Having read Councillor Vanessa Brown’s letter (Letters, August 31) on her Conservative administration’s cuts to the Connexions service, I am surprised by some of her claims and inaccuracies. Coun Brown implies that her colleagues had the cuts imposed on them by the Government, but those cuts were to one section of Brighton and Hove City Council’s funding, the Area Based Grant, and it was Coun Brown and her colleagues who decided to cut from within this grant and not to use currently uncommitted funding or reserves.

Only 5% of councils have actually reduced their Connexions budgets in-year as they await the outcome of the spending review and the Education Bill. Brighton and Hove has jumped the gun.

Coun Brown likes to quote national reports on Connexions, but what work had been done to assess the local impact before she took the decision to cut the service? Had the benefits of the targeted work from Connexions’ personal advisors on the local reduction in teenage pregnancies and youth offending been taken into account, for example? What about the tentative evidence that a reduction in the numbers of young people not in education, employment or training is at last under way? Was an Equalities Impact Assessment, required by law, undertaken to ensure this is a fair cut that does not disproportionately affect any one section of the city’s population?

The major provider of the Connexions service in schools, Prospect, has been asked by the council to reduce its budget mid-contract, representing an 80% cut of the whole Connexions budget. Unsurprisingly Prospect has said that this cannot be done and hence their staff’s jobs have been put at risk, along with those directly employed by the council and in the voluntary sector.

It is even more unpalatable when the supposed neutral cost of the appointment of four “super directors” appears to go up weekly and is now close to a million including recruitment, head-hunting costs and pay-offs to past and present directors.

Councillor Gill Mitchell
Leader of the Labour Opposition, Brighton and Hove City Council