Carrying the Courage of Conviction

"We do not have to take our troubles lying down – the most effective way of birthing new life as we all know is standing up!"

This begins as a report on the opening of ABL’s Carlisle Business Centre Conference Suite on Wednesday 30th June 2011- but Oh there is always more to it than that . . .

Steve Wyler OBE was the ketnote speaker.  He is a Big cheese in the new organisation Locality which is an amalgamation of the Development Trust Association with Settlements and Social Action Centres. 

Steve commended the courage of ABL to take risks to invest in the local community in the middle of a recession and talked about the commitment of ABL and other development trusts to enABLing their communities.

He then went on to talk about the bigger strategy which he and his colleagues at national level are working on, to support the courage and commitment of local communites like Manningham seeking to invest in their people.  This is what we are asking for, he said – and sometimes getting: 

1. Asking for a pause in the ‘slash and burn’ cuts which fall most heavily on the poorest communities.  Giving time for communities to  co-design local alternatives, taking the chance to do things a different way.  They have got 3 months moratorium to do this.

2. Community Right to Buy – this is now in the Localism bill but there is opposition from the Lords and from landowners who see that they may lose out.  In Scotland there is a stronger law which has enabled the inhabitants of many of the Western Isles to own the land they live on.

3. Community Allowance – to enable people on benefits to do short terms sessional paid work for community organisations without effecting their benefits.

4. Community Rights Act.  This puts a requirement on banks to be transparent about lending activities in poor communities;  where they are found to be wanting it puts a requirement on them to put remedial measures in place ( eg supporting local business, partnership/support for credit unions etc).  This law is effective in the US and communties are using it.  Steve said: “We think it is a scandal not to have this here.”

5. To have a large team of Communtiy Organisers working within communities.  They will listen to people, find out what they want and see if they can come together to effect change – often this is about taking down the barriers those in  power have put up preventing people helping themselves – positive solutions run on our terms not yours.  The Government is up for this.

Steve said that: We are about working to do thing differently, working with local people’s hopes and dreams and helping to make them happen.

Here clearly was a can do man in a can do organisation where poor local communties are able to build and invest in their own future.  This takes courage and conviction.

Mothers and Midwives let us carry that courage and conviction to build birth care and communities on our human terms, let us start challenging the barriers to us claiming our birthrites -  and those who put them there.  Let us invest in our children and in our futures together.

In the evening it was my local church’s Church Meeting: a difficult one as the financial situation is bad – but it comes down to the same issues of courage and conviction: who we are, why we are here, what are we going to do with the resources we have to fulfil our aims and why we are here?  And in partnership with fantastic organisations like Locality we can turn around whole communities not just individual churches.

Who has the courage and the conviction? We do not have to take our troubles lying down – the most effective way of birthing new life as we all know is standing up!

We cannot lose our precious progress to normality!

I am really concerned about what is going to happen next. We have just had the budget and all the rhetoric is about cuts, cuts, cuts. It is the rhetoric that worries me in some ways because it is about pushing the boundaries of what cuts are acceptable. We have no choice they say but to tighten our belts – but they do not specifiy what they mean. And in the post budget rhetoric it is to slam the poor and the sick rather than taxing the rich and the bankers, to cut spending rather than raise taxes to protect services. To be a fair budget and to be fair rhetoric we need to hear both.


Of course cuts are not just about benefits it is about our public services. Services are used disproportionately by the poor and disadvantaged. This is where my greatest concerns lie and this is not being highlighted in the media or in political speeches. I know that Bradford Maternity Services have been asked to cut about a million and half pounds from its budget. With a rising birth rate, investing in midwives and normality – I wonder where the cuts are going to be made? The Birth centre is not happening because, I am told, maternity services have made only half the cuts that they need to make – and the ‘stick’ for compliance is the money not being released for the birth centre.

And reader, you must understand that these cuts are made from UN-RINGFENCED budgets, that is from budgets that can be reduced by the acute Trust anyway because it gets a lump sum of money for all the hospital (and community) services in its care and then it divides it out between the departments. The PCT may give the Hospital say £100 for maternity services but the Trust is not obliged to give that money to maternity services – it can give £70 to maternity services and spend £30 elsewhere. And then ask the Maternity Services to cut their budget from £70 to £50. I don’t know yet whether this is what is happening in Bradford – but it could be.

What worries me most in this situation is that what will be cut, what will be lost, is our precious progress to normality, increasing and welcoming homebirth, supporting breastfeeding in communities, reducing CS rates and other interventions, increasing the numbers of midwives to meet national recommendations on woman to midwife ratios. Readers, it is my fear that progress here will be lost when we are only just beginning to feel the benefits. I fear a return to the bad old days of me knowing personally anyone who has a home waterbirth in Bradford, of CS rates of 30%, of decreasing breastfeeding rates, of midwives burning out or battening down the hatches because of the immense pressure they are under.

The thing is, that cutting investment in normality, quality midwifery led care, breastfeeding will actually increase costs in the short medium and long term: Lower breastfeeding rates raises re-admission rates for babies and young children (Eg. gastro problems, excema) and has an impact on health and wellbeing stretching for decades afterwards; CS costs about 4 times as much as a home birth (tariff), research shows that more doctors mean higher intervention rates ( which costs more money, source Denis Walsh’s excellent presentation at ARM conference Oct 2009), quality midwifery reduces the need for analgesia, raises breastfeeding rates and lowers postnatal depression rates to name but a few. Midwives save money whilst saving lives

So this is a call to arms. Albany for All! We want good quality maternity care, which means continuity of care from midwives. But folks, if we have any chance of getting this or even retaining the progress we have now made, we need to get out there NOW and start making a noise, waving the shroud, reminding Governments, MPs, PCTs and Hospital Trusts what cutting investment in quality care and progressive normality for birth will cost in terms of money and unnecessary suffering.


It is time to organise, strategise and get those dandelions growing!