Advice service axed

A SERVICE which helps vulnerable people in the Uckfield area is to be scrapped because of county council spending cuts, it emerged this week.

A visiting advocacy service for the housebound will be scrapped after an 11,000 contract with Uckfield Citizens Advice Bureau was cancelled by East Sussex County Council.

The news comes just two weeks after the Sussex Express reported that an Uckfield day centre for people with learning disabilities looked set to close as a result of a 605,000 cut in the county s social services budget.

The manager of Uckfield s CAB this week slammed the decision and claimed the bureau s service was a 'soft target for spending cuts.

Jerry Noble said: 'We have had an advocacy contract with East Sussex County Council for many years. We would provide a service to members of the public referred to us by social services.

'People who cannot get into bureau, we visit at home. These people may be unable to get to us because they are elderly, physically disabled or suffer learning disabilities. We represent them with appeals and so on.

'There is something like a hundred people in Uckfield who benefit from this service the most vulnerable people in the community. Last year we carried out around 600 advocacy visits but we won t be able to do that anymore these people will be on their own.

Mr Noble said he had written to ESCC s chief executive, Cheryl Miller, to ask her to reconsider the cuts. 'We feel we have been pretty hard done by, he said. 'Other budgets have been cut by four or five per cent, ours has been cut by 100 per cent.

He claimed that CABs in East Sussex received less than 18,000 from the county, compared to 268,000 from West Sussex County Council for its bureaux.

Good name

'All bureaux have problems getting funding. I suppose we are one of the lucky ones, as Wealden District Council and Uckfield Town Council support us very well.

'My feeling is that they are perhaps working on our good name and hoping we will carry on doing it any way. It s grossly unfair - we regard ourselves as a soft target for funding cuts.

He said the bureau had been given three months notice of the funding cut just after Christmas. The present contract is set to end on March 31.

Cllr Keith Glazier, ESCC s lead cabinet member for social services, said: 'Unfortunately we need to make savings of 4 million in our social services budget this year, which means prioritising our support to voluntary organisations. We are still listening to the views of those involved but must ensure that those with the greatest need receive services and that the best use is made of limited resources.

He added: 'We are confident that the needs of people with learning disabilities will continue to be met through our ongoing support of another advocacy service called My Choice, which will help people across the whole county.