian is right – we will not take no for an answer. We will continue to fight this unfair decision, and we will make sure that our children have the best facilities to learn and achieve in.