Lambeth United. Fighting to stop Labour Lambeth selling of short life and co operartive housing. protest 5th March 11am

Hello all,
Here are the details of the photo op next week.
Please come along and bring friends and family - we need a good turnout!
Stop selling social housing in Lambeth!
PHOTO OP with
VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, MARK THOMAS, KATE HOEY MP and MAGGI HAMBLING
Wednesday 5th March, 11am
Lillieshall Road, London SW4
On Wednesday 5th March Lambeth residents and campaigners, including designer and activist Vivienne Westwood, comedian and activist Mark Thomas, artist Maggi Hambling and Kate Hoey MP, will meet in Lillieshall Road, London SW4 to protest against Lambeth Council’s sale of long-standing housing co-operatives.
All those gathered for this photo op have pledged to defend residents of these housing co-ops against evictions, and have stated:
We will stand with housing co-op residents when they refuse to leave their home, if Lambeth go through with their threat to send bailiffs to evict them.
Pledge your support to stop the eviction by contacting:
Lambeth Housing Activists
lambethhousingactivists@gmail.com
www.housingactivists.co.uk
07834 828 292
Lambeth United Housing Co-operative
lambethunitedhousingco-op.org.uk
Twitter: @LUHousingCoop
facebook.com/LambethUnited
Petition: http://chn.ge/16PkKwv

PFI the Odious Debt scam..that People Before Profit will refuse to pay if we win in May.

PFI contracts: the full list

How much will the UK have to pay out in PFI repayments? Get the full list of each contract - and find out what's in the pipeline
• Get the data
• Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

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Aerial view of the Severn crossing. Photograph: David Goddard/Getty Images

£301,343,154,097. That is the total that the UK's public sector will pay in existing Private Finance Initiative repayments.

And PFI is in the news right now, following the collapse of an NHS Trust over its PFI contract.

The figures come from data released by HM Treasury.

The data covers 719 projects which have been built under the initiative and are now being paid for by the taxpayer. It also identifies another 39 projects which are in the pipeline. And if you just go from when this government came in in May 2010, that bill is still £258.6bn - or just under half of total UK government spending this year.

The Treasury data lists each project, its capital cost - and, crucially, the repayments planned each year. If the difference seem unreal - that's because they are very large. Often projects cost several times their capital costs in repayments by the time we've finished footing the bill in fifty years' time.

PFI uses private money for major public sector capital projects. The private company builds and owns the facility, which is then leased back to the state, in exchange for regular repayments. It was initiated in the UK by John Major's government in 1992 - but was expanded under Labour after 1997. The first project operational is the Severn River crossings, which started operating in April 1992.

The chart below shows how repayents will balloon over time. If you look at the NHS alone, in 2001-2, it was £196m. By 2005-6 it had grown to £542m. This year, 2012-13, it will have reached £1.76bn.

In fact NHS PFI repayments don't peak until 2029-30, when they hit £2.71bn a year.

The most expensive project in the data is the Ministry of Defence's Future Strategic Tanker Aircraft (FSTA), with capital costs of £2.7bn. It will have cost the MoD £10.5bn by the time it has stopped paying for it in 2034-35.

PFI: capital costs of projects

Fullscreen version

PFI: total repayments

Fullscreen version

But the biggest Department in terms of PFI is the Department of Health. It has 118 current NHS PFI projects, with a capital value of £11.6bn. The sum total of the repayments, by the time they're made, will be £79.1bn. The most expensive on the list is the Acute site rationalisation work at Barts Health NHS Trust. While the original capital cost is £1.1bn, it will have cost £7.1bn by 2048-49 when the repayments will be finished.

The present government has six NHS PFI projects currently in procurement, with a total capital cost of £1.01bn.

The data also shows NHS is just one aspect of a much wider malaise. In total, there are 719 current PFI projects with a capital value of £54.7bn. Total repayments will top £301bn over the lifetime of the projects. The overall annual PFI bill doesn't peak until 2017-18, at £10.1bn, and remains at over £9bn for another decade afterwards (even without new schemes).

In total, there are 39 PFI projects currently in procurement, with a total capital value of £5.36bn - that's for the whole of the UK, of course and the NHS is split into different regions.

The full data is below. What can you do with it?

