Crisis-hit youth centre appeals to parents for help

Mums and dads whose children attend a crisis-hit youth centre are being asked to take a more active role to keep it from closure.

Pensioner Gladys Chilton, chairwoman of Pennywell Youth Project (PYP), says she needs help from the community in her fight to keep the award-winning centre open.

Gladys, who has been involved with the organisation for 12 years, said: “People keep telling me they don’t want PYP to close and all I have to say to them is ‘you know where our door is’.

“There is plenty to be done up there. The place needs a spring clean and a lick of paint, but we need the people power because we can’t afford to pay someone to do it.

“We really need some young blood behind us.”

The youth project, in Parkhurst Road, Pennywell, has won awards for it pioneering work with young people and touched the lives of thousands.
But over the last two years it has struggled to find funding and its bids for cash keep getting turned down.

Many of the management team spend their time cooking and cleaning in an effort to keep the place ticking over.

Earlier this week, the Echo revealed how three key figures in the charity were leaving because of the financial difficulties.

Sunderland City Council is working to ensure that any additional sources of finance are identified and made available.

But, the threat of closure is taking its toll on those who have devoted their time to the project.

Gladys said: “At the moment I’m not well enough to fight back.”

Anyone interested in helping should call 534 5357

Taken from Sunderland Echo

Youth project is on ‘its last legs’

THREE members of staff have quit a crisis-hit youth group as fears grow over the future of the award-winning centre.

An emergency committee meeting was held at Pennywell Youth Project (PYP) after three core workers handed in their resignations.

The centre, which has played a key role in transforming Pennywell, is under threat amid a funding crisis.

PYP chairwoman Gladys Chilton, said: “We are really struggling and I am blaming the local authority for a lot of this.

“For two years we’ve asked for more help regarding money for core costs and got nothing.

“If they want to save Pennywell Youth Project then they have to do something fast. We’re on our last legs.

“At the moment we are struggling to exist until March.”

The project’s kitchen staff went first, followed by the head gardener and the closure of the centre’s bike shop Chain Reaction.

This week a teacher from the education department left and it was announced the key administrator and senior youth worker will leave at the end of the month.

Gladys said: “I can’t blame them for going. They have to look out for themselves and take care of their own futures, but it is very sad to see them go.

“We are cutting down, but we are keeping the project going. We are not going to close.”

If the centre can survive until April, when the new financial year begins, fresh funds will be pumped into the project.

PYP normally receives about £90,000 from Sunderland City Council, but the youth centre says this year’s budget has been slashed to £65,000, with no explanation.

Gladys said: “Nothing must happen to the youth project because I think we would see come changes on the estate straight away if the children didn’t have those doors to come through.”

Children’s services ‘value project’

JUDITH Hay from Sunderland City Council’s Children’s Services, said: “The Pennywell Youth Project has an excellent track record for developing ways of supporting both young people and the local community that have really made a positive contribution to our city.

“Sunderland City Council values and supports the contribution provided by all voluntary sector youth projects, including Pennywell Youth Project, to the life our city and hope that contribution continues.

“Grants are allocated a year at a time, and although the amount available has decreased for the period 2010 to 2011, the city council remains committed to providing annual grants and working to support key partners.

“We respond to any request for help and give it our due consideration, and have always provided the project with any support we can.

“We are working to ensure that sources of additional finance are identified and made available where possible in addition to the annual core grant.”

Taken from Sunderland Echo

Defending the Welfare State and Public Services

March and Rally 10 April 2010

The pensioner, trade union and other welfare movements are planning a major demonstration in central London next April, in defence of the welfare state and public services.

The National Pensioners Convention is leading the event and the TUC is giving its full support, along with ASLEF, BECTU, CWU, FBU, GMB, NUJ, NUT, PCS, POA, RMT, TSSA, UCATT, UCU, UNISON, UNITE and USDAW. In addition the BMA, RADAR and the Carers Poverty Alliance are also taking part.

In the New Year we will have a special website advertising the event at www.10410demo.com along with a flyer (attached) which you can order for distribution and a petition.

