A Kafkaesque nightmare

Unite community member Paul Rooney, a former social care worker who gave up his job to care for his severely disabled teenaged daughter, looked through his post one day to find a council tax bill for ÂŁ2,000, backdated from more than a decade ago.

 
It was an obvious mistake, Rooney thought to himself – at the time, he had just quit his job to care for his daughter Roisin full-time, and Liberata, the private company which handles council tax collection for Bromley council, must have misplaced his council tax benefit.

 
But what started as an accounting error has now turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare for Rooney, who is also an insulin-dependent diabetic – Liberata has tacked on £49,000 in solicitors’ fees to his original bill, which has forced him into bankruptcy.

 
He’s now on the brink of eviction.

 
Just as daughter Roisin, who has a brain tumour, cannot talk and often uses a wheelchair, was set to celebrate her 15th birthday, bailiffs descended on Rooney’s home in Bromley on July 13.

 
But they’d soon find themselves shown the door, as dozens of Unite community members and other local residents turned up to take a stand for a man whose only crime was being at the receiving end of an outsourcing giant’s outrageous blunder.

 
After community action helped push back the bailiffs, Rooney applied for a stay of eviction. He and his daughter are not out of the woods yet, however – after a series of court hearings which favoured the council and the company, Rooney awaits yet another court hearing on August 7.

 
Rooney said in a recent interview that the council’s relentless pursuit of £2,000 will, in the end, cost the taxpayer more.

 
“The council did say that they had a responsibility towards me as a vulnerable adult with health concerns and [if I am evicted] they will rehouse me and my daughter. That will probably cost them tens of thousands of pounds more in order to recoup their original £2,000, which will cost the Bromley taxpayer more. It makes absolutely no sense.”

 
Long history of failure

 
Although Bromley council and private firm Liberata deny Rooney’s claim that the bill was made in error, the outsourcing of public services has a long history of failure.

 
Liberata alone has had many of its contracts unceremoniously terminated after persistently poor performance.

 
In 2008, Sheffield council chose not to renew its contract with the firm for council tax collection and housing benefits processing services, after various debacles including 4,000 people erroneously being sent letters demanding they pay amounts as little as six pence or face further action.

 
It was also alleged that the firm sent 10,000 empty envelopes which were supposed to have contained council tax bills.

 
In the same year Liberata lost a contract to process Educational Maintenance Grants, after it notoriously botched students’ payments, leaving thousands of low-income students without their grants two months into term, which forced many to quit their courses altogether.

 
Both contracts went to another outsourcing giant, Capita, which followed in the footsteps of its predecessor firm Liberata in Sheffield, erroneously sending 5,000 letters accusing residents of not paying their council tax in 2013.

 
Capita also botched council tax collection services for Birmingham City council last year, after it overcharged residents by a total of more than ÂŁ500,000.

 
Despite this track record of failure which has, as in the case of Paul Rooney, upended lives, the Tory-led Bromley council has relentlessly outsourced council services, most recently handing over adult disability care services to private firm Certitude this month.

 
Unite regional officer Onay Kasab, who has overseen a wave of strikes of local authority workers fighting Bromley council’s mass privatisation programme, hailed the level of community support shown in each dispute.

 
“What has been inspiring about the Bromley strike to protect services from privatisation has been the support from the public, from service users and Unite community members,” he said. “We have always been clear that this is not just about protecting jobs, pay and conditions.

 
“We have correctly emphasised the impact on the community when services are privatised – we have pointed to examples in the NHS as well as local government,” Kasab added.

 
“The impact on Paul Rooney gives us a real, living, breathing example, cutting across the rhetoric of local authorities who claim that privatisation is about ‘efficiencies’. We don’t measure efficiency by how much money you save – we measure it by the impact it has on real people.”

Unite Community co-ordinator Pilgrim Tucker hailed the community support shown for Rooney and his daughter.

“Sometimes it’s easy to feel demoralised by the onslaught of privatisation — up against private, vested interests, we sometimes feel as though there’s nothing we can do about it. But through community solidarity, we’ve seen that we can effectively fight back, if we are all in it together.

“We saw this in Paul’s case — if it weren’t for community and trade union mobilisation, he and his daughter could easily have been evicted the other morning. Now, there’s hope.”

Stay tuned on UNITElive for the latest on Paul Rooney’s court hearing next week.

People can donate to Paul’s legal fund by contacting Alan Shaw at bromleytradescouncil@gmail.com