The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting and asked members of the Committee to introduce themselves.

She gave an explanation as to why the special meeting had been called and that the meeting would examine the plans for the future delivery of social care on the Wirral following the decisions made by Council last December.

The meeting would hear from both the Interim Director and the Cabinet Member for Social Care and Inclusion, Councillor Bob Moon and also representatives of various interested groups. It was intended that the structure of the meeting would be broadly in four parts;

·  Consultation

·  Finance

·  Service implications

·  Staffing issues

Councillor Bridson asked for clarification that no budget arrangements would be discussed other than what came out of the December Council meeting and the Chair confirmed that this would be the case.

Members are asked to consider whether they have personal or prejudicial interests in connection with the item on this agenda and, if so, to declare them and state what they are.

Members are reminded that they should also declare, pursuant to paragraph 18 of the Overview and Scrutiny Procedure Rules, whether they are subject to a party whip in connection with the item to be considered and, if so, to declare it and state the nature of the whipping arrangement.

Members were asked to consider whether they had a personal or prejudicial interest in any matters to be considered at the meeting and, if so, to declare them and state what they were.

Members were reminded that they should also declare, pursuant to paragraph 18 of the Overview and Scrutiny Procedure Rules, whether they were subject to a party whip in connection with any matter to be considered and, if so, to declare it and state the nature of the whipping arrangement.

No such declarations were made.

This Special Meeting of the Committee has been called, in accordance with the Overview and Scrutiny Procedure Rules, by Councillors M McLaughlin, B Kenny and P Glasman, in order to give consideration to matters concerned with budget proposals, set out in the attached document.

The Special Meeting of the Committee had been called, in accordance with the Overview and Scrutiny Procedure Rules, by Councillors M McLaughlin, B Kenny and P Glasman, in order to give consideration to matters concerned with budget proposals.

A document submitted by the Labour Group Members referred to:

·  The failure of this administration to refer any budget savings to the relevant Overview and Scrutiny committees for proper scrutiny.

·  The decision taken by Council on December 13th to suspend the relevant part of the Constitution in order to avoid any such scrutiny.

·  The lack of any detailed Cabinet reports setting out the details of the budget savings, and their consequences.

·  The lack in particular of any explanation of the impact of the loss of over 1300 posts, the restructuring necessary to protect services, and the costs of that restructuring.

Both the Interim Director of Adult Social Services and Councillor Moon, Cabinet Member for Social Care and Inclusion, responded to questions from the Chair and Committee members.

1. Consultation

Councillor Moon commented that consultation had been ongoing for the past three years since a report on the transformation of Adult Social Services to Cabinet on 6 November, 2008, although this Cabinet decision was the subject of a call-in on 4 December, 2008, the decision was endorsed (4:3), but he stated there was little political will to move on at that time. Since then consultation had taken place on Options for Change papers which had been presented to Cabinet and from May 2010 onwards it had been decided to go ahead with the results of consultation.

The Chair then referred to the Task Force consultation process to which 5600 had responded but of these, only half, less than 3000 had filled in the social care part of the questionnaire and of these, the numbers of people with any experience of using services was approximately 300.

Councillor Moon stated that this was not just a random sample, as they had gone to great lengths to consult with carers and people in care homes with staff, in some cases, helping users fill out questionnaires.

The Chair commented that from December 2010 when proposals were agreed for the closures of homes there should then have been a 12 week period of proper and meaningful consultation.

Councillor Moon stated that an initial letter had been sent out on 6 January, 2011 but acknowledged that this was perhaps not the best worded letter. Since then where concerns had been raised, one-to-one conversations had been held with users and carers.

The Interim Director stated that there were seven permanent residents across the five Council run care homes and a number of other users who accessed those services for a number of days per year. Of the seven, alternative arrangements had been agreed for five and discussions were ongoing with the remaining two. A number of discussions had been held with carer groups broadly and by Tuesday 22 February, 2011 all users would have been contacted and dates would be  ...  view the full minutes text for item 59.