David Maples, Brighton Socialist Party
Brighton’s people’s budget conference, organised by Brighton and Hove Trades Council, met on 15 February days after an eighth Labour councillor elected in 2023 left the Labour Group on the council.
The model ‘Starmerite’ council is floundering. Despite passing a “legal balanced budget” last year, it has a General Fund overspend of £8.8 million. Attempting to find £25 million cuts this year, it has struggled to come up with £20 million. The council has now applied for “Exceptional Financial Support”.
Trades Council Secretary Andy Richards explained the intolerable pressure council staff are under. Labour’s proposed insourcing has proved to be the complete opposite. The council has privatised supported-living service Burwash Lodge and is looking for private management for Roundabout nursery in Whitehawk.
Tim Halpin, the Unison convenor at learning disability charity Grace Eyre, explained that the council’s delay in agreeing care support uplifts had led the charity to stop paying the Real Living Wage. Because of financial pressures created by the council, it also sold its headquarters and made redundancies.
Matt Webb, Trades Council President, gave an impassioned defence of education, including the campaign he is running to stop the academisation of his daughter’s school, Coombe Road Primary.
The conference was shocked when guest speaker Paul Kershaw, chair of the Unite Housing Workers branch, reported that 36 homeless people had died in Brighton in 2024.
Paul set out measures the council could take, including:
- Freezing council rents and pressurising housing associations to do the same
- An accountable programme of retrofitting housing to improve thermal performance
- Supporting tenants’ organisations, including with legal resources
- Pressurising housing associations such as Sanctuary to recognise a trade union
Brighton council has twice been run by the Green Party. They have high hopes of taking control again in 2027, so the attendance of one of their candidates, Warren Malone, was very welcome.
The budget papers talk of a further £30 million cuts in 2027-28. Trades Council Executive member Bill North set out the Trades Council’s approach. It called on the Labour administration to withdraw the draft budget and charges for 2026-27 and for the Labour and Green groups to produce a revised budget based on freezing council tax, rents, business rates and charges, and to campaign for Labour to restore government funding levels to the 2010-11 pre-austerity level, in real terms.
Warren reported that the Greens have struggled to find candidates, those who apply being warned that they will be ‘required’ to vote for future cuts – “a poisoned chalice”. Warren did sign the petition calling on Zack Polanski to ensure the Greens take a fighting, no-cuts stance (see p5).
The trades council is supporting Unison’s lobby of the council budget meeting on 26 February and elected a committee to take the campaign into the wider movement and community.
Polanski is speaking in Brighton on 23 February, tickets cost £26.25! Socialist Party members will be hoping to give him, and those in attendance, an opportunity to sign the petition!