Data summary

PFI contracts by department

£m. Click heading to sort table. Download this data

Department	Total capital costs (£m)	Total repayments
SOURCE: HM Treasury
Cabinet Office	12.00	39.20
Crown Prosecution Service	18.20	384.22
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills	21.84	42.33
Department for Communities and Local Government	2,240.51	7,730.71
Department for Culture, Media and Sport	348.93	1,353.69
Department for Education	7,731.11	29,463.73
Department for Energy and Climate Change	4.40	15.70
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs	3,843.76	22,705.81
Department for Transport	7,349.42	36,546.01
Department for Work and Pensions	1,085.70	10,402.30
Department of Health	11,614.29	79,157.27
Foreign and Commonwealth Office	91.00	474.91
GCHQ	331.00	1,952.00
HM Revenue and Customs	862.10	5,774.62
HM Treasury	141.00	939.00
Home Office	850.81	4,086.51
Ministry of Defence	9,131.48	49,755.17
Ministry of Justice	798.60	9,796.05
Northern Ireland Executive	1,999.77	7,211.65
Scottish Government	5,692.80	30,755.49
Welsh Assembly	543.36	2,756.78
Total	54,712.09	301,343.15

D

What's this?

Ray Woolford help needed for the food bank run

At present we have to collect food  from local supermarkets at 10pm Monday to Saturday and 5pm Sunday.
In order to collect the food you do need a car, and at present i have to collect the food every day, although some days we wait and wait and get no food. This takes up my entire week and many days i have community meetings i need to go to, but have to leave early to collect the food.
If any one reading this has a car and could offer to just to 1 night a week it would free me up to do other community work.

Ray Woolford looking to relaunch Lewisham Law Centre

People Before Profit advice centre is presently open 6 days a week by appointment and has just launched a free legal advice surgery open to all and held the 1st Wednesday in the month. 2-6pm open to all and 6.30-8pm.
With Legal aid cut and advice centres closed, People Before Profit Lawyer Nik and a number of other lawyers helping for free have insured we are so busy that we are looking to expand and to reopen a community law centre, Lewisham Borough law centre was closed due to cuts.. this would be open and run by the community so we would welcome more legal minds join the team and concerned residents wanting to defend our legal system for the poor and low paid.

Suffolk Food Bank; Support.Donate.Help. Access.

 

 

 

 

RACHEL JOHNSON: Don't moan about benefit cuts... do something to help

Jess in centre of the team at We Care food bank Lewisham, who is about to open a We Care food bank in Suffolk.
Jess urgently needs use of a hall, empty shop office etc to use as distribution and drop of point for food, and our clients.
You can contact the Suffolk We Care direct to offer help, access food, or to help with donations, collections etc. at first the food bank will be fortnightly and we will grow and change to reflect what the community needs, be it ad on an advice service, legal support. home visit, or running a charity shop to raise the funds to buy the food for people and pets in food crises. At We Care you must have prove of address and picture ID, only 1 person per household can be a member, but you do not need a voucher . we do ask that people if they have it pay a £1 so they are contributing to the project and as we are run by the communty for the community we have no state or business funding, so need every £1 we can raise, as food donations never cover the amount we need to feed the huge numbers of people in food poverty.

To make a cash donation to we Care Suffolk ; Please Use Payment Ref Suffolk . We Care Food Banks; Sort code 08 92 99 Account Number 65659328.Thank You.

Email Jess direct at;Suffolkfoodbank@gmail.com
Follow ray on twitter@Raywoolford
www.lewishamfoodbank.com



Interview with We Care Founder Ray Woolford in last Sundays Mail on Sunday.

When we think of hunger, we somehow think of Michael Buerk.
Distended bellies, stick legs, and flies crawling into the gummy eyes of starving children. And Africa. 
We don’t think of lumpy people in cheap parkas, queueing at food banks, or spooning in the Heinz Cream of Tomato at soup kitchens. 
But this is where we are.

Picking up food: Ray Woolford is an estate agent who also runs a food bank in Deptford, South-East London

Ray Woolford is an estate agent with a moustache who also runs a food bank in Deptford, South-East London. 
Four times a week, Ray does the run to Waitrose in Greenwich to pick up food going past its sell-by date, but he says that shoppers are so skint that they lift stuff from his trolley before he can get it to the food bank.
There it goes fast, with only one protein – a tin of tuna, a jar of mini-frankfurters – per week, per family, and only to those with vouchers. 