This will be a major event either just before or just after the general election. Either way it will put down a marker to the next government that the welfare state and public services are important to all of us and must not become a casualty of the economic crisis. Every effort must therefore be used to maximise attendance.

Plotting and scheming for Welfare not Workfare

On 12 November, it became legal to force unemployed people to work for their benefits – to do 40-hour-weeks for under a third of the minimum wage. The Government’s Welfare Reform Act introduced ‘Work for your Benefit’ pilot schemes, which once completed can be rolled out without any further debate. It also attacked single parents – who face sanctions if they fail to prepare for work outside the home as soon as their child turns three – and people with impairments, disabilities or severe and enduring illnesses.

Two days later, members of twenty-three different groups from around the UK met to share information and plan resistance to these pernicious attacks, which will take their toll on working-class and low-income communities.

Groups present included Unemployed Workers Unions from six cities across the UK, the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network, Southwark Mind, WinVisible (women with visible and invisible disabilities), Single Mothers’ Self-Defence (part of Global Women’s Strike) and members of the union in the Department of Work and Pensions – PCS. They were joined by feminist and other groups (all listed below).

The strength to be gained from meeting in solidarity with each other was immense and created a real sense that a movement is building: a movement which will not only fight the immediate attacks of the Welfare Abolition Act, but draw out the connections between our struggles and together challenge the ideology driving them.

The Act seeks to make our worth dependent on work; work defined in the really narrow terms of waged work for someone else’s profit. By making us compete with those in waged work for non-existent jobs, it helps drive down wages and conditions. We all take the brunt as the rich make even more money out of us.

We want solidarity with and from people in low-income, temporary and insecure work. These are the jobs that ‘work-for-your-benefit’ would replace.
We want caring to be recognised as important work in society. Single parents are already working and benefits are their entitlement to a social wage.
We want justice for people with severe or enduring illnesses. The drive to get people off incapacity benefits and Employment and Support Allowance and into work is making people more ill with stress. Only we know what we are capable of and it is wrong for conditions and sanctions to be imposed on us to force us into unsuitable work, unwanted “work-related activity” or “motivation sessions” which press us into their programmes of treatment for addictions and other conditions.
We want the right not to work. People not in waged work contribute loads to their communities. We do not want to be forced into mind-numbing, insecure work that leaves us no better off, or worse off than on benefits and definitely not at £1.27 an hour!
We want free, high-quality, public services to support older people and people with impairments/disabilities. People should not have to become employers managing ‘individual budgets’ in order to access the care they need.
We want to stand in solidarity with migrant workers. Just as unemployed people are pitted against people in work, so migrant workers are pitted against us. We believe that we must stand together and demand all of our rights together.
We want to fight privatisation of the Department for Work and Pensions. Attacks on DWP and Jobcentre Plus workers are attacks on our rights to access welfare. We will support the PCS’ fight against cuts.
We want an end to the apartheid system of benefits, healthcare and housing for asylum seekers.  UK Border Agency support should be scrapped — where people are forced to survive on incomes far below benefit levels – which are already set at subsistence level.  No slum housing and dangerous and dirty hostels, dispersal, or vouchers.

After a day of info-sharing, outrage and scheming, we formed a few working groups. If you’re able to help out with any of the projects, please email hackneyunemployedworkers@gmail.com

1.Media working group – monitor and respond to hostile articles in the media.
2.Our propaganda – creating posters, newsletters etc to get our messages out
3.Website – put together a website as a space to share resources, feedback and comment, get the word out about our campaign and publicise local and national action.
4.Our welfare rights – compiling information to help us access our rights now and creating ‘Know your rights’ leaflets.
5.Defeating the Work for your Benefits pilots – research to support the network to take action against the pilots.

If you want to stay in touch, please join our discussion list here:

http://groups.google.com/group/no-to-welfare-abolition

If you agree with our demands above and would like to take part in our campaign, please ask your group to sign up to this statement and email
hackneyunemployedworkers@gmail.com

And put the next national meeting in your diary now…. 17 April in Manchester!

