JOHN BIGGS, Executive Mayor of Tower Hamlets, has moved to close the borough’s last remaining three day care nurseries. The move comes after Labour ran a campaign to keep the nurseries open when the former Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, proposed closing them in 2014.
The case for closing the nurseries came to the Cabinet meeting last week in the form of a Report brought in the name of Danny Hassell, Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Schools. The question of closure will now be put to a public consultation.
Town Hall trade union Unison staged a last minute lobby of the Cabinet meeting – making it clear that they had not been consulted about the closure plans.
Aware that this is a controversial issue – 80% of respondents rejected his last proposal, to sell off the nurseries – Executive Mayor John Biggs announced that he will take the final decision on closure at a Cabinet meeting, not as a private decision.
Last week’s Cabinet Report, prepared for Cllr Hassell, is giving cause for concern in a number of areas.
•The Overview & Scrutiny Committee, during its pre-Cabinet scrutiny of Cabinet Reports, came up with an unprecedented eight pages of questions – most of them requests for clarification of assertions and assumptions in the report
•Last year, when Executive Mayor John Biggs was trying to sell off the nurseries, campaigners said that it would be hard to find another organisation to take on the service – and in the small print of the latest report the Council concedes that was indeed the case. Paragraph 2.4 of the report states: “[…] initial scoping with potential providers identified that they would not proceed if staff were TUPE’d as part of the arrangement.”
Even worse is the “Catch 22” argument on viability in the Cabinet report, which sees the cost of nurseries calculated not on the basis of the 102 places the system offers but on the basis of the 22 children who will be in the system in September – if no new children are admitted.
It remains to be seen what the debate will be when the decision returns to Cabinet. Last week only Cllr Danny Hassell spoke, to introduce the report, and the Executive Mayor himself. The other Cabinet members appeared to have nothing to say. The meeting, originally scheduled for 5pm, was brought forward to 4pm – making it even harder for members of the public to attend.
•Read more about it: Biggs under fire as he moves to close nurseries Nursery campaigners surprise Biggs at suffragette event