Association: When we think of hunger, we somehow think of Michael Buerk (pictured), who is best known for his reporting of the Ethiopian famine in 1984

Last week, a long-awaited Defra report into the 170 per cent increase in the use of such banks contradicted a minister’s previous claim that the spike was down to ‘increased supply’.
Like the experts hired by Defra, Ray attributes the rise in food banks not to supply, but to need, due to three factors: stagnant wages, a 30 per cent rise in food prices, and the new punitive sanctions regime that’s led to 818,000 claimants having their benefits docked since October.
Or, to sum up, the fact that millions of people are broke.
‘I’ve nothing against carrot and stick, but once you’re sanctioned, you’re off benefits and you get nothing for 13 weeks,’ he says. ‘No voucher, no help with the Oyster card, nothing.
Atos [the IT company that assesses whether benefits claimants are fit to work] is paid not to pay people their benefits. There’s no hardship fund, nothing.’ 
And now our bishops are agitating, too. ‘Britain is the world’s seventh largest economy and yet people are going hungry,’ they wrote last week, as they slammed Cam for the growing crisis of food poverty here on God’s green English earth.
They decried the fact that  half a million have resorted to food banks, that 5,500 have been admitted to hospital either with or for malnutrition, and blamed the Tories’ moral mission to reform welfare, a system that ‘should provide a robust last line of defence against hunger’.
Yes, grim. But I dispute the Right Reverends’ claim that it’s only the Government’s responsibility to make sure nobody in Britain is ever hungry.
At the moment – and Chancellor George Osborne points out that the recovery is shaky as he continues with his £12billion cuts in welfare this year – it’s all about what the Government CAN do.

Criticism: Bishops have slammed David Cameron (right) for the growing crisis of food poverty in the world, while George Osborne (left) has pointed out that the recovery is shaky as he continues with welfare cuts

It’s not about what it would like to do if, to deploy a popular phrase, money was no object. 
To say the Government should be a bulwark against hunger sounds good. But it’s like saying it should stop the floods.
‘I’d close my food bank tomorrow if they made sure people could get food,’ says Woolford. 

 

 

Mmm. The ‘they’ word. I agree ‘they’ – ie our masters – could do more: the Government could soften its punitive new sanctioning regime; it could force supermarkets to give away, not throw away, food; it could stop prosecuting ‘skippers’ (those who scavenge from bins); it should consider issuing food stamps so the cash-poor have some means to buy food, rather than spend the little they have in hand on debts, bills, heating, cigarettes, Sky TV, drugs, whatever.
The bishops have asked us to fast at Lent to raise awareness of food poverty and – you are hereby warned – I’ve done  some telly for Sports Relief, also to raise awareness of food poverty. At the end of filming,  I came away very aware of  food poverty. 
I also came away knowing that while there are limits to what the state can achieve, there are  no limits to what we can do, individually.
Some of our finest institutions have nothing to do with the state, and are all the better for it. The National Trust. The Women’s Institute. The Royal Academy. The Ramblers’ Association. The Scouts.
As the axe falls, what we used to call ‘Big Society’, ie ‘people’ has quietly occupied the no man’s land between public and private sector. We have time-lapsed back to the Victorian age, before Socialism with its capital S, to a time distinguished by public service, charity, and voluntary provision – to selflessness with no thought of reward. 
Then there were mutual and friendly societies, voluntarily-run hospitals. 
Today we have soup kitchens, feeding centres and up to 500 food banks run in association with activists at community centres and churches. 
At one, Trinity Methodist Church in Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, I sat with the homeless and hungry at a properly laid table. Volunteers in aprons served us, then cleared our plates. Nobody was paid. It didn’t feel like a hand-out.
As we all inhaled second helpings of delicious veggie shepherd’s pie made and dished up by Diane Kilgour from FoodCycle, it was hard to work out who was giving and who was receiving.
There are 60,000 social enterprises in this country, for which hundreds of thousands of people work. But don’t sit back. They are all small, and underfunded.
As the bishops say, ‘this is a national crisis, and one we must rise to’. I agree. Our country does need you. For many, there’s not a lot of the state  left, but oodles of potential  do-gooders out there. So come on. It’s down to us, not ‘them’.

Ray Woolford Food Bank @ Mail on Sunday interview about his work and impact of Gov welfare reform on his food bank. How to donate.

RACHEL JOHNSON: Don't moan about benefit cuts... do something to help

By Rachel Johnson
PUBLISHED: 01:34, 23 February 2014 | UPDATED: 15:35, 23 February 2014

• 
  

When we think of hunger, we somehow think of Michael Buerk.
Distended bellies, stick legs, and flies crawling into the gummy eyes of starving children. And Africa. 
We don’t think of lumpy people in cheap parkas, queueing at food banks, or spooning in the Heinz Cream of Tomato at soup kitchens. 
But this is where we are.

Picking up food: Ray Woolford is an estate agent who also runs a food bank in Deptford, South-East London

Ray Woolford is an estate agent with a moustache who also runs a food bank in Deptford, South-East London. 
Four times a week, Ray does the run to Waitrose in Greenwich to pick up food going past its sell-by date, but he says that shoppers are so skint that they lift stuff from his trolley before he can get it to the food bank.
There it goes fast, with only one protein – a tin of tuna, a jar of mini-frankfurters – per week, per family, and only to those with vouchers. 

