Brave New World of Localism - Part Two, Planning in the Hood

In the mayhem of the last few days before my Christmas holiday, I got through the remainder of the Localism Bill. Despite being at home and under no obligation to do anything much but eat, I've been giving some thought to its implications. Whilst eating.

Neighbourhood planning, in particular, could have a huge impact on development and land use, if the bill is enacted as currently written. I suspect that any local councillors who read it will immediately get onto their local MPs to ensure that doesn't happen. Neighbourhood planning has no role for local councillors; the onus is on parish councillors and leaders of neighbourhood fora (forums? Spellcheck is unhelpful on this point).

Three new terms are being introduced: neighbourhood development plans (NDPs?), neighbourhood development orders (NDOs?), and community right to build orders (CRBOs?). None of these are obligatory, and there are two prerequisites: a spatially defined neighbourhood and an organisation to represent it. In rural areas, it is assumed that the former will be a parish and the latter a parish council. These are established structures, probably known and supported by most people nearby. For the purposes of the localism bill, the ideal neighbourhood would probably be a large village comprising a single parish, with a well-supported parish council and a good level of community cohesion. A community centre would need to be conveniently available for holding local referenda and discussing the development plan.

There are plenty of such places, but they're the exception rather than the rule. In urban areas, the first hurdle will be agreeing where neighbourhoods are. The minimum requirement is a 'neighbourhood forum' with at least three members. To my mind, this implies that my two housemates and I could set ourselves up as a pocket neighbourhood, stretching from the front yard to the end of the back garden. The responsibility for ensuring that everyone doesn't do this lies with local councils, who have the unenviable task of mediating when competing claims of neighbourhoodity are made. If there are no such claims, presumably some areas will end up in non-neighbourhood limbo. I also assume that local councillors will seek to exert their influence at this point.

But let's say that the chaotic civil war bit is over, and we have neighbourhoods, including a small one that I will call My House. Now a local referendum can be held to decide whether to prepare a neighbourhood development plan. If less than half of the turnout says yes, no plan can be prepared and the neighbourhood forum might as well go home. But in the My House example, say I vote yes and the two other don't vote at all because they're out somewhere. That's a mandate for the preparation of a neighbourhood development plan, which the local planning authority would have to help me write.

Let us ignore for the moment the fact that I live in a rented house and would be contravening my lease if I so much as put in a picture hook without the landlord's permission. The neighbourhood development plan for My House could set out an intention to add four further stories to the place, styled in the manner of a treehouse. Assuming the neighbourhood forum (my housemates and I) are happy with this, and it doesn't directly contradict the Cambridge Local Plan (which I don't believe it does), the plan could be adopted.

The next stage would be to go for a neighbourhood development order. These are potentially powerful tools, as they specify an area of the neighbourhood and what development can take place in it. Once adopted, that development (which could be anything that doesn't need environment impact assessment) can bypass the planning system entirely, leaving the local planning authority with little or no control over it. In the My House case, the local authority would have to help my housemates and I prepare our order, setting out the development we intend (a very large vertical extension). In order to get this order adopted, we'd have to get an independent person to examine it (a planner ex-colleague, perhaps) and hold a further referendum. I could probably convince my housemates to vote yes by this point, if only because they'd want me to stop going on about it. I could then start building a four storey treehouse on the roof of my home, safe in the knowledge that planning officers couldn't stop me. Although building control might have something to say.

This example may sound totally ridiculous, but there's nothing in the bill to stop it happening. Doubtless, local planning authorities would have to deal with these kind of vexatious micro-neighbourhoods, as well as the sensible, cohesive villages making constructive decisions. I haven't mentioned community right to build orders, as these seem to some extent to replicate neighbourhood development orders. However, they can be requested by 'community organisations' (not defined – could this include businesses?) to grant permission for specific development on a specific site. An independent examination and referendum is required, but once again the local planning authority is being taken out of the loop.

Three final points to make about neighbourhood development orders. Firstly, they might never catch on. A lot of legislation is piggybacking on local development orders, which were introduced in the 2004 Planning Act. Since then, ten pilots have been set up and one local development order has been adopted. Neighbourhood development orders are intended to serve exactly the same purpose – extend permitted development rights within a specified area. The difference is the procedure; rather than being introduced through the local planning process, the new orders will supposedly be led by neighbourhoods. So will they be any more popular than their predecessors?

Secondly, neighbourhood development orders are alarmingly powerful. They override duties to consider conservation areas and the historic environment. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the bill is that they also override green belt designations. There's no detail as to how they'd be enforced, but once in place they effectively convey planning permission in perpetuity and can only be challenged through judicial review.

Thirdly, I'm glad I don't live in London, because if these orders look worrying, the powers being given to the Greater London Authority in the final clauses of the localism bill are a hundred times more so. The mayor of London is being given power to designate 'mayoral development areas' when he/she considers it 'expedient'. These amount to mini-urban development corporations with regeneration objectives. The Secretary of State can pass property, rights and powers to them from councils, the Homes and Communities Agency, the Olympic Delivery Authority, or even a government department. No public consultation, let alone a referendum, is required to set up a mayoral development corporation. Boroughs and the London Assembly must be consulted, but the mayor doesn't even have to accept their comments. A mayoral development corporation may do 'anything it considers appropriate for the purposes of its object or for purposes incidental to those purposes'. This looks to me like an extraordinarily unconstrained power, presumably intended to speed up projects like the Olympics and Crossrail. Entirely mayor-appointed and with no safeguards at all, there's a lot of potential for abuse in these development corporations.

The localism bill is a strange document. The name totally belies the content. It takes a considerable amount of planning power away from the local level, and hands it to neighbourhoods if they want to take it. It also introduces a number of duties on local authorities that smack of centralism. Even the much-touted power of competence on local authorities is constrained, restricting precisely what they need to use it for right now – raising money. This bill is trying to do a lot of things at once, and relying in many places on regulations to be introduced later. I hope that parliament will notice during the second reading that it has the potential to cause total mayhem and paralyse development. Recent news has suggested that chaos is what the government wants, but I can't help doubting that most businesses, local councillors, and people-on-the-street would share that sentiment.

The Brave New World of Localism - Part One

Today I have attempted to read the whole 405 pages of the Localism Bill. A meeting, quite a few phone calls, and the need to respond to emails prevented this, but I got half way through. Nerd that I am, I believe in reading the legislation rather than the government summaries. They always leave out critical points. So, from the first half of the Localism Bill...

Three Centralist Things

• Local authorities have a new duty to ‘determine whether council tax is excessive’. A referendum must be held if a proposed increase is ‘excessive’. The decision as to whether it is excessive must be based on a set of principles determined by the Secretary of State annually. The net result here is central control of council tax levels, because few would answer ‘yes’ to the question, ‘Do you want an excessive increase in council tax next year?’ justified or not. (Vol 2, section 52ZB)
  
  
• A 'community right to challenge' is being introduced. This will allow voluntary bodies, charitable trusts, parish councils, two or more local authority employees, or other bodies to be specified in regulations, to express interest in providing public services. Local authorities can accept or reject expressions of interest, but only based on grounds to be specified by the Secretary of State.
  
  If an expression of interest is accepted, a procurement exercise must take place. The regulations require the social, economic, and environmental well-being of the area to be considered as part of the procurement process. However this can only apply (as the Act notes) insofar as is consistent with procurement law. This obscures the fact that the contract may very likely then be awarded to a private company rather than the community body that originally challenged. There are no provisions in the bill to deal with the possible failure of the ‘challenger’ to adequately provide the service, nor any recognition of the contracting and enforcement challenges this would pose for local authorities.
  
  It is also worthy of note that this power results in local councillors having effectively no say in whether local services are outsourced. If an expression of interest must be accepted according to Secretary of State guidance, procurement has to go ahead. (Vol 1, section 66)
  
  
• Local authorities will no longer have the ability of local authorities to encourage domestic waste reduction by payments and charges. It would be interesting to see if similar schemes could be managed under the ‘power of competence’... (Vol 1, section 29)

Three Random Things

• Fire and rescue authorities will be allowed to charge for extinguishing fires - as long as they are at sea or under the sea (Vol 1, section 18B).
  
  
• Failing councils will have their elected mayors taken away as a punishment, until the Secretary of State decides they deserve to get them back. Given that the vast majority don't want them in the first place, how is this a punishment? (Vol 2, section 9HI)
  
  
• Which comes first, the neighbourhood or the neighbourhood forum?
  
  Local authorities must designate a ‘neighbourhood forum’ for each neighbourhood. This must be an open organisation, established to further social, economic, and environmental well-being of people living, or wanting to live, in an area. Membership must be open to people living, or wanting to live, there. Only one forum can be designated per neighbourhood and they must apply for the privilege.
  
