Politics: Council move to end out-of-school care exasperating

Politics, they say, is about choices. By and large, the choices made by political parties – or those individuals elected to public who profess no party label – reflect the priorities of those parties and individuals.

When asked the question, the general public will usually respond that the day-to-day issues which are important to them are health, normally closely followed by education.

Which makes the decision by Aberdeenshire Council’s Education and childrens’ services committee to end out-of-school care all the more exasperating for those parents for whom this is going to have very profound consequences indeed.

In opposing this measure, my political colleagues on the council and – to be absolutely fair – one of the religious faith representatives who sits on the committee, recognised that if you were starting with a blank sheet of paper and designing an out-of-hours school care service, the current arrangements are likely not what you would end up with.

However, a redesign of the service was not what the committee was asked to decide upon and instead a proposal to simply cease provision from the start of the summer was what was up for discussion.

A nod was given to discussions taking place at some future point with “relevant council services and the wider sector”, but all of that to happen after and not before the decision to cease the service was taken.

The result has been to create doubt and uncertainty in the minds of many of the parents of the roughly 350 children across Aberdeenshire who currently use this service.

In utilising this service, many of those parents are able to go out to work, not only to help with the family income but also providing vital local services.

We know that some posts in the north-east are harder to fill than others and it is a hard fact that many of those are lower-paid positions in which women make up the majority of the workforce.

This decision does nothing to improve that situation, quite the reverse in fact, as parents will now be seriously considering whether they can afford to go out to work.

A lot of dust has been kicked-up around the decision of course. Some councillors who voted for the decision have attempted to somehow pin the blame on the Scottish Government.

This despite the funding settlement from the Scottish Government for local authorities increasing by five per cent in real terms and in the face of the Scottish Government’s own funding from the UK Government being cut by 1.4 per cent in real terms (and an even greater 3.7 per cent in real terms the year before that).

To his credit, Conservative MP Andrew Bowie, who represents West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, didn’t ignore the obvious and write anyway to the Scottish Government to complain. He decided to complain to the Director of Education instead.

Which is an interesting way of dealing with a situation that his own political colleagues – and the Lib Dems and Independents – who actually run Aberdeenshire Council have created.

The decision is now a decision of “the council” so it’s not as if there aren’t questions for the officers of the council to answer in how they plan to mitigate this policy choice.

But in the first instance, those questions would have been better addressed by Mr Bowie to his colleagues in the Conservative-led council who made this choice and therefore created this situation.