Association: When we think of hunger, we somehow think of Michael Buerk (pictured), who is best known for his reporting of the Ethiopian famine in 1984

Last week, a long-awaited Defra report into the 170 per cent increase in the use of such banks contradicted a minister’s previous claim that the spike was down to ‘increased supply’.
Like the experts hired by Defra, Ray attributes the rise in food banks not to supply, but to need, due to three factors: stagnant wages, a 30 per cent rise in food prices, and the new punitive sanctions regime that’s led to 818,000 claimants having their benefits docked since October.
Or, to sum up, the fact that millions of people are broke.
‘I’ve nothing against carrot and stick, but once you’re sanctioned, you’re off benefits and you get nothing for 13 weeks,’ he says. ‘No voucher, no help with the Oyster card, nothing.
Atos [the IT company that assesses whether benefits claimants are fit to work] is paid not to pay people their benefits. There’s no hardship fund, nothing.’ 
And now our bishops are agitating, too. ‘Britain is the world’s seventh largest economy and yet people are going hungry,’ they wrote last week, as they slammed Cam for the growing crisis of food poverty here on God’s green English earth.
They decried the fact that  half a million have resorted to food banks, that 5,500 have been admitted to hospital either with or for malnutrition, and blamed the Tories’ moral mission to reform welfare, a system that ‘should provide a robust last line of defence against hunger’.
Yes, grim. But I dispute the Right Reverends’ claim that it’s only the Government’s responsibility to make sure nobody in Britain is ever hungry.
At the moment – and Chancellor George Osborne points out that the recovery is shaky as he continues with his £12billion cuts in welfare this year – it’s all about what the Government CAN do.

Criticism: Bishops have slammed David Cameron (right) for the growing crisis of food poverty in the world, while George Osborne (left) has pointed out that the recovery is shaky as he continues with welfare cuts

It’s not about what it would like to do if, to deploy a popular phrase, money was no object. 
To say the Government should be a bulwark against hunger sounds good. But it’s like saying it should stop the floods.
‘I’d close my food bank tomorrow if they made sure people could get food,’ says Woolford. 

 

   

Mmm. The ‘they’ word. I agree ‘they’ – ie our masters – could do more: the Government could soften its punitive new sanctioning regime; it could force supermarkets to give away, not throw away, food; it could stop prosecuting ‘skippers’ (those who scavenge from bins); it should consider issuing food stamps so the cash-poor have some means to buy food, rather than spend the little they have in hand on debts, bills, heating, cigarettes, Sky TV, drugs, whatever.
The bishops have asked us to fast at Lent to raise awareness of food poverty and – you are hereby warned – I’ve done  some telly for Sports Relief, also to raise awareness of food poverty. At the end of filming,  I came away very aware of  food poverty. 
I also came away knowing that while there are limits to what the state can achieve, there are  no limits to what we can do, individually.
Some of our finest institutions have nothing to do with the state, and are all the better for it. The National Trust. The Women’s Institute. The Royal Academy. The Ramblers’ Association. The Scouts.
As the axe falls, what we used to call ‘Big Society’, ie ‘people’ has quietly occupied the no man’s land between public and private sector. We have time-lapsed back to the Victorian age, before Socialism with its capital S, to a time distinguished by public service, charity, and voluntary provision – to selflessness with no thought of reward. 
Then there were mutual and friendly societies, voluntarily-run hospitals. 
Today we have soup kitchens, feeding centres and up to 500 food banks run in association with activists at community centres and churches. 
At one, Trinity Methodist Church in Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, I sat with the homeless and hungry at a properly laid table. Volunteers in aprons served us, then cleared our plates. Nobody was paid. It didn’t feel like a hand-out.
As we all inhaled second helpings of delicious veggie shepherd’s pie made and dished up by Diane Kilgour from FoodCycle, it was hard to work out who was giving and who was receiving.
There are 60,000 social enterprises in this country, for which hundreds of thousands of people work. But don’t sit back. They are all small, and underfunded.
As the bishops say, ‘this is a national crisis, and one we must rise to’. I agree. Our country does need you. For many, there’s not a lot of the state  left, but oodles of potential  do-gooders out there. So come on. It’s down to us, not ‘them’.
Follow Ray on Twitter@Raywoolford;
Make a Donation to our Independent Food Bank that also feeds pets.
We Care food Banks; Sort code 08 92 99 Account number 65659328