  ‘Neighbourhood areas’ must also be designated by local authorities, but only when a neighbourhood forum has applied for their area to be designated. If no such body existed, presumably the area would remain in non-neighbourhood limbo. Moreover, how do local authorities arbitrate between overlapping applications? There is a real chicken and egg situation here! (Vol 2, section 61G)

One Thing That We Will All Need To Get Used To In The Localist Future

The plural of referendum. There are going to be a lot of them. Local authorities will have to hold referenda if:

• 5% of electors in a district or 'neighbourhood' sign a petition;
  
  
• A local councillor requests it;
  
  
• The council passes a resolution to hold one. (Vol 1, section 40)
  

That's a pretty low bar. Referenda can only be denied if they're unlawful, non-local, vexatious, abusive, or cover something the Secretary of State doesn't like (to be specified later). Results of local referendums must be published and local authorities must decide what to do about them & why. But they are free to do absolutely nothing if they see fit. I've yet to decide whether this is sensible or just renders the whole procedure an entirely pointless waste of time.

Stay tuned for Part Two, featuring What the hell are Neighbourhood Development Orders and Why Should I Fear Them?

Edited To Add Like an idiot, I forgot to link to the bill itself, which can be found here. Also, it's 431 pages, not 405. Bugger.

The Way We Live Now

When I started this blog in July, it seemed to me that those working outside the public sector hadn't yet realised that there were massive changes ahead. To be fair, I had only a hazy idea myself, but enough to feel alarmed at the prospect. There has definitely been a shift in recent weeks. I've noticed that conversations with colleagues, family, friends, in fact just about anyone, circle inexorably back to the telling phrase, 'We live in interesting times.' Everyone is saying this, and the required response is to nod sagely and murmur, 'Interesting times indeed.' This sequence confirms that you, like the other party in the conversation, are an observer of dramatic events beyond your control.

The next step, of course, is to shift from observer to participant, as the protesting students have done. I subscribe to the view that the protests are about a lot more than tuition fees. Young people are protesting now because they feel they have nothing to lose by doing so, because they feel that their opportunities are being taken away. Whatever the actual impacts of the complex new tuition fees scheme (which might be more progressive than the current system, I haven't examined it in sufficient detail to say), putting a price of £9,000 a year on a degree is an ideological statement. Whereas previous governments emphasised the value of higher education to society, the coalition is framing it as an asset to the individual, one that needs to be purchased. I don't think the government understand how much of a shift in the social contract this is, nor how hypocritical it looks in light of their fairness and social mobility rhetoric.

When I was a student, the times weren't especially interesting. I graduated prior to the introduction of top-up fees. During my degree there was a general election in which the incumbent Labour government faced no serious threat, and the economy remained boringly stable throughout. Despite this, as students do, I spent long hours sitting round a kitchen table putting the world to rights with my friends. There is a vast gap between those debates and the protests now. They are manifestations of the same student political awareness, altered by the seismic economic and political changes of the intervening years. The twentisomethings of my generation graduated with plenty of debt (£10-£25,000 for the most part), but we expected to and for the most part did find jobs. Our future looked stable.

It isn't anymore. Many of my university friends now work in the public sector; in education, the army, Whitehall, the NHS, quangos, or local government. I don't think any of us can say with confidence that our jobs aren't to some extent at risk. My whole team is now officially at risk of redundancy, although we've yet to receive the letter confirming this. Most importantly, we have little reason to believe that there will be other jobs available if/when we are kicked out of the public sector. In the mixture of positive and negative economic news, it remains a fact that there are already more job-seekers than there are vacancies in the UK. Unlike our older colleagues of many years experience, we twentisomethings will get minimal redundancy payouts, certainly not enough to start our own business or keep us off Job Seeker's Allowance. We have been basically priced out of the housing market, so are unlikely to have either the asset of a house or the burden of a mortgage.

Where does this leave us? Certainly in a better position than teenagers and students, which is why we've yet to take to the streets. In my opinion, it leaves us as prime brain drain material. I wonder if my generation will take a look at the lack of jobs, collapsing public services, and disgust with politics in the UK, and decide to go elsewhere? Being stuck in renting makes us mobile and our degrees apparently now command a great premium. Although many other countries are experiencing austerity, we are the only one to be saddled with the sickening spectacle of David Cameron and Nick Clegg telling us that we are all in this together. For those with languages, France and Germany beckon. For others, Australia is having an economic boom (unsustainably based on exporting raw materials to China, admittedly), or what about New Zealand, Canada, and the less Tea Party-ridden parts of America. In fact, there's a whole world out there, and it's looking increasingly appealing.

I can't understand why the government seems amazed that instability causes protest. Perhaps they're just feigning surprise that young people complain when their certainties and security are suddenly stripped away. During 'interesting times' you can either get involved or watch from a safe distance. A lot of people my age will soon be faced with that decision.

Meanwhile, Cambridgeshire County Council has announced that its budget is being cut by £160 million over the next five years. £50 million must be saved next year, and that front-loading will have an especially significant impact. An estimated 450 jobs will go. Suffolk-esque kamikaze outsourcing does not appear to be the preferred option, encouragingly. A consultation on where the cuts should be made can be found here.

Edited To Add: Having had a go at the consultation survey, I'd urge everyone who lives in the county to do the same. It's eye-opening - whatever distribution of cuts is decided, it's clear that support for the most vulnerable people (the elderly and at-risk children) will be cut. In addition, up to 19 libraries could be closed and up to 80 bus routes stopped.

Life's Not Fair

The government's reliance on the concept of fairness is something I've been curious about. Since they talk it up so much, it would seem logical that there are some arguments, or even policies, to make the cuts seem fair. These haven't been easy to find, though, so I was pleased that Nick Clegg had apparently seen fit to explain by way of an article in the Guardian.

When I started reading this piece, I was expecting to be annoyed. I anticipated that Clegg would make some moderately specious arguments, based on carefully chosen statistics. I intended to refute these arguments. But as I read on, all I could think was, he's not even trying. The last three paragraphs of the article don't even have anything to do with fairness or inequality; they're merely a defence of the Liberal Democrats decision to pal around with Tories.

Mr. Clegg, I'm not just angry, I'm also disappointed. Let us examine what is being said here.

Clegg begins by drawing a line between 'old progressives' and 'new progressives'. He doesn't bother to define progressive, but one can only assume that he means someone who promotes progress and improvement. The old progressives, it seems, happen to be concentrated in the Labour party. They believe that the more the government spends, the more progress will be made.

This is dismissed as, 'clearly nonsense'. Yes, it is simplistic and I doubt anyone would disagree. In fact, I doubt Labour would disagree. Clegg then makes the jump to paying off the deficit more quickly being progressive in and of itself, making no mention of any possible implications that this might have. Paying off the deficit is being carefully partitioned away from cuts to public services. The former can be painted as an economic imperative; the latter scares people. Discussing one without the other is dishonesty by omission. Clegg's justification for deficit panic is the risk of higher interest rates on mortgages, more debt servicing, and a greater burden for taxpayers. Frankly I'm getting tired of these three excuses. There are a multitude of assumptions under there, the most significant of which is that austerity won't cause the same chaos here as Ireland is currently enjoying.

Clegg doesn't go into this. Instead, he proceeds to say that lifting people out of poverty isn't progressive. I am not exaggerating. Quote:

Old progressives see a fair society as one in which households with incomes currently less than 60% of the median were to be, in Labour's telling verb, "lifted" out of poverty. The weakness of this approach is that significant resources end up being devoted to altering the financial position of these households by fairly small amounts – just enough, in many cases, to get them above the line. But poverty plus a pound does not represent fairness.

Mr. Clegg is saying that putting significant resources into making a lot of people's quality of life better is wrong. How can you counter that sort of breath-taking arrogance? What is unfair about helping people to move above the poverty line? The whole idea of a poverty line is that below it quality of life is inadequate and basic needs cannot be met. I'm sure the people helped by the state to heat their homes, pay their rent, and clothe their children didn't stop to think, 'Gosh, how unfair it is that the state is helping me! Damn their unprogressiveness!'

After conceding that poverty is a perhaps little bit about money, Clegg makes the connection with quality of public services. These would be the same public services from which the government is chiselling around £80 billion of savings over the coming years. Will this increase the quality of services to the poor? Do I need to answer that?

The three areas of public spending identified as progressive, and therefore worthy of protection, are early years, schools and the NHS. That's it. From this we can infer that there's nothing fair about protecting people from crime, so cut the police. Or from injustice, so cut the courts and legal aid. Providing welfare payments for the disabled, sick and elderly isn't progressive at all, so they can all be reduced. There is apparently no fairness in allowing people a half-decent home, so cutting the housing budget by half is no problem. Higher education isn't progressive, so universities can be encouraged to raise their fees in order to make up funding cuts. Caring for vulnerable children isn't progressive, neither is protecting the environment, nor responding to fires, providing transport, community centres, flood defences, job centres, libraries, trading standards, and so on.

