Barnet Alliance for Public Services - aims

a) to maintain, improve and extend the range of public services in Barnet in all fields, such as education, social care, employment, the environment, housing, health, public utilities, telecommunications, planning, sports and recreation, cultural activities.

b) to use all the means available to us, the community of Barnet, to prevent any cuts, increased charges, commercialisation or any measures directed at privatisation of these or any other of our remaining public services, and, in particular, to prevent implementation of the ONE BARNET wholesale council privatisation plan.

c) to defend the people of Barnet from the attempts of powerful banking, commercial and financial interests to make us pay for an economic crisis they caused.

d) to ensure community representation in all major borough financial and strategic decisions and to work to secure a local administration run democratically in the interests of the community as a whole.

We are in the process of consolidating our positions.  This is a work in progress, and the latest document can be view here.

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For interest, below is an earlier version of our aims, in use before we adopted the aims laid out in our constitution:

• We champion democratically accountable, high quality public services. We reject the idea that public services should be cut in order to bail out the banks.
• We reject Barnet Council’s plans for mass outsourcing of its services – no to the One Barnet programme!
• We oppose privatisation and cuts to public services, whether NHS, education, or local authority, and will resist them.
• We oppose free schools and the extension of academies.
• We note that Barnet residents and council employees have resisted damaging policies, scrutinised and exposed questionable contracts with private companies, are becoming aware of the impact of decisions of the council, and are actively organising to oppose unpopular plans, with increasing success. This shows that public pressure works!