The uncertain future of the council's day centres
'I won’t give up until they put the chains on the doors'
Good morning — welcome to your Wednesday briefing.
Day centres for people with varying care needs can be a lifeline for families and exhausted carers. Birmingham City Council currently runs nine but almost half of them are at risk of closure as the local authority tries to plug an eyewatering £380m budget shortfall. A consultation, which one councillor has suggested was ‘deliberately flawed’ (the council says no decisions have been made yet) on the proposals to shut the four at-risk centres has been and gone. The future of the day centres hangs in the balance until a cabinet vote in September. Olivia Barber, a former social worker turned journalist, has gone behind the doors of two to speak to the people who will be affected most of all by the decision. Her findings are in today’s story.
Editor’s note: As is tradition mid-week, you will find a paywall part of the way down the story. As newsrooms have dwindled across the country, journalists have less and less time to spend scrutinising institutions, like the council, that make decisions on our behalf. We want to change that with quality journalism like Olivia’s — but it costs money. If you can afford to, please consider becoming a paying member of The Dispatch today. We’ll make it worth your while.
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The uncertain future of the council's day centres
By Olivia Barber
Maureen and Lisa Winkles settle on the cream sofa in their neatly arranged living room. They wear positive smiles, but their shoulders slump slightly and the bright evening light highlights a weariness in their faces. Maureen says that she's taken up doing puzzles again to help take her mind off things. “Trouble is, once I start I don't want to stop,” she laughs.
Maureen is 86. Her daughter Lisa has been going to the Harborne Day Centre here in Quinton since she was 21 — she is now 53. Maureen doesn’t know what they’ll do if the council closes the centre. “She’ll have to go into a home if I can’t cope,” Maureen says, with the resigned tone of a person speaking about a decision beyond their control. “I know I’m old,” Maureen adds, “but I’ve never felt it on the inside. This has really knocked the stuffing out of me.”
Birmingham City Council (BCC) currently runs nine day centres for adults with learning disabilities. In May, the council launched a consultation on its proposals to close four of the centres, one of which is Harborne. BCC cited the reasons behind this being that numbers of day centre attendees have dropped following the pandemic. The council has also said that by reducing the number of centres it runs, it would be able to improve the quality of facilities.
In addition, faced with a £380m shortfall in its budget, the council estimates that closing the four centres could save £5.3 million in staffing and running costs over the next two financial years.
Day centres offer structured activities for people with varying care needs including people with mental health issues, learning disabilities and physical disabilities, as well as older people. They provide a safe space for people to go and offer respite for carers.
The council’s decision comes amid a difficult year for Maureen. She learned that her sister has dementia, Lisa was admitted to hospital with pneumonia, then Maureen herself fell ill. Despite it all, we sit chatting, the radio playing softly in the background, and mother and daughter try to make light of the situation.
“I’ll fight to the death”
The designated protest leader for the Save Harborne Day Centre campaign is Jean Cross, whose brother Robert is 62 and has been attending the centre for 43 years. “She's gobby and she speaks out. We need someone like that,” says Maureen. “Her and her son, they’re fantastic.”
‘Stop the potential closure of Harborne Day Centre’ posters are displayed in Jean’s windows. At the ‘Rise up Brum’ protest against cuts outside the Council House earlier this month, Jean put these posters up on the pillars lining the building’s entrance. She tells me she persuaded a workman to let her attach a banner to some scaffolding. Passersby who were previously unaware of the proposed closures signed their petition. “They said, ‘give us your petition, we can’t let this happen; it’s unacceptable,’” Jean says.
65-year-old Jean, and her activism, seem indefatigable. “They’re picking on the wrong day centre. I’ll fight to the death,” she declares.
Besides Harborne, the centres facing closure are Fairway in Kings Norton, Beeches GOLDD (which stands for Growing Older with a Learning Disability and Dementia) in Great Barr, and Heartlands in Nechells.
According to council data, the current daily rate of attendance at Fairway is eight people, Beeches GOLDD is 11, while Harborne and Heartlands have 41 and 48 attendees respectively. The council temporarily closed Beeches GOLDD and Heartlands a few weeks ago for essential building works, and family members of day centre users have their reservations about whether they will open again, even if the proposed closures do not go ahead. Building surveys commissioned by the council in 2021 estimate that Beeches GOLDD requires £7,910 for essential repairs in the next two years and £19,700 for additional work over three years. The Heartlands needs £189,946 for essential repairs and £2.8 million for modernisation.
“Well, that’s [Heartlands] never going to reopen,” says Jean. “I think they think we’re stupid.” The council has said that its proposals to close the four centres “are separate to the operational requirement to ensure that our buildings are safe for citizens.”
Maureen tells me she wouldn’t have known about Harborne’s existence 30 years ago, if the taxi driver who used to take Lisa to college had not mentioned it. Lisa was about to leave college at the time. “He asked me, ‘What will Lisa do next?’” Maureen says in her soft-spoken voice. “I said to him, ‘I don't have a clue, nobody has mentioned anything.’” She said she called Harborne Day Centre, “and that was it”.
Lisa tells me that the day centre is “where all my friends are, I don’t have friends around here.” Maureen says it can be hard for her keyworker Kay to tear Lisa away from her favourite activity of all, colouring, but that she really enjoys the relaxation classes and going out for pub lunches. On rare occasions when Lisa can’t go to Harborne, or at a time like this when she is worried about its future, she keeps asking her mum. “Have I got work tomorrow?”
A city council spokesperson said that if the closures do end up going ahead, those who attend either of the four affected centres “would be supported to move, along with staff, to the five remaining centres”. There has not yet been any indication of which centre they would be offered as an alternative, but the two nearest to Lisa are Moseley and Hockley. When I ask Lisa if she would move to another day centre, she firmly says, “I don’t want to go anywhere else. I want to go to my own — Harborne”.
When I requested to visit the day centres, the council said they could not allow journalists inside, but that they couldn’t stop me from speaking with centre users and carers off the premises. They also said they wouldn’t be able to arrange for any staff members to speak with me. When I tried to speak with a day centre manager about the proposed closures, they said: “You’re putting me in a difficult position, asking those questions.”
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