The title of the article implies that the government is concerned about inequality persisting down the generations, yet no examples are provided of ways in which entrenched poverty will be tackled. This argument that cuts won't be made to the NHS, schools or early years is the only one tried. Quite apart from the fact that close examination of the CSR undermines it, all that the government are doing here is freezing spend at the level of the previous regime. This is supposedly progressive, although increasing the level of state funding to that level during the Labour years wasn't.

Faced with this slight difficulty in his public services argument, Clegg veers off into social mobility. New progressives want to remove the barriers to social mobility. That's entirely laudable, but what is the government doing about these barriers? Apparently just the Pupil Premium, which will be paid for through reductions elsewhere in the education budget. It's yet to become clear how it will work, but importantly it is for school children. The social mobility of everyone older is left unmentioned.

Turning now to tax, Mr. Clegg states:

New progressives want to reshape the tax base fundamentally, towards greater taxation of unearned wealth and pollution, rather than of people.

How nice. I presume a carbon tax is forthcoming? A land tax, perhaps? Extra tax on second homes? Clegg must surely working on those? Very quietly, though, as all he mentions are the changes to income tax and capital gains tax. I don't disagree that those changes seem seem to benefit those on lowest incomes most, as the IFS analysis showed. What goes unmentioned is the most regressive tax of all, VAT, being raised to 20% next year. There is also no reference to the purpose of most tax: to redistribute money. Wanting to move away from taxing people implies that this is no longer an aim of the government. Why not? Are we back to the Victorian notion that every individual is responsible for their own level of wealth, and if they can't earn enough to feed and clothe themselves they don't deserve help? How is that in any way consistent with social mobility?

The article then ends with an extraordinary three paragraphs that read as an attempt to justify the Liberal Democrats sell-out to the Conservatives. According to Nick Clegg, coalition governments are inherently progressive, whatever they do. Why? Because of pluralism. What might look like a calculated assault on public services, a callous betrayal of the vulnerable, and an extremely risky economic gamble is in fact a beautiful example of pluralism and compromise. So Mr. Clegg tells us.

I for one am not remotely convinced.

Reading between the lines, these so-called new progressives seem to think that a smaller state is inherently fairer. That giving people fair life chances means leaving the worst off to help themselves if they can. That markets will sort out poverty without the state bothering to get involved. All of this is in my view incorrect. Greater state intervention doesn't automatically reduce poverty and inequality unless it's done carefully, but without it inequalities just deepen and persist.

I don't know what the new progressives believe, but just look at who they are. Nick Clegg and at least another 17 of the 29 who comprise the coalition cabinet are millionaires; 23 if you believe The Daily Mail. George Osborne, a chancellor who takes pride in personifying the cuts, has an inherited trust fund and personal wealth of around four million pounds. 20 of the 29 cabinet members went to Oxford or Cambridge. 25 are male, 28 are white. Other than the royal family, can you think of any group in this country less qualified to lecture about fairness?

Starship Local Enterprise

With a new government comes a new vocabulary. 'Regional' becomes 'local', because regions were too large, arbitrary and undemocratic. 'Development' becomes 'enterprise', because development is too complicated and implies the improvement of many social outcomes whereas enterprise just means encouraging businesses to grow. 'Agency' becomes 'partnership' because an agency is a quango full of public sector non-jobs, whilst a partnership consists of local organisations doing important local things.

Thus the coalition has scrapped Regional Development Agencies (amongst other things) and replaced them with Local Enterprise Partnerships. One three letter acronym (LEPs) displaces another (RDAs). There is one very significant difference between the two, though. The budget from RDAs over the past three years was over £6 billion. The budget for LEPs over the next three years is zero. Yes, nothing at all.

The government announced Local Enterprise Partnerships in a great fanfare, and invited areas to bid for one. Many did with great enthusiasm, sixty-two in total. Twenty-four bids were recently announced to have succeeded, and told they could now go ahead and form their LEP. It's an interesting situation, really. The government made LEPs into a competition with no stated prize, but because areas are used to being given funding for doing as central government says, they went along with it expecting a prize later. Now is it clear that there will be no money from government to fund the running costs of these partnerships, and neither will they have any new kind of legal identity to let them raise their own funds. By this time, though, local areas have put work into LEPs, and in any event want something to replace Regional Development Agencies. They have acquired their own momentum.

Whether this momentum is enough to overcome the lack of funding or legal power is another question. Without government support, LEPs will rely on local authorities and businesses for their running costs. Local authorities are facing severe budget cuts and businesses won't put up money unless they can see a clear benefit to them. This makes it likely that LEPs will be either simple partnerships, which have a meeting every few months but otherwise do nothing, or a very small team. Such a structure could well be adequate for the purposes of some local areas, who don't feel that the regional organisations need a replacement. After all, most of the current regional functions are being centralised back into Whitehall.

I am nonetheless a little baffled by the sheer number of roles that the recent government White Paper on 'Local Growth' threw at Local Enterprise Partnerships. Apparently, they could get involved in transport planning, housing, spatial planning, economic development, local business regulation, bidding for national funding, bidding for European funding, support for new 'Growth Hubs', infrastructure planning, managing the Green New Deal, promoting renewable energy investment, ensuring business involvement in strategic planning applications, commenting on national planning policy, encouraging enterprise, providing business advice, leveraging private sector investment (not my phrase!), tackling climate change, enabling the timely processing of applications for strategic development and infrastructure, responding to economic shocks like floods, working with Jobcentre Plus to create jobs through the Work Programme, regeneration projects, improving skills, and encouraging inward investment.

You might observe that it's quite a long list. Some of the activities on it could be funded on a project-by-project basis, but there is no money to set up a Local Enterprise Partnership or employ people with the skills to actually do those things.

Ironically enough, the government has also set up a Regional Growth Fund, which is neither regional nor about growth. It could more accurately be termed the North-West Public Sector Cuts Rescue Fund, as Lord Heseltine has said that the South and East will struggle to get any of it. Despite this, I was very amused to find he then commented in a speech that 'I want this Fund to do exactly what it says on the tin'. He might need to relabel the tin in that case.

But why should we care about any of this? Because without any regional or Local Enterprise Partnership-type structures, local councils will fall into parochialism. Planning will stop at local borders, which is a real problem for infrastructure, especially transport. Because as well as funding vanishing, a lot of expertise will be lost from the public sector as a whole swathe of organisations end and their activities cease. Finally, because I think centralisation will increase rather than decrease. Without some co-operation, however loosely organised, how can local councils stand up to government? How can they make their voices heard when the current conduits to Whitehall, the Government Offices of the Regions, are vanishing? I'm starting to suspect that local authorities are being tricked. The fact that local councils are getting the worst of the cuts sends a stronger message about the importance of localism to our government than all their enthusiasm about Local Enterprise Partnerships.

Winter discontent

In addition to the major policy statements coming out on a weekly basis, promising radical change to avert a doomed debt-spiral, there are indications of the age of austerity closer to home.

Last week a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses handed me a leaflet about how Jesus can help you through unemployment. It contained an incongruous mixture of budgeting tips and bible quotes. My bank has ceased the barrage of letters begging me to take out a loan. I applaud the saving of paper, but assume that 25 year olds don't get loans anymore. My union dues have suddenly gone up. A recent update email from my alma mater dwelt at length on its financial position, relegating exam results and sports teams to short mentions at the end.

Students are protesting, rioting even, out of anger at the betrayal by the government of all that they held certain. I can well understand their rage. If tuition fees had been anything like £9,000 when I was a student, I would have been priced out of the better universities. Including the one I attended.

Conversations at work increasingly focus on what we plan to do after March 31st next year, when the funding for our jobs evaporates. We've been told that the redundancy 'consultation process' takes six months, and are therefore a little confused that it hasn't started yet. It's less than six months until the 31st March, after all. Be that as it may, we're all looking at our options. Some are considering teacher training, others opening a B&B, still others going over to the Dark Side (private sector consultancy). I am set on doing a Masters degree, and intend to bridge the gap between the end of my job and the start of a course with whatever work I can get, to keep me in rent and spaghetti. It seems clear that the longer I wait to go back to unversity, the more the cost will rise.

Everyone at work is reconsidering what they want from a career, what they enjoy, what they can afford, where they want their work-life balance to be. I'm very lucky to have no dependents or mortgage to support, and in any case would want to change jobs sooner or later in order to keep learning and climbing the ladder. It obviously concerns me how little work will be available before and after a Masters (during which I would rely on my savings, funding being non-existent). There just seems no point in worrying about it right now.

