Hampshire Country Council have opened a consultation on what areas they should cut their services to 1.4 million residents, to ensure they meet their £132 million shortfall by April 2025 - following years of austerity cuts.
The options are pretty grim😢
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1 - Adult social care charges
Rather than getting people to pay 95% of their care and support, we just go the full whack and charge them 100%
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2 - Withdraw funding from grant programs that support voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations.
Given how much we now rely on volunteers to run things, making that EVEN harder doesn’t sound good
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3 - Remove the one off grant schemes that go to support community schemes and projects - again, usually helping volunteer run organisations with costs
Again - as a society we rely heavily on these kinds of organisations to support the most vulnerable.
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4 - Reduce the Cultural Trust grant that supports arts and museum services.
I mean, who needs culture in a society anyway 🙄
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5 - Reducing highways maintenance
I mean FFS - our roads are absolutely awful already
Hampshire ranked 8th in this pothole poll!
Reducing road maintenance, drainage improvements (given recent flooding?!) and surface treatments - is that smart?
6/ vanarama.com/blog/vans/reve…
6 - Highways Winter Service
To redetermine which roads should be treated as a priority in winter…
You’ve seen what happens when we have more than an inch of snow, right?!
The country grinds to a halt. We should be improving it, not making it worse!
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7- Stop all homeless support services apart from their legally obligated requirements.
With homelessness rising across Hampshire (and the country as a whole), to cut support even further is just cruel.
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8 - Household waste recycling centres to provide further reduced services.
Hampshire CC contains 13 local authorities. EVERY single one sits in the bottom half of the National ranking of council recycling rates.
Cutting services further is a terrible idea!
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9 - Library stock
As if library services haven’t been hit hard enough already.
In a cost of living crisis, libraries are a vital part of our community - providing education, joy, community groups and warmth for many.
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10 - Passenger Transport
Yet another area that’s already cut to the bone. Hampshire has huge rural areas which would become inaccessible to those without a car. Cutting further community bus services, school buses etc would be a disaster
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11 - Rural countryside parking
So in a cost of living crisis, where there is very, very little pleasure that can be had for “free”, adding on charges to visit nature reserves and conservation sites seems cruel
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12 Crossing Patrols
Let’s get rid of the mechanism by which kids can cross safely to get to school.
Nope, can’t see anything going wrong there….😢
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13- Street Lighting
Reducing street lighting in both brightness and hours of operation.
Again - what could possibly go wrong! 🙄
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Don’t get me wrong - I don’t blame HCC for having to make these cuts. They’re in an impossible situation thanks to #ToryAusterity
We’ve had 13 years of cuts to every area of our lives. The Tories seem hell bent on creating a Britain that is just an empty husk of itself
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Do you remember a time when it was given that libraries would be there, street lights were a necessity, councils fixed the roads, ran community bus services to help the vulnerable…..
And now they can only do the absolute bare minimum of what they’re legally obliged to do
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This country is broken. Utterly, utterly broken.
We NEED a #GeneralElectionN0W
We NEED to start fixing the damage, investing in infrastructure, councils, public services.
We can’t take any more cuts.
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And don’t even think about claiming there’s no money!
If they can find £240 million to throw at Rwanda for a scheme they know will never happen and spend millions on a barge just for some performative cruelty, then they can start finding money to actually fix the country
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Im old enough to remember “Global Britain”, “Rule Britannia” “World beating Britain”….
Now we’re just broken Britain, disfunctional Britain, no heart, no soul, just crumbling and stumbling from self inflicted crisis to self inflicted crisis.
It has to end soon….🙏🏼
19/19 End
for those that live in Hampshire….👍🏻hants.gov.uk/aboutthecounci…
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