East Sussex councillors have raised concerns about an ongoing consultation into potential cuts to adult social care.
The potential cuts to adult social care, which come to £3.994m, were put out to public consultation by East Sussex County Council’s cabinet last month. They cover a range of services, including day centres for both elderly and disabled people, drugs and alcohol recovery, and housing support for vulnerable people.
At the time, the potential cuts were described as the first steps of wider savings proposals intended to address a £55 million funding gap in next year’s budget.
While the consultation is still ongoing, the proposals were discussed by councillors at a full council meeting on Tuesday (October 8).
Several councillors took the opportunity to raise concerns about how the consultation process was progressing.
They included Liberal Democrat councillor John Ungar, who said: “I believe that the proposed cuts will have a massive impact on the quality of life of vulnerable people across East Sussex.
“I ask, where is the human cost explained in any of our papers? I don’t believe there is. That is being silent and it is so silent you hear it in a thunderous roar.”
He added: “Where is the equality impact information? That is really important, particularly for councillors. What alternatives are being provided where services are being cut, removed or just totally disregarded?
“Those bits of information, which we need, show that the consultation won’t work properly, because people aren’t properly informed. To be fully consulted is to be fully informed and that is something that hasn’t happened.”
A similar argument was made by Green Party councillor Wendy Maples, who said: “What I find most wicked about this consultation is that it is effectively pitting one care centre against another in the way that it is presented.
“We are being asked to choose. Do we want a care centre in Lewes or in Heathfield? Do we want to have people with learning difficulties, adults with learning difficulties or children having their care taken away.
“The issue is that those are not the people who are going to be answering this consultation. They are either themselves in a care centre needing that support or they are carers at home who have not the tiniest margin of time to be able to read through these consultations.
“So what we are going to end up with is a consultation that is actually pretty meaningless.”
Cllr Carl Maynard, the council’s lead member for adult social care, disputed this line of argument.
He said: “We’ve seen a lot of party political nonsense and blame game and ‘oh, I couldn’t possibly vote for this, I couldn’t possibly vote for that’. I keep saying — and it seems it falls on deaf ears when it is politically expedient for members of the opposition not to agree — that you have to take tough decisions; that is how you deliver a balanced budget.
“I think it would be useful to actually, instead of saying ‘we wouldn’t do this, we wouldn’t do that’, to actually encourage residents to engage. In just under a week, we’ve had over 427 responses already.”
He added: “In terms of the bigger picture we’ve seen in the past a really good record for East Sussex County Council both listening, engaging and consulting people … and it is incredibly disingenuous to hear Cllr Ungar, for example, say we haven’t done an [Equality Impact Assessment] when he knows damn well we’ve done one every single time we’ve gone out on a consultation.
“It is not just disingenuous to suggest we wouldn’t, it is just factually incorrect.”
Consultation on the cuts will run from Thursday, October 3 to Thursday, November 28. The council says feedback from the consultation will analysed in a report that will be shared with all councillors before decisions are made in February next year.