At the moment I'm young, well-educated, healthy, and living in an area of the country that's coped relatively well with the recession so far. Millions of people are going to be worse off when the cuts to tax credits, housing benefit, job seeker's allowance, and child benefit arrive. Never mind inflation on the rise, VAT rising to 20%, and public services being dismantled and sold off. When those millions start protesting, I'll be there too. Complete with a witty placard.

Tower Blocks

When I was about to fall asleep last night, it occurred to me that the best metaphor for the planning system is a game of jenga. (I can't recall my subsequent dreams, so can only hope that they were equally fascinating in content.) The UK planning system consists of multifarious and lengthy pieces of legislation, statutory instruments, and policy documents. Since planning began, a few of these have been removed but more piled on the top. The whole thing has therefore become increasingly voluminous, complex, and unstable.

This is due to the strange fact the governments are unable to leave planning well alone. Although widely ignored, misunderstood, and marginalised, planning is an important conduit of power between local and central government. Moreover, it has a not insignificant role - mediating between different interests to decide how land is used. During the Blair years, a whole regional layer of planning was added between the national and local, requiring decisions on each individual planning application to take account of a seemingly endless amount of policy.

The coalition government does not approve of the word 'regional', and to be quite honest I can see why. Regional planning suffered a democratic deficit, as John Prescott's regional assemblies never took off as they were meant to. It also spawned a horrifying level of jargon and TLAs (three letter acronyms). I once read a regional planning document that proposed to monitor 'synergy' and 'leverage' on an annual basis, which very nearly made me cry. That said, regional structures did bring a lot of funding into planning, infrastructure and economic development. And naturally the people working for these regional structures meant well and did their best with the powers and resources they had.

No longer, though. The abolition of Regional Development Agencies and their planning duties has been repeatedly announced since Eric Pickles become Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. This sudden wholesale removal of an entire tier of planning has caused considerable confusion, making the whole jenga stack wobble. However the government does not intend to leave planning with just local and national tiers. The recent CLG Business Plan confirmed the introduction of a new concept: the Neighbourhood Plan.

The idea of setting out planning policies, by each neighbourhood for each neighbourhood, comes from the Conservative planning Green Paper, titled Open Source Planning. This was released back in February, and at the time was widely derided by planners as unworkable, whilst horrified developers claimed it would end housebuilding. Apparently, the Conservatives didn't listen. I can see what they're trying to do: replace a distant and seemingly unaccountable layer of planning with a hyper-local and responsive one. That's laudible, until you consider the sheer magnitude of the problems that the planning system is expected to tackle. To name but the two I know most about:

The housing shortage; regional plans set targets for house-building, which often caused local controversy. Despite these targets, not enough homes were built. Thus, house prices remain stubbornly high despite the lack of first time buyers and the housing benefit bill climbed inexorably. The planning system is one of the biggest determinants of the quantity and quality of housing being built at any given time.

Environmental sustainability; the planning system must somehow reconcile interdependent and sometimes conflicting environmental objectives. Flood risk, air quality, biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste reduction must all be considered and balanced when putting a plan together. Renewable energy is a particularly fraught topic - how can you reconcile national targets for renewable energy generation with rampant anti-wind turbine NIMBYism?

Both of these issues, and many others, are far, far bigger than a neighbourhood. I am all for people having a say in what happens where they live, but that isn't a new idea. Neighbourhoods elect local councillors, who decide whether or not to give planning permissions. Local councils put together local plans (noticing the many uses of the word 'local' here?), which people are encouraged to comment on. Most don't bother, unless something particularly controversial is at stake - like a wind turbine or a site for gypsies and travellers.

What the government's proposing is, like the Big Society, a much larger role for the community whether they like it or not. As the concept of neighbourhood plans remains hazy, I have a number of questions.

• What is a 'neighbourhood'? In rural areas, parishes are a helpful existing designation and have established Parish Councils to lead the process. But in towns and cities, is a neighbourhood a set area, a set population, or are the boundaries to be chosen by the inhabitants themselves?
  
  
• In order for a neighbourhood plan to have legitimacy, what proportion of the population need to be involved? Or indeed need to agree it? Will this agreement be through a mini referendum?
  
  
• Who will have the most influence over a neighbourhood plan? Will only those who have lived in the area for a certain period of time be able to speak up? Isn't it likely that those with the most time on their hands (the retired, I expect) will be most heavily involved?
  
  
• Regional and local plans were legally required to be consistent, or at least not conflict. Will it be the same for local and neighbourhood plans? If there is dissention between the two about how land is to be used, which would prevail?
  
  
• Local plans require a mass of evidence to back them up - data on infrastructure, housing need, and environmental constraints, for example. Will neighbourhood plans also need to be evidence-based? If not then they are bound to become unrealistic, but what safeguards will prevent this?
  
  
• A patchwork of neighbourhood plans, possibly overlapping and inevitably conflicting, will create huge complexity for the development industry. Will developers be given the chance to comment on neighbourhood plans? How will planning decisions be made when sites cross the boundary between two or more neighbourhoods?
  
  
• Neighbourhood plans will only be able to reflect the wishes of current residents of an area, not future generations or those wishing to move into the neighbourhood. How will the system safeguard against NIMBY enclaves, which further entrench inequality by safeguarding their patches against anyone new? What about often-excluded groups like the disabled and gypsies & travellers, how will their housing needs be taken into account?
  
  
• How will conflicts of interest be managed? Suppose someone with a large garden wants to put it in the plan for redevelopment but their neighbour objects. Who mediates in this situation?
  
  
• Putting together neighbourhood plans will require training, local government officer time and expertise, as well as funding. Local councils are facing 30% cuts over the next three years, how are they expected to cope with this additional resource-intensive requirement?
  
  
• What use will neighbourhood plans really be to communities? The frustrating nature of the planning system is that it only reacts; it can't proactively cause things to be built. Putting together a lovely plan for their neighbourhood will be a waste of people's time, if it is full of aspirations that will never be met as public funding is tightly squeezed.
  
  
• Let's be honest. Can you really imagine neighbourhood plans welcoming new housing and infrastructure like recycling centres and bus depots? These things are necessary, but will the vociferous members of communities really be able to make the most considered decisions about where they should go? What about the BANANAs*?
  

Funnily enough, planning is not a particularly popular or desirable profession. I toyed with and then decided against becoming a planner, on the grounds that the devil was in the really dull detail, like kerb heights and child yields. Being dragged into writing a plan for the community isn't terribly enticing when you've seen how difficult it can be. Moreover, the points in my Big Society post also apply here; the life of a private renter doesn't really encourage long-term thinking about where I live right now.

There are undoubtedly problems with the planning system, which I won't go into at length due to their utter tedium. Planning is in need of reform to address the challenges of climate change, housing shortage, and austerity. People are disconnected from planning, which I think is largely due to its over-complexity and incomprehensible language. There is a lot that could be done to simplify local plans and put them into plain English, without radically changing the whole system. That should at least be tried before putting precious time and money into more reorganisation. It strikes me that neighbourhood plans could be the final block that knocks the whole tower over into chaos.

* BANANA = Build Absolutely Nothing Absolutely Nowhere near Anything.

This society ain't big enough for both of us

The New Economics Foundation have just released an excellent report on the Big Society. After explaining what in fact the Big Society is, which is more than the government have managed, it comprehensively examines the aims, advantages, drawbacks, and risks involved. It's only 32 pages and a really good read - I thoroughly recommend it. There is no point in just restating the whole thing, so I'll give my personal perspective instead.

The NEF report identifies three key determinants of involvement in the Big Society: access, capacity, and time.

Access really depends on networks, and the strength of community bonds. I live in a rented house, in an urban neighbourhood that mixes student houseshares, young professional houseshares, and families. I've only lived in this house for a few months, don't know the names of my neighbours, and don't feel part of the community as such. The insecure nature of private renting means that I've lived in six different places since graduating four years ago, and thus not put down roots in any neighbourhood. I don't even know how I'd go about getting involved in the community; I don't go to church, have no children to take to playgroup/school, and don't belong to a political party or pressure group. I'm very familiar with and fond of where I live, but transient young professionals like me struggle to really engage with our communities. Apart from anything else, I don't know how long I'll be living in this house, but based on past experience, a few years at the very most.

The way around this might be to use the main community resource where all the young professionals can at some point be found - the local food shop. If you were going to pounce on me and ask if I'd like to get involved in the Big Society, it'd be easiest to do whilst I was staring at shelves of yogurt.

Capacity relates to what anyone can usefully do. Hopefully I've got some experience and skills that would be useful to the Big Society - like project management, diplomacy, and procurement. I'm also quite energetic and not easily bored. At risk of sounding like a CV, I think I've got things to offer. Most twentisomething graduate professionals would probably say the same.

