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Documents why austerity failed and its disastrous economic and social effects in Europe and North America and highlights why Australia should not adopt these policies. Government debt continued to increase, reduced demand intensified the recession, negative or weak growth prevailed and the private sector failed to invest. The cost of lost output, reduced wealth, mass unemployment and government intervention runs into trillions in any currency. Austerity advocates were equally committed to embedding neoliberalism in the public sector and the welfare state and reconfiguring the role of the state. Prepared for the Don Dunstan Foundation and Public Service Association of South Australia and published by the Australian Workplace Innovation and Social Research Centre, University of Adelaide.

Your Choice Barnet Ltd (YCB), planned to make £2m profit over a four-year period from residents with physical disabilities and learning difficulties to subsidize London Borough of Barnet taxpayers. It is, as predicted, in financial crisis. This analysis for the Campaign Against the Destruction of Disabled Support Services (CADDSS) exposes the scale of the company’s financial crisis, the failure to attract new service users and revenue, the totally inadequate approach to engagement and the drastic staff restructuring proposals, which it claimed would not affect service users and carers. The report sets out a detailed case for full and continuing engagement of service users, carers and community organisations, together with staff and trade unions, in the design, delivery and review of service provision. There is a very substantive case for returning Your Choice Barnet services back to in-house.

See earlier reports for Barnet UNISON on the Options Appraisal, Business Case and Business Plan which predicted the financial crisis.

Critique of Barnet Council’s Options Appraisal for Adult Social Care In-House Provider Services (August 2010)

Analysis of Business Case for Local Authority Trading Company (May 2011)

Local Authority Trading Company (LATC) for Adult and Housing Services (January 2012)

Review by Dexter Whitfield of European Welfare States after the Crisis: Changing Public Attitudes (by Policy Network, Institute for Public Policy Research and The Foundation for European Progressive Studies) in The Spokesman, No. 120, May, 2013 – The paper does not recognise the financialisation, personalisation, marketisation and privatisation of public services and the welfare state, let alone consider them a ‘challenge’ “The reason perhaps lies in the fact that these policies, designed mainly by the last Labour government and accelerated by the Coalition, are intended to privatise the ‘old’ welfare state in order to release public money to more fully address the casualties of, and the needs, of capital.”

Climate finance and markets is a collaborative project of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC and the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America. It sets out to understand what climate change means for the financial sector, and what financial sector involvement means for the funding of climate change projects. Reader covers financial trends, private sector actors, international financial institutions and carbon markets and other financial instruments.

Twenty years on from the introduction of the private finance initiative (PFI), Dexter Whitfield examines the effect it has had – and how it’s set to get worse under new Tory plans (PF2) – Red Pepper, Feb/Mar 2013, Issue 188, pages 16 – 18.

The Posted Workers Enforcement Directive and the ‘Monti II’ Regulation: The temporary posting of workers to a member state other than that to which they are based has brought together a complex set of social, economic and regulatory issues within EU law. This paper examines the conflicts of free movement and social rights and the Posted Workers Enforcement directive and the Monti ll and recommends a way forward.

The average annual return on the sale of equity in UK PPP project companies was 29% between 1998-2012 – twice the 12%-15% rate of return in PPP business cases at financial close of projects. The excess profit could be £2.65bn, all of which benefits private sector companies. This report exposes the real level of profiteering in PFI projects and shows how the government’s new PFI model, Private Finance 2, does nothing to address the profiteering or lack of transparency. Includes a Global database of PPP equity transactions. Also ESSU UK PPP Equity database can be download:

A paper written for Studies in Social Services, Li Bing, Vice Professor, Department of Sociology, Beijing Administrative College, China. Social services are at the forefront of the continued neoliberal transformation of public services and the welfare state in the UK. The paper applies the In Place of Austerity framework to examine the changes in social services. Paper in English and Chinese.

This Barnet UNISON Briefing examines the London Borough of Barnet’s plan to allocate just 2.5% client costs in the planned outsourcing of planning, environment health, trading standards, highways planning and cemeteries. The amount allocated would hardly be adequate to fund contract management and monitoring, leaving nothing to fund other client functions. It discusses the effects of Barnet Council’s ‘thin client’ plans, commissioning and client responsibilities, resources required for contract management and monitoring and the consequences of under-resourcing the client function.

The London Borough of Barnet signed a £100m 25-year PFI street lighting contract with Barnet Lighting Services Limited (Bouygues Construction and Mill Group infrastructure fund) in April 2006. This Briefing details the delays and performance failures by the private contractor, the lack of audit despite the high risks and cost increases borne by the Council, and the lack of regular, comprehensive and publicly available monitoring reports.