Children’s Services cuts ‘short-sighted’ says councillor

ON a day that saw Oxfordshire County Council agree to launch a public consultation on its plans to close 44 Children’s Centres, Thame Town Cllr Mary Stiles has spoken about her fears that the service for young people and their families remaining would just end up ‘fire fighting’ and costing a lot more in the longer term.

Cllr Mary Stiles

Cllr Mary Stiles joined the Save Oxon’s Children Centres protest group last Tuesday outside County Hall and has said that she would have been there today for the county council’s Cabinet meeting if she had not been going away on holiday.

Emphasizing that she was speaking in a personal capacity, and not on behalf of Thame Town Council nor in her capacity as the Chair of Thame Red Kite Children’s Centre’s Advisory Group (That group will meet in October and will issue a formal response then), Mrs Stiles told Thame.Net:

Image courtesy of oxfordshire.gov.uk

“I believe that Children’s Centres provide a vital service for babies, young children and their families. To cut them is very short-sighted, because prevention is always better than cure. Everyone knows that the government is not funding local government adequately and that savings have to be made, but all of the proposals would mean the end of the fantastic service provided at present.”

During the debate this afternoon, County Cllr Gill Sanders told the meeting of OCC’s Cabinet that Oxfordshire was facing its ‘Dr Beeching moment,’ before it agreed to consult on the proposal to replace 44 of the county’s Children’s Centres and seven of its early intervention hubs, with eight ‘family support centres’.

Mary Stiles went on to say that to join with Children’s Services to have provision for 0 – 19 year-olds did make sense and would definitely save money. “But for those services to be available only to referred families, would stigmatise those families thus making them hard to reach and would be “fire-fighting”, with no prevention work, thus storing up problems for later – and resulting in a much greater expense to the public purse in the end.

“It is also such a waste of public money to have invested in centres, for them then not to be used for their intended purpose. Rather than closing centres such as we have locally, OCC should be working with local councils and other groups to be creative and find a way to keep up the good work carried out by Children Centre staff – even if for the foreseeable future there is less provision.

“Less is better than none. If you cut something completely, rarely do you get it back. If you keep it going, there will be something to build on in better times.”

The public consultation on Oxfordshire’s proposals, aimed at saving £8 million pounds, will be launched in October.

Opposition to the proposals is running high and an online 38 Degrees petition started by a young, Oxfordshire mother in the past couple of days, already had 3,306 signatures at the time of this posting.