The third factor is the one gives me the most pause: time. I work full-time, at least forty hours a week. Being single, I also do my own food-shopping, cooking, laundry, and housework (although the chore-sharing aspect of shared living is a great boon in this respect). This doesn't leave me with an awful lot of spare hours, or indeed a great deal of spare energy. Obviously there are weekends, but I probably spend less than half of them in Cambridge, as my family and plenty of my friends live elsewhere.

Thinking this through produces an ethical dilemma - assuming I continue to work full-time, in order to get involved in the Big Society I'd have to sacrifice seeing my friends and family so often. The selfish part of me resents that prospect. If I'm already working five days a week in the public sector, surely that's my bit done for society? Obviously I'm paid for that time, but I'm also paying taxes like everyone else. On the other hand, I think participation in society is really important and see the utopian appeal of local areas transforming themselves. What volunteering I've done has been really satisfying and rewarding, always temporary though.

I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but suspect that my generation have become accustomed to the simple social contract of paying taxes in return for having public services provided. The more complex level of involvement required by the Big Society is something I find hard to imagine fitting into my life. I was born in the eighties, and despite a left wing upbringing have internalised the individualist message that working is the most important thing. The current government is if anything strengthening that message, whilst stacking involvement with the Big Society on top of it. They have so far ignored that gap that this opens up between many people's expectations of society and the new reality. Whatever good intentions I might have towards the community, earning money to ensure my own independence and taking care of my family are my priorities.

On the other hand, if I was working three or four days a week, or even not at all, there wouldn't be a dilemma. I'd have spare time and energy to spend volunteering at a library, community centre, or similar. This assumes that I could earn enough to live on working part-time - which I'm certain I could, as my lifestyle isn't costly. That's the optimistic view, but at the moment wages are flat, inflation is rising, and jobs (full- or part-time) are scarce. Moreover, if unemployed you have to spend all your time searching for a full-time job in order to qualify for Job Seeker's Allowance.

I honestly don't know how lifestyles like mine can be reconciled with localism and the Big Society. I don't feel bound to my neighbourhood by residence (short-term renting), by employment (threatened by cuts), or by family (no relatives here, don't have children), or by friends (an urban tribe with much the same transience as me). I am accustomed to working five days a week then having total flexibility as to how I spend the rest of my time. I have the vague idea that I'd like to contribute to society, but no idea how to practically do so. And I very much doubt that I'm the only one who feels this way.

La Belle France

The unrelentingly grim tone of political and economic announcements recently led me to read about the French Revolution to cheer myself up. I've always had a fascination with the upheavals of 1789-94. In just five years (the usual gap between elections now) the whole country was turned upside down, torn apart, and built back up by war, terror, and astoundingly prescient ideas. Paris must have been a simultaneously horrifying and astonishing place to be during those years of upheaval.

The tenuous link that this has to UK housing policy is found in the demographic layout of Paris, focal point of the revolution centuries ago. Unlike London, which has pockets of social deprivation in close proximity to the richest areas of the central business district, Paris has a donut of deprived suburbs around a wealthy centre. With housing benefit cuts and changes to social housing, this structure will be rapidly replicated in London. Although given the scale of benefit cuts, those reliant on them in central London may need to move much further afield than the still-costly outskirts, and/or resort to deliberate overcrowding.

Minister of Decentralisation (surely one of the most oxymoronic titles ever) Greg Clark mentioned this in his recent speech to launch the government's White Paper on 'local growth'. He said:

'...even in the wealthiest areas, there remain significant pockets of unemployment and deprivation. Whatever the differences in economic performance between broadly defined parts of the country, the differences between different towns and neighbourhoods are also often great. Tower Hamlets, in the shadow of Canary Wharf, has three quarters of children growing up in low-income families.'

Mr Clark has successfully identified the problem of inequality, which has many complex economic & social causes, and without sustained and significant intervention perpetuates itself. However, he then veers into a character-assassination of Regional Development Agencies followed by a massive plug for their successors, the Local Enterprise Partnerships. Both RDAs and emerging LEPs focus on economic development, and I very much doubt that reducing poverty within areas the size of Tower Hamlets falls within their remit. Which is not to say that the government is doing nothing to tackle poverty in the shadow of Canary Wharf. The changes to benefits and social housing will move this poverty outside central London so that those working in the City won't have to look at it anymore.

You might wonder why London shouldn't become more like Paris. Unfortunately, confining poverty to the outskirts of the city hasn't always worked out well. The 2005 riots were centred on the poor suburbs of Paris, expressing frustration at high levels of unemployment, entrenched poverty, and racial tensions. That unrest had been simmering for decades before violence erupted. In London there will be huge internal migration of those in poverty over the next three years; the low-paid, unemployed, elderly, disabled and carers forced to uproot and resettle elsewhere. This will inevitably cause some tension, although historical comparison suggests that we have a much more sanguine approach to displeasure with the government on this side of the channel.

More seriously, the reason that housing benefit cuts will bite hardest in London is that it's disproportionately economically successful and lacking in housing supply, resulting in extremely high housing costs. The government's rhetoric is entirely focused on reducing the deficit, brushing aside the ideological questions at stake. Should the public sector subsidise people so that they can live in London, or let the market lock all except the highly paid out? What are the social benefits to communities with mixed levels of wealth; economic dynamism due to ease of recruiting for lower paid jobs, less wasted time and energy commuting, improved social cohesion as different groups mix? What are the disadvantages of London as it is; dissatisfaction stemming from the proximity of poverty and wealth, perceived unfairness of housing benefit, potential driving up of rents? Although replicating Paris' donut model would reduce housing benefit costs, would it increase public expenditure in other ways by moving people away from jobs, requiring greater spending on Job Seeker's Allowance and transport?

Have the government silently dropped their responsibility to try and alleviate poverty, or at least not make it worse? It really concerns me that they don't seem to be acknowledging any of these questions, let alone trying to answer them.

Strangely enough, given the choice I'd prefer to live in Paris than London. Not for any rational, statistically-supported reason - I just like it more.

The End is Nigh

This was not a cheerful way to start the working day:



On my desk I found the latest Inside Housing magazine announcing the death of social housing. The coalition's so-called reforms effectively end social renting as a tenure. Requiring new social tenants to pay 80% of market rents will result in one of two things:

Housing Benefit will have to increase to cover the much more expensive rents, increasing how much is spent on benefits in order to subsidise the provision of new social housing;

Or

Housing Benefit won't increase and will no longer be sufficient to cover social rents, ending the safety net for the vulnerable that social housing was meant to be.

I wonder which will happen? Here's a clue: the government is totally obsessed with reducing the housing benefit bill.

The National Housing Federation are saying that the level of new social rents will be so high that in places like Camden, Hackney and Haringey households would need to earn £54,000 to pay their social rent without housing benefit. David Cameron's defense of this is, '[Are] our constituents working hard to give benefits so people can live in homes they could not even dream of? I don't think that's fair.'

This welfare-scroungers rhetoric, seemingly taken straight from the Daily Mail, makes me incredibly angry. Cameron is ignoring the fact that the housing market is a disaster in this country, supply is inadequate, owned and rented housing is getting less and less affordable, and there is a particularly acute shortage of housing for the most vulnerable. That's why spending on housing benefit has increased. In London and the economically thriving parts of the South, private renting (let alone buying a house) is unaffordable for people on an average wage. It is a barefaced lie that only unemployed 'scroungers' need housing benefit and social housing. It is also a barefaced lie that social housing is in any way mansion-like.

Here are some facts from the government's own housing statistics.

• The percentage of households who own their home outright and have no
  members of the household working (57%) is comparable to that for social
  renters. This is because both contain a high proportion of the retired.
  
  
• 31% of social tenants are retired; only 21% are under 35. Younger people are far more likely to be in private rented accommodation.
  
  
• Social housing is more likely to be overcrowded than private rented or owner-occupied. (6.7% of social renters, 5.4% of private renters and 1.6% of owner-occupiers are overcrowded.) A third of all overcrowded households live in London.
  
  
• More than a quarter of all children in the social rented sector (25.7%) are living in overcrowded conditions, compared to 5.8% in the owner-occupied sector and 15% in the private rented sector.
  
  
• More than a third of social renters work: 24% are in full time work, 10% in part time work. Only 8.4% are unemployed.
  
  Let me reiterate that: eight per cent of social tenants are unemployed. Would you like to see the table I got that number from? Here it is. David Cameron, your claims about unemployed scroungers are simply not true.
  
  
• 24.5% of social tenants are economically inactive, meaning that they can't work and are not getting Job Seeker's Allowance. These would be the disabled, ill, and full-time carers.
  