The meeting had people in attendance from: South Manchester Community Union, London Anarcha-Feminist Kolektiv, London Coalition Against Poverty, Feminist Action, Defend Welfare Newcastle, Manchester Unemployed Workers Union, Cambridge Unemployed Workers’ Union, PCS, Hackney Unemployed Workers, Single Mothers’ Self Defence, Winvisible, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Disabled People’s Direct Action Network, Southwark Mind, Women’s Office Manchester Student Union, Riveters feminist group in Manchester, Feminist Fightback, Industrial Workers of the World, No Borders, Stop Deportations, Anarchist Federation, Communist Students, Salford Unemployed Workers’ Union.

Lifeline youth club under threat

A youth club that has played a key role in transforming an estate once dubbed the “car crime capital of Europe” is in danger of folding.

Every week for the past six years, Pennywell Youth Project has packed more than 600 children into its Petersfield Road base, getting them off street corners and into activities such as music and DJ workshops, football and out-of-school clubs.

But the club is fast becoming the latest victim of the recession. Grants are drying up, staff are working on a voulntary basis and the lights are being turned off to save funds.

“Jobs have been lost and more could go,” said project manager Gordon Langley. “We could last six months, three months, two months – I just don’t know.”

Taken from Sunderland Echo

More than 300,000 homes “lying empty”

More than 300,000 privately owned homes have been lying empty across England for lengthy periods while millions of families stagnate on lengthy housing waiting lists.

According to new figures released by high street bank Halifax, the number of empty homes in England reached its highest level for five years during 2008.

But when homes that have been empty for less than six months are added the real figure is double this.

A huge number of private homes have been left empty despite the four million people in the country on the housing waiting list – a figure the Local Government Association expects to increase by another million in the next two years.

The figures were released as TUC general secretary Brendan Barber called for an empty property tax of five times the usual council tax – an average of £5,875 – on up to a million homes left vacant by absentee landlords to help meet the costs of the financial crisis.

Mr Barber said: “It’s a scandal so many homes are standing empty when the queue for social housing is growing and a chronic housing shortage is pushing prices well above their pre-recession levels and out of reach of many potential home owners.

“These empty properties, often bought for purely speculative purposes or as a vehicle for tax avoidance by overseas landlords, contribute to our housing crisis and fiscal deficit.”

Economist Suren Thiru said the number of empty homes had increased recently following several years of decline.

“In many cases, high levels of long-term empty homes reflect relatively high levels of deprivation, low average earnings and high unemployment,” he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Communities and Local Government added that councils must do more to deal with empty homes and have strengthened their role so they can work with owners to bring properties back into use.

Where no alternative can be reached, councils have a last resort – empty dwelling management orders (EDMOs) – to allow councils to get empty homes occupied without forcing a change of ownership.

Taken from Morning Star

Parents pack school hearing

Anxious parents vented their anger as they attended an 11th-hour meeting to save their school.

Schools Adjudicator Brian Slater hosted a meeting to help him decide the fate of Gillas Lane Primary School in Houghton.

The primary school was earmarked for closure earlier this year as part of Sunderland City Council’s proposals to tackle huge number of surplus places, but parents have been campaigning against the plans.

After a lengthy debate in the summer, Sunderland Council’s school organisation committee agreed to defer a decision.

Members were asked by education officials to give the final go-ahead for the axe to fall in August 2012, but they voted four to one in favour of deferring the decision into the hands of the Schools Adjudicator.

At last night’s meeting held at the school, Mr Slater heard views from the local authority, campaign group, Gillas Lane Action to Support Schools (Glass), and residents.

Speaking at the meeting, Glass chairman Dave Coulbeck said: “As parents and carers, we believe we have had a raw deal in this process. Our views and wishes have been sidelined.”

He claimed the proposal had been “misleading” and “poorly executed”.

Those fighting to save the school say its small class sizes are key to giving pupils a good grounding in life.

Earlier this year the authority announced plans to shut Gillas Lane and transfer pupils to nearby Bernard Gilpin Primary School.

Fighting back the tears, Gillas Lane headteacher Terry Hambleton, told the meeting: “What I firmly believe is that there is scope and room for two good schools in the area.

