Garden Centre Update II

I spoke to Emmanuel from Surrey & Borders PCT yesterday morning and he re-confirmed what Jill found out earlier in the year, that the Richmond Fellowship now wanted to take on the Old Moat Garden Centre again despite orginally pulling out because they did not want to work with people with learning difficulties .

Emmanuel confirmed that the Richmond Fellowship had very little experience working with this group and told me that the charity had submitted new proposals - presumably explaining their change of heart and new plans for the centre - that he was going to try to make available to keep the renegotiation of the contract open and transparent. He said he would get back to me on this over the next couple of days.

There is a shocking back story here though. According to Emmanuel , Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health (SCMH) 'disability employment expert' Dr Bob Groves who was involved in advising the Remploy Taskforce and Surrey and Borders on ' Modernisation ' of work services , has been pushing ' Mainstream ' in the Remploy case but advising here to establish a voluntary sector ' training and employment ' scheme at the garden centre restricted to one disability group!

The centre has traditionally been a 80/20 mental health/learning disabilities client split without any problems so in effect Dr Groves and his colleague Dr Helen Lockett have been talking up how everyone with disabilities can be catapaulted into the Mainstream jobs market to suit their, SCMH's and the Governments politically correct agenda but advising charities behind the scenes to abandon any pan-disability approach for the ' cause'.

For those new to this blog, the Old Moat Garden Centre hasnt actually been employing anyone or paying the national minimum wage , it has had the NHS Trust's and local Social Services service users using the centre long term for ' training ' or ' therapeutic activity ' purposes and has being paying them £3 a day and 'Modernisation' was, in theory, supposed to turn the centre into a more dynamic training and employment scheme run by the voluntary sector purely focussed on getting people into mainstream work.

The problem is , these schemes have a record of not getting people into any kind of work or worse, getting people into unsustainable mainstream jobs that fall through and screw up peoples benefits and lives. They tend to keep the charities who run them , usually with some DWP money, well funded though.

We've camapaigned to have the centre run properly so it provides real sustainable work paid at the national minimum wage upwards for those who want and are able to undertake it, provides quality training on the same basis and continues to provide therapeutic activities and support so that NHS service users - the centre is an NHS resource remember - have the widest range of choices and the centre remains a viable community resource.

It's taken Dr Bob Groves of the SCMH, the Surrey and Borders MH Trust, the Surrey PCT , the Richmond Fellowship and MCCH a year to get to the point where they've figured out that the Old Moat Garden Centre has a mixed client group!!!

Groves , who is ultimately responsible for this farce, has just supported mass factory closures across the country at Remploy in favour of politically correct Government policy when he and the major disability charities have no evidence that all disabled people or even large numbers of them can be seamlessly inserted into sustainable mainstream jobs.

I am sure that many disabled people can, already do and want to work in mainstream employment however its reckless and cruel to just ignore disabled peoples circumstances and needs and just try to catapault them at mainstream jobs to suit some narrow political agenda.

There should have been one definite job loss over the Remploy issue, Dr Bob Groves job as he clearly failed to inform people of the local difficulties he was having here planning to 'transform' just one garden centre smack bang in the centre of the stockbroker belt, the most affluent area in Britain .

Perhaps the GMB should hire a good lawyer to get their proposals given the same weight as Dr Bob's bulshit......