  
• Not all social renters receive housing benefit at the moment - 59% to be exact.
  
  
• Households buying a house with a mortgage had an average income more than three times that of social renters (£47,500 and £14,800 per annum respectively). 65% social renters have incomes of less than £15,000 per year.

Does it seem like social renters are getting an unfairly good deal here? I think not.

Social housing is allocated to those that most need it - the elderly, disabled, young people who've run away from abusive families, homeless families with children. I'll tell you what's not fair, Cameron: dumping these people on the streets, shunting them between bed & breakfasts, or forcing them into overcrowded accommodation. You don't need me to tell you that this will trap people in poverty.

How can this government have the gall to use the word 'fair' as their mantra whilst callously kicking away the welfare safety net? They have decided that if you can't afford shelter you're just not trying hard enough, whether you're a child, disabled, ill, elderly, or just another victim of the recession. William Beveridge must be spinning in his grave.

Dogbert Government

The Spending Review contains a lot of this sort of thing:

'The CLG settlement includes a 13 per cent real terms reduction to fire resource expenditure. This will require the Fire and Rescue Service to modernise, increase efficiency and deliver workforce reform.'

How this might be achieved without increasing the likelihood of people dying in fires is not stated. Rather, 'It will be for individual fire authorities to decide how to make these savings.'

It's assumed that every public service has a huge amount of waste and spare capacity. For some, this will be the case, but is it really safe to assume it for absolutely everything, including the emergency services?

This Dilbert cartoon sums up being told to cut 10%, or 20%, or 30% by a government with no idea of how this is to be achieved.


Thank you Scott Adams.

Incidentally, it might be an idea to check your smoke alarms.

Roof Over Your Head

For context, I have a particular professional and personal interest in housing policy. Previous missives include:

What's Wrong with Private Rental

What's Wrong with Owner Occupation

What's Wrong with Social Housing

Why I Won't to be Able to Buy a Home in the next Decade

The Coalition Don't Get it and the Coalition really don't get it.

A lot of rumours swirled around prior to the spending review about massive cuts to the housing budget. How bad was it? Worse than that.

It remains unclear exactly how much funding for affordable housing has been cut, as it's funded by a confusing patchwork of programmes. Here are the numbers provided in the spending review.

From 2008-11 the government's National Affordable Housing programme had £8.4 billion of funding, with a target of 180,000 new affordable homes a year. (As a result of the credit crunch, I'm pretty sure this target will be missed.) The CSR allocates £4.5 billion to affordable housing over the next three years, with a target of delivering up to 150,000 over the spending review period. This includes existing commitments, and is therefore effectively a four year target. Consequently, the annual target for new affordable homes has gone from 60,000 to 37,500. Of course, high targets are meaningless if you can't meet them. But despite this, CLG's token Liberal Democrat minister Andrew Stunnell is claiming that the current government will provide more affordable housing than Labour did. Given that the budget for affordable housing has been halved and the target cut by more than a third, this claim looks nothing short of delusional. It's based on increasing rents for social housing, which provides homes for the disabled, retired, and vulnerable, whilst reducing housing benefit.

Whilst Mr. Stunell is being mentioned, I should comment on what appears to be his pet project: affordable housing in abandoned farm buildings. Sounds like a bad joke? Here is the 'Homes on the Farm' press release.

Presumably this policy is based on some idea of bucolic country life, or perhaps nostalgia for the feudal system. What it would amount to is isolating those unable to afford market housing from jobs, services, and transport networks. I find it particularly absurd that the press release emphasises young people. Speaking as a genuine young person, most of us live in cities because that's where we can find jobs. Moreover, urban areas offer actual services and leisure activities, as well as not requiring utter dependence on a car. I grew up in the countryside and, frankly, after going to university in a city returning to quiet rural life isn't very attractive. I'm sure some young people do want to live where they grew up, but treating barn conversions as some sort of panacea for rural housing problems is misguided. Quite apart from the fact that this policy isn't supported by any funding or legislation, being merely an exortation to farmers and local authorities.

Once again, this demonstrates the government's failure to look in any way systematically at housing, employment and poverty. I know I say this a lot, but these issues are highly interconnected.

Two brighter notes, though. Firstly, the shadow housing minister Alison Seabeck is horrified by the hatchet taken to spending on housing. Secondly, the cuts to welfare, including housing benefit, will need to go through parliament. There is still time for MPs to wake up and smell the unfairness.

Just Keep Moving

On Friday Iain Duncan Smith advised the unemployed to 'get on a bus' to find work. As well as being incredibly patronising, this talk of the 'flexible labour market' ignores both economic theory and observable reality.

For a start, there is no economic rule that there will ever be enough jobs for everyone. At the moment, jobseekers outnumber vacancies to an almost farcical degree in economically weaker areas of the country. In the area of Wales Iain was discussing in his speech, for instance, there are approximately nine unemployed people for every vacancy. Presumably Mr. Duncan Smith would suggest that all those unable to get a job either commute further or move out of Wales.

Helpfully, the government will be making both options much more expensive in coming months and years. The costs of road, rail and bus travel will all rise. Petrol prices are creeping up again, VAT hits 20% in January, and the fuel escalator kicks back in next year. Road pricing is back on the cards. Bus subsidies are being cut by 20%. Rail fares will rise by 3% plus the Retail Price Index (currently 4.6%) each of the next three years. In fact, it looks like the best option will indeed be to get on your bike, as Norman Tebbit so famously suggested. Unfortunately, cycling from Wales to London on a daily basis is scarcely practical.

Moving house to get a job, though, would be even harder. Housing benefit is being substantially cut, the affordable housing budget has been hung, drawn and quartered (post on this to follow), and those in social housing have a newly created massive disincentive to move. New social tenancies will be on a novel and deceptively named 'affordable rent' basis, constituting 80% of market rent. That might sound reasonable, but in London would result in rents tripling. In Cambridge, I gather social rent would double under the new terms. Existing tenancies will remain on the same terms as they were created. If moving house would inevitably result in a vast increase in your rent, it would take a very attractive job to get you packing.

As with all the policy currently being made, Iain Duncan Smith's approach is entirely predicated on reducing spending, in this case on welfare. The Department of Work and Pensions isn't trying to strengthen the economy, reduce regional inequality, tackle long-term unemployment, or improve business confidence. It is assumed that swiftly reducing the deficit will cause these things to magically occur all by themselves. A number of nobel prize winning economists are sceptical of this.

Crudely cutting benefits, especially housing benefit, isn't going to make the labour market more flexible or create jobs. Indeed, jobs will be rapidly lost as the cuts bite. Encouraging people to move, or indeed forcing them to, is useless when there aren't jobs available. In the UK, housing costs strongly correlate with job availability, as house building has failed to keep up with demand in successful areas. Cuts to housing benefit and the affordable housing budget will move the unemployed away from jobs. Further away than they can commute, even if travel costs weren't rising steeply.

There's another significant problem here, and it concerns the Big Society. If communities are to unite in order to provide their own public services, as the coalition expects, they will need to be stable and cohesive. Housing benefit cuts will force hundreds of thousands of people to move, causing huge social upheaval. What hope have unsettled and precarious communities of successfully running libraries, community centres, and schools?

High levels of spending on welfare are a symptom of a geographically unbalanced economy and hugely dysfunctional housing market. Coalition policy is ignoring these causes in favour of the idea that anyone without a job just isn't trying hard enough. Again, it's hard to reconcile this insistence on believing the worst of people with a sudden flowering of voluntary work and community enterprise. All I can conclude is the government doesn't understand that things are connected, things like jobs and housing and transport. I wouldn't have thought that was too complex an idea to grasp, but unfortunately the Diary of a Civil Servant confirms that it is.

Across the Pond

Spending has been Comprehensively Reviewed, and I've been following it as best I can despite being on a first aid course. In theory I now know how to resuscitate people, so might end up as a Big Society paramedic in a few years when we can't afford real ones. (Public sector humour: I'm not sure it can get much blacker at this point.)

Whilst attempting to absorb the scale and implications of the spending review cuts, something kept nagging at the back of my head. I've just realised what it is. The coalition constantly treats public services as inherently wasteful, unnecessary, autocratic, and staffed by faceless hoards whose only aim is to spend taxpayers' money as quickly as possible. These attitudes sound familiar; they are shared by the American Tea Party movement. Although the Tea Party's political mores are somewhat incoherent, they heavily emphasise cutting government spending and taxes. They agitate for minimal government and greater freedom of individual and/or community action. They object to the public sector providing basic services, like healthcare and welfare.

