Ongoing Threats to Local Welfare Assistance

I have mentioned before the threats to Brent's local welfare assistance, as well as that of other authorities.  Now even Tory authorities are expressing concern.  Many thought the consultation that the government started after Islington threatened legal action was something of a sham, and I admire the way Islington is carrying on the fight.  If so, the government may be threatened with judicial review again.  As far as I know, the government has no effective monitoring of who benefits from this spending (and will therefore be most hurt by the cuts).  For instance, it cannot say how many victims of domestic violence would be affected.  I am not sure that it has the flimsiest data of any of the Equality Act strands.

UPDATE

I take it the anonymous questioner at  11.25 below is making a reference to the libraries consultation.  Many of the litigants in the library case tried to suggest that Brent's library consultation was a "sham", but the Judge roundly rejected this argument.  If you consult the text of the Bailey judgement, you find the consultation considered extensively and the litigants various arguments rejected.  Indeed the consultation arguments constituted the mainstay of the litigant case.  My view is that they did not so much resent the consultation (For instance they made no suggestions as to how it might have been done differently), they simpoly didn't like the decision at the end of it. 

That is a fair enough opinion, but don't claim that a consultation was a sham when it was not.  As the judge says in paragraph 80: "The Claimants do not say that all of this was a sham yet, if the Council did approach this with a closed mind on the involvement on community groups or on a subsidy for community groups, that is what it must have been. I simply do not accept that. The Claimants’ real contention is that the Council was not prepared to go along with alternatives which cost it money. ... It concluded for sound and legitimate reasons that it was not desirable, and the alternative means were not appropriate. S7 contains no duty to consider providing a subsidy if the Council do not consider that to be desirable or appropriate. The Council’s approach was entirely consistent with the requirement in s7(2) that the provision of library services by other means be “appropriate”. The Council was entitled to judge that, in dealing with a service the costs of which needed to be cut, some other means of provision was not appropriate if it cost the Council money over and above that which the Council was prepared to spend, or if it was unlikely to provide the service required."