Labour Should Abandon Their Cuts to Vulnerable Children

Before Christmas I went to visit the Southampton Young Carers Project, a service at risk of being axed by the new Labour Council Administration.

The Young Carers Project supports some of the most vulnerable families in the city. The project supports 120 brave young children who look after sick or disabled family members. It gives them valuable respite, puts on trips for them and helps to give them a childhood despite the pressures of family life.

Labour announced in November that they will withdraw the full £89,000pa that the council currently gives to the service. This would mean that in April the service will be cut off at the knees, with no time to find alternative sources of funding to keep it going.
Labour’s budget cuts have disproportionately hit services to children in Southampton and cuts like the Young Carers Project will not save money in the long run and instead will put more pressure on families, leading to more family breakdown and children being taken into care.

Local Conservative Councillors are calling on Labour to abandon their plans to cut the service.

New Play Park Needed for Lake Park

The Children's play area in Lake Park is in need of improvements, with play equipment in need of updating and the area surrounding it often waterlogged.

I have received a number of complaints from parents that use the park and I am pushing the council for an urgent upgrade. The City Council has funds available for improving play parks in the area. These funds have been paid over to the council by developers over recent years as part of planning requirements that new developments help support improvements in the area. So the council has the funds and in my view it needs to make Lake Park a priority.

Southampton to Share in New Government Funding for Schools

I was delighted to read yesterday that two Southampton Schools will benefit from the new Priority School Building Programme. Bitterne Park and Cedar School will benefit from the new £2b fund which is aimed at targeting improvements and repairs to those schools most in need of building works. 

I submitted a bid for these schools to the new scheme last year whilst in my role as Cabinet Member for Childrens' Services and was able to raise the issue of Southampton Schools with the Secretary of State for Education when he visited Southampton in March.

To see the full list of schools benefiting from the scheme click HERE and for Michael Gove's ministerial statement click HERE.

The extra funds come on the back of a separate award of £3.9 to the City Council in April, to fund new places that are needed in our primary schools.

The new money will all be put to good use very quickly with school rebuilds and repairs being completed within a couple of years.

Massive Expansion of Nursery Provision Planned for Southampton

The trade unions in Southampton are deliberately misleading and trying to frighten local residents ahead of the local elections on 3rd May. Unions have flooded the city with bill boards suggesting that nurseries are under threat. These bill boards have only been put up in Southampton, Birmingham and London and are part of the union campaign to unseat the current Conservative Council locally and buy an election victory for the Labour Party.


In Southampton nursery provision is NOT under threat and is in fact due to expand dramatically in the coming years to meet the demand resulting from the rising local birth rate and to provide extra support for 2 year olds from disadvantaged families.


Local Conservatives are pledging to create an extra 1,800 nursery places for 2 year olds by 2014 and have pledged to protect all 14 local Sure Start Centres.


We continue to work actively to sustain existing, good quality childcare and assist nurseries to expand, where appropriate to meet this demand, including the nurseries directly managed by the Council.


In the Conservative February Council budget we made revenue provision for expanding places for 2 year olds for 2012/13 and the city received a capital grant from the Department of Education of £3.9M recently which may be used to support the provision of additional places.


The unions should be ashamed of themselves for these despicable tactics. The Conservatives are massively expanding nursery provision in the city and so for the unions to suggest that nurseries are under threat is totally false. They are needlessly worrying local families for their own political ends. Their strikes last year disrupted our bin collections and caused misery for local residents and now they are playing politics with vital services to young children and families.

New Play Park for Albany Road

Freemantle Councillor, Michael Ball, at the current play park in Albany Road 

Freemantle's Conservative Councillors have helped secure £72,000 for improvements to play equipment in Albany Road.

The funding is coming from local developers who are required to set aside money for improvements to the local area when new developments are built.

A consultation is due to take place and the improvements are due to complete this year.

We Need to do More to Improve Adoptions

Adoption can make an extraordinary difference to a child's life. Adoption transforms the lives of some of the most neglected and abused children in the UK. Vulnerable children in our city need a loving home and we need to find adoptive parents to give them just that.

This week is National Adoption Week, which aims to raise awareness of adoption and to encourage more people to consider adopting. There is a national shortage of approved adopters which at the moment means the average time a child being taken into care and being successfully placed for adoption is two years and seven months.

Ofsted recently inspected Southampton City Council's adoption service and their judgement was that the service is performing to a good standard across the board and this a testament to the hard work of our staff. But we can always do more. We should be adopting more children and doing so faster and we should be careful not to discriminate against potential adopters.

As a council - and as a society - we need to step up to the challenge of improving the system to improve outcomes for children in care. We need processes to work more quickly for both prospective adopters and for the children who just want a warm, loving home.

We need to cut through the unnecessary red tape and make placements more quickly. We need a legal system that will work faster than it does at present. We need social workers to be able to allow white families to adopt black and mixed race children, and vice versa, and single people and older couples should not be discriminated against.

Of course, the debate surrounding this will continue. But I agree that it is a scandal that children remain in care when there are families out there who would love to take them in.

Every child deserves a loving family. Making space in your life for a child is an amazing thing to do. If you have ever considered adoption, there has never been a better time to get in touch.