What bitter irony that in the US a vocal but widely derided minority are espousing these policies, whilst in the UK they're suddenly the mainstream. But the UK never had anything even vaguely analogous to the Tea Party movement, and the coalition definitely didn't sweep to power on a dismantle-the-state ticket. How did we end up with government in the style of the crazy American right wing? Weren't the Liberal Democrats once a left wing political party? What the hell happened?

Make no mistake, this spending review can talk efficiency savings and streamlining procurement all it likes, but cuts like this are an unequivocal ideological statement. The government is saying that the state is far too big. There are too many people working in the public sector. There shouldn't be so many public services. It costs too much to provide everyone with a basic standard of living.

There are many, including plenty of public sector employees, who would agree with those statements in principle. Then they would protest vociferously about the high cost of train tickets, about class sizes at their child's school, about cancer drugs not being provided on the NHS, about the local community centre closing, about potholes in the road, about the lack of police on the streets, about their elderly relatives having to pay for care, about the costliness of being a student, about the wait for their local council to answer the phone, about inadequate flood defences, about the lack of NHS dentists, about every little thing that public sector does which we all take for granted. It might seem blindingly obvious, but still needs to be said: none of these services are going to improve when a lot of their money is taken away from them. Get used to being put on hold, to being told that there's now a charge, or just that no, we don't do that any longer.

There have been times when I thought perhaps I was being unduly paranoid to assume the government had an explicitly anti-state agenda. But then I came across this paragraph in the spending review document:

The Government will pay and tender for more services by results rather than be the default provider; look to set proportions of specific services that should be delivered by non-state providers including voluntary groups; and introduce new rights for communities to run services, own assets and for public service workers to form cooperatives. [...] Areas of focus for this approach: This approach will be explored in adult social care, early years, community health services, pathology services, youth services, court and tribunal services, and early interventions for the neediest families.

In other words, targets for privatisation and outsourcing, from a rabidly anti-targets regime no less. The mentions of voluntary groups and co-operatives are all very well and fluffy, but who is going to put in a cheaper bid to provide the service? The big private company with rock-bottom costs, or the local community group relying on grants? Faced with 30% cut in budget, local councils will have to pick the lowest cost option. Notice also that first to be sold off will be some of the most sensitive services required by the most vulnerable people, the kind of services with truly awful consequences when they fail.

I'm not going to go into everything that's depressing in the spending review, because I want to finish writing this within the decade. But briefly, the department that funds my job and almost everything I work on, Communities and Local Government, got the worst settlement of all. Over the next three years, their administration and programme budget will fall by 51%. Their capital budget will fall by 74%. That's tantamount to saying that most of what the department does is totally unnecessary. In case you wondered, these extraneous functions include providing affordable housing, planning, regeneration, and infrastructure.

But I am an optimist as well as a cynic, and have managed to find some vestiges of silver lining to the spending review. For one, the Carbon Reduction Commitment has been fiddled with to make it into a £1 billion stealth carbon tax on large businesses. It won't be hypothecated back into climate change mitigation, but it's still more of a carbon tax than I'd dared to hope for. In addition, the Department for Transport can no longer afford the £1.3 billion project to turn the A14 North of Cambridge into a vast motorway. In my personal view, the scheme was totally inappropriate and appallingly carbon-heavy, as well as a perpetual political flashpoint. I won't miss it, although the A14 needs fixing somehow (tolls?) as there are continually accidents on it.

Little rays of sunshine aside, the title of my blog has never seemed more appropriate: welcome to age of austerity. If the Tea Party have any sense (although frankly I doubt it), they'll be watching the UK with interest over the next few years. What happens when you suddenly and radically roll back all public services in an economically fragile country with high unemployment? Stay tuned to find out!

Particularly good spending review commentary that I've come across: the wonderful Joseph Stiglitz on why the cuts won't work and more on how local government got the worst of the spending review.

Can't Someone Else Do It?

Not long ago, Suffolk County Council announced their intention to outsource everything that they do. I have a personal interest in this as much of my family live in Suffolk, but also find it an interesting idea conceptually. For the sake of argument, why not outsource all services and just leave a few council employees in a commissioning role? There are a number of implications:

• Cost.
  
  The tacit assumption here is that the private sector can provide services more cheaply than the public sector. This may or may not be true. Yes, the private sector is profit motivated and therefore supposedly more efficient. But companies will not provide a service if they can't make a profit. If local services are privatised, council tax revenues will pay for private sector profits. Is that something people are ready to face up to?
  
  
• Quality of service.
  
  This will be entirely dependent on contractual negotiations. I mean no disrespect to local government procurement, but the private sector have better lawyers and fewer scruples. I've undertaken procurement before, and it is a tricky business even when the contract is relatively small and short-lived. For a recent example of what happens when contractual negotiations go wrong, see the saga of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway.
  
  
• Local Enterprise.
  
  The outsourcing debate involves frequent reference to social enterprises and community groups doing things for themselves. But let's not kid ourselves. A multi-million pound road maintenance contract is going to go to the lowest bidder, and that's going to be a big company with economies of scale. Outsourcing will not necessarily cause a flowering of local enterprise. Local authorities are not legally allowed to favour local companies over others when undertaking procurement, and in the current financial situation the lowest bidder is going to win. The lowest bidder is unlikely to employ a lot of local people, or indeed a lot of people period.
  
  
• Partnership.
  
  County councils don't work in a vacuum. They have a constant need to talk to district councils, police, health services, and local residents, to name but a few. Indeed, they have legal duties to do so. Although working in partnership is time-consuming and can often seem very unwieldy, when it doesn't happen the results are often disastrous. Witness the recent cases of vulnerable children slipping through the cracks as social services failed to communicate with police and healthcare colleagues. When two (possibly competing) private companies are involved, can a reasonable level of partnership working happen? Can co-operation be secured contractually, or will the private sector just pay it lip-service?
  
  
• Accountability.
  
  This is by far the biggest issue. If all local services are contracted out, accountability will be entirely contractual in nature. The private sector is not democratically answerable to local people, except through the media. Where does this leave local councillors? They will in effect be entirely useless, and might as well not exist. Their constituents will come to them with the usual complaints about bin collection, potholes, and leisure centres, which they will have absolutely no way of addressing (beyond suggesting that they call the relevant company's helpline).
  

When thinking this through, you start to wonder why have a county council in the first place. The two-tier local council system in much of England is very unwieldy and creates a lot of duplication and wasteful political manuvering. Not that many people are aware of how local services are carved up between district and county councils, because it's arbitrary and not particularly interesting. For reference, Suffolk County Council and its peers have the following responsibilities:

• Building & maintaining schools
  
• Caring for vulnerable children (fostering, adoption & children’s homes)
  
• Caring for vulnerable adults (the elderly, disabled, & seriously ill)
  
• Building & maintaining roads & cycleways
  
• Collecting rubbish from homes & businesses, recycling it, & managing waste sites
  
• Building & running libraries & community centres
  
• Registering births, deaths, & marriages
  
• Managing (some) green open spaces
  
• CCTV & community safety
  
• Electoral services
  
• Implementing trading standards & investigating fraud
  
• Providing advice on planning policy & planning applications
  
• Archaeology & conservation of the historic environment
  
• Prevention & response to surface water flooding
  
• Pest control & animal welfare
  
• Management of public rights of way
  
• Planning the future need for all the services listed above

Many county councils also do the following:

• Support economic development in the local area
  
• Encourage more sustainable living by promoting recycling, non-car travel, etc
  
• Regeneration projects

The variety and complexity of these services, and their interdependencies with services provided at district level, have resulted in county councils employing many thousands of people. Suffolk's decision to divide all these services up into packages and outsource them in three phases is (to borrow a phrase from Sir Humphery Appleby) brave. Given the overriding need for 30% budget cuts, some outsourcing is inevitable. There are areas of duplication that could be cut, nice-to-have projects that are no longer affordable, and great potential for pooling resources with other public sector organisations (sharing HR and admin functions with other councils, for example).

What Suffolk is proposing is an order of magnitude more ambitious than that. It has decided to entirely divest itself of all services within the next two years. It would be amazing if that timeframe is even legally possible. I strongly feel that the council should proceed more slowly, first piloting the outsourcing scheme with smaller and less risky services. Contracts will need to be negotiated very thoroughly, be open to public view (this is definitely not current practise), and include clear penalties for inadequate quality of service.

Suffolk's report into their 'New Strategic Direction' suggests that outsourcing everything will strengthen local democracy, make services more responsive, and give communities more capacity to take control of their lives. All three claims look dubious to me. The report talks of councillors providing strategic direction, but in reality once contracts with companies are signed, they will have no further influence. Unless the intention is continual contractual review and renegotiation (time-consuming, inefficient, & wouldn't address the public-private legal expertise imbalance), for years at a time local councillors would have no grounds to interfere with the way services are managed. I've never met a local councillor who would be satisfied with that. In fact, I think most would be apoplectic.