“We know their names, their families, what happens on a weekend, their strengths, what makes them tick.”

Parents and staff are worried about pupils going from a school of 130, with a nursery, to one of more than 400 without a nursery.

Representing the council, Keith Moore, deputy director of Children’s Services, said: “We absolutely understand as a local authority the difficulties and sensitivities of the proposal we are making and we want to acknowledge the excellent work of the school.

“But we have a responsibility and a duty to balance this with the clear duty to manage surplus places.”

Mr Slater will now consider all views before making a decision.

Taken from the Sunderland Echo

Unemployment Levels in Sunderland, North East and the UK

The Guardian has given a detailed database of benefit claimant figures today, so I thought I would highlight some of the statistics relevant to Sunderland and compare them to regional and national levels. No Surprise that Sunderland has a higher rate than both of these. Please note, that the figures are for benefit claimants and not unemployed people as a whole, otherwise the figures would be far greater.

The UK in total has 1,145,989 people who claim benefits, making up 4.2% of the working population. This is a 1.6% (612,276) increase in the last year.

The North East has 85,231 people who claim benefits, making up 5.3% of the working population. This is a 1.7% (27,890) increase in the last year.

Sunderland North has 3,103 people who claim benefits, making up 6.2% of the working population. This is a 2% (997) increase in the last year.

Sunderland South has 3,503 people who claim benefits, making up 6.9% of the working population. This is a 2.1% (1,084) increase in the last year.

This obviously shows that there is a lack of decent job, training and education opportunities in the Sunderland area, and that when the recession hit, that it has had most effect on working class and neglected areas like Sunderland. Despite this, it has been revealed this week that, there are going to be massive cuts to training schemes nationally.

Apparently the unemployment rate is slowing, but unemployment is still increasing and pay rises are now the lowest on record. And to add to this, after the next general election, all the major parties have promised big cuts the public sector, meaning many more job losses to come.

I would like to add that there are going to be huge benefit cuts in the months to come, in the form of the Welfare Reform Bill. This is likely to distort statistics like this, as these only detail people claiming benefits. So there will be many ‘hidden’ unemployed people who are ignored.

The overall picture does not look too good, despite much of the media spin things are getting better. They are not getting better for the average working class person, the single parent families, and those who rely on unsecure low paid jobs and benefits.

Parents’ last chance to save Gillas Lane Primary School

Battling parents are calling on the community for help in a last-ditch bid to save their school.

The Schools Adjudicator will be holding a meeting next week to help decide the fate of Gillas Lane Primary School.

The Houghton primary school was earmarked for closure earlier this year as part of Sunderland City Council’s proposals to tackle huge number of surplus places. Angry parents have been campaigning against the plans.

After a lengthy debate in the summer, Sunderland Council’s school organisation committee agreed to defer a decision on the closure.

Members were asked by education officials to give the final go-ahead for the axe to fall in August 2012, but they voted four to one in favour of deferring the decision into the hands of the Schools Adjudicator.

Now, Brian Slater, the adjudicator appointed to look at the case, will be holding at meeting in the school next Tuesday at 5.30pm to hear the views of those involved.

Anna Watson, a parent governor at Gillas Lane, said the campaign group, Gillas Lane Action to Support Schools wants as many people as possible to attend the meeting and show the strength of feeling.

She said: “There is still very strong support for the fight to prevent the school from closing. But this is our very, very last chance to save Gillas Lane. If it doesn’t go our way there is nothing else we can do.”

Earlier this year the authority announced plans to shut Gillas Lane, which has been rated as outstanding by Ofsted inspectors, and transfer pupils to nearby Bernard Gilpin Primary School.

The proposed move is part of a citywide shake-up, which would see the closure of seven primary and two nursery schools.

As well as closing Gillas Lane, over the next five years the council aims to build three new schools. One will replace Hetton Primary, Hetton Nursery and Eppleton Primary. Another will replace Bexhill and Town End Primary and the third will replace Hylton Red House Primary, Hylton Red House Nursery and Willowfields Community Primary.

Taken from Sunderland Echo