Moreover, there are some services that I'd be uncomfortable with outsourcing as a matter of principle. The protection of abused children and vulnerable adults should not be something that companies profit from, there is too much of a moral hazard at stake. Company law states that private companies have a duty to maximise returns for their shareholders; this duty is not overriden by the moral imperative to protect children and adults at risk.

Suffolk County Council are to be commended for taking the Big Society to its logical conclusion, and thus focussing the debate about what local authority cuts will really mean. Reading their report, though, makes it clear that the full implications of outsourcing have not been considered. Local Councillors don't seem to get that they are making themselves impotent and irrelevant, as well as ridding themselves of the people who set up their meetings, write papers, type up minutes, and make them coffee. I presume that in the fullness of time they will start doing these tasks themselves, before eventually realising that their jobs have become pointless. Whereupon they will outsource themselves to a local newspaper columnist, and the privatisation of Suffolk County Council will be complete. According to their timetable, this can be expected in September 2012.

For further comment on the Suffolk experiment try the Guardian, BBC and East Anglian Daily Times.

EDITED TO ADD I've just found a very interesting blog post on this by Flip Chart Fairy Tales.

I Used to Care But Now Things Have Changed

This post has a soundtrack from the wonderful Mr. Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed.

I've recently been giving some thought to how my views on cutting the budget deficit have changed over the past year.

In 2009 my bugbear was the Labour government's 'deficit-what-deficit?' policy. At the time, it seemed entirely irresponsible to ignore the budget cuts and tax rises that would clearly need to happen. Moreover, both opposition parties seemed to be colluding to cover this up. Prior to and during the election this year, none of the three parties put forward proposals for how exactly they would tackle the deficit. All of them said that it would be tackled, then waved away the details of how. The principle point of argument then turned out into when the deficit should be dealt with.

During this pre-election period, I was enthusiastically pro-cuts, as well as pro-restructuring taxation. During the time I've worked in the public sector, I've witnessed a lot of what felt like wasteful and pointless expenditure of time and resources. I found it deeply frustrating at times that public sector structures evolve so slowly, and are never quite suitable for the current challenge. So I thought that tackling the deficit could prove to be a great opportunity to restructure institutions in order to tackle climate change, inequality and social deprivation. To identify wasteful areas of spending and duplication, to reconnect public institutions with the public they serve, and to demonstrate that a low carbon future is actually cheaper than business as usual. What I hoped for was a long-term plan for reducing public spending whilst kick-starting a low carbon economy.

Naturally, many of the phrases I've used in the above paragraph were also featured in the manifestos of all three political parties. The coalition document probably included most of them too. But I've become a lot more cynical in the past few months, and the government's deficit reuction plans are not what I had in mind.

The most critical difference is that I thought the public sector should be restructured in a considered way, with a view to the long term. Specifically, with a view to 2050, when we will be emitting 80% less carbon dioxide. So says the Climate Change Act. In contrast, the coalition have made a point of doing everything very fast. They threw together an emergency budget, abolished all manner of institutions, and proposed almighty upheavals of every government department in their first month of government. In fact, they claimed proudly to be turning the entire concept of government upside down.

What has changed my view on cuts is that the public sector and population at large have been entirely absent from this decision making. I don't call a couple of websites inviting bright ideas sufficient consultation for turning government upside down. Indeed, even the usual impact assessments seem to have been skipped for many changes. Until October's spending review, it won't be clear exactly how much pain each agency, scheme, and fund will carry over the next few years. This uncertainty and feeling of utter helplessness results in a public sector full of very jumpy, disillusioned employees with a penchant for black humour.

I am no longer the enthusiast that I was because the suddenness and depth of the coalition's cuts scare me. I simply don't see how they can possibly help the economy to recover. The government's message seems to be that reducing the deficit, whatever the effect on the public sector, will miraculously fix the weak economy.

This ignores basic economic theory - government spending is part of GDP. Reduce spending and GDP falls. Cut jobs and unemployment rises. There is no automatic rebalancing whereby the private sector grows as the public sector shrinks; the two are interdependent. To illustrate, ministers often rail about the public sector wasting money on consultants. Well if that money wasn't wasted, those private sector consultants wouldn't have jobs. Wasteful it may be, but it's also a job subsidy. Likewise, infrastructure investment required private sector firms to actually build the bridges, roads, and railways, which they make a tidy profit on. Public sector support for education and research is absolutely vital to the private sector; if the UK doesn't offer the skills and innovation companies need, they will go elsewhere.

Reducing the size of the public sector will therefore reduce the size of the private sector, at least initially. A significant, possibly record-breaking, rise in unemployment next year looks inevitable. There's nothing like high unemployment to knock confidence amongst banks (mortgage arrears!), retailers (saving not spending!), and markets (recession!). Rising unemployment also has huge social impacts, reduces tax revenues, and, without significant intervention, perpetuates itself to the next generation.

In 2009 I thought that sensible cuts could bring about economic recovery, and feared that the government would just ignore the deficit and lumber on regardless. In 2010, I no longer have to worry about the deficit being ignored, quite the opposite. Perhaps this is a case of be careful what you wish for? The problem is that the cuts we're getting look like they will damage both the economy and our ability to tackle climate change and social problems.

Ironically, over the past year not that much has changed in relation to my job. In 2009 I didn't think that it would last beyond 2011. Now I'm nearly certain that it won't. Which brings me neatly to an elegantly written new blog that I found through Society Guardian, documenting how it feels to be a redundant public servant. The author writes from a much more level-headed perspective than me, as befits someone with 20 years in the public sector to my 4. I recommend that you take a look.

Regression

Recently the Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed the intuitively obvious: the 2010 budget will be regressive. In other words, it will have a stronger negative impact on the poorer inhabitants of the UK.

As the IFS analysis points out, the government's budget impact assessments completely missed out £4.1 billion of the £11 billion cuts to welfare budgets, including the significant changes to Housing Benefit. Claims of a 'progressive' budget have been based on ignoring a large proportion of the policies within it. The coalition's defense of this claim continues to be based on the idea that cutting the deficit is progressive in and of itself, even if the effect of those cuts falls disproportionately on the poorest. I for one would query whether this is what 'progressive' actually means.

What particularly struck me in the IFS report is the contrast between pre-announced and budget policies. According to the IFS analysis, the coalition policies announced before the budget were geuinely progressive, taking most from the richest. These polices were basically tax-based; raising the income tax threshold, changes to national insurance, etc.



Compare that to the policies announced within the budget, including significant cuts to welfare budgets and an increase in the biggest regressive tax: VAT.



Look at that reversal. The implication is depressing but not surprising - all the nice policies were touted during the election and when the coalition was formed. Once the government was entrenched, they laid into the poor.

But is the effect regressive when all of the policies are taken into account - do they balance out?



In a manner of speaking they do. However, if you aren't a pensioner and don't have children, yes, the total effect of coalition tax and benefit policies is regressive. The largest proportional impact will fall on the poorest of this group. For families with children, the greatest impacts are shared between the richest and poorest. Pensioners at all income levels are effected relatively equally, as most of the changes pass them by.

Take a look at more detail of the impacts by household type.



The greatest negative impacts will fall on households reliant on benefits. This is consistent with the government's fuzzily-articulated aim to get people off benefits and into work. However the simplistic 'take away benefits and they'll work' approach is based on any number of fallacies, for instance that work is available, that claimants have the suitable skills for work that is available, and that it's appropriate for everyone to work. Why should a single parent work full-time? They'll just have to employ someone to care for their child(ren), which seems like a waste of money and time. Plus of course there are many with disabilities or illnesses that prevent them working.

You will note that the greatest loss of proportional income falls on households with no earners and children. I'd emphasise the word proportional; such households aren't going to have much of an income to start with. Losing 7% of it will be significant, not least in its effect on the children. It's ironic that a government claiming to be pro-family are in fact penalising people for breeding through the tax and welfare systems.

No-one gains from this budget, but to lose out least you'll need to be in a childless household of working age in the upper half of the income distribution. Which I am lucky enough to be, for the moment. (In case you're wondering where in the income distribution you are, try this tool.)

The IFS analysis is very useful, but what's more alarming is that it only models tax and benefit policies. This is reasonable, as modelling the effects of wider cuts to departmental budgets is nigh-impossible. It's important not to forget, though, that departmental budget cuts will also have a disproportionate impact on poorer households. Many don't have the option to 'go private' when public services reduce or disappear.

The 25% cuts apply to much that we take completely for granted: the police, fire service, environmental health, justice system, scientific research, flood defense, road maintenance, and public parks & nature reserves, for example. These are the kind of things people assume will be there when needed. That won't necessarily be the case.