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.

Go Your Own Way

Every cloud has a silver lining, even at a time of austerity, and my current area of optimism is road transport. The great thing about transport policy is that low carbon solutions are vastly cheaper than business as usual. In my opinion, too much has been spent on roads in the past few decades, whilst policy has been characterised by a complete lack of strategy or innovation. Although public transport would undoubtedly benefit from investment, I would be more inclined get everyone able onto feet and bikes. The latter is helpfully compatible with massive budget cuts, as well as offering much wider social, health and environmental benefits.

There is a wonderfully ironic paradox at work here. We now have a transport minister who wants to 'end the war on motorists' (which is utterly laughable), but cannot afford to build roads. Cycling infrastructure, meanwhile, costs a fraction of motorway upgrades. Moreover, badly maintained roads encourage motorists (the sane ones, anyway) to slow down and drive more carefully. The cheapest cycling infrastructure of the paint-a-white-line-and-call-it-a-cycle-path variety may be pretty ineffectual, but I'd still greatly prefer it to billions being spent on road widening that creates more traffic, more pollution, and wastes more resources.

I am also very happy about the fact that road-pricing is back on the table suddenly. Those who previously considered it an affront to the freedom and dignity of the motorist have suddenly realised that paying to use a road might be better than not having a road at all. Step forward and take a bow, RAC. Currently the Department for Transport is ruling out charging for existing roads, but given the new world of localism, what's to stop particular cities from implementing their own systems? Road pricing forces drivers to think about how much they use their vehicle, encouraging walking or cycling for short journeys. This in turn gets more vehicles off the roads, further encouraging walking and cycling. A recent survey found that 39% of non-cyclists said they didn't bike because it was too dangerous to cycle on the road.

For those who consider that taxing motorists constitutes unfair persecution, here is a graph of relative transport costs, from the DfT's Transport Trends report:



It is a source of perpetual exasperation to me that so many people are willing to accept road pricing and similar taxes on economic grounds, but not environmental ones. Nonetheless, whatever the purpose of the tax, if it has environmental benefits the justification doesn't matter so much.

I'm hoping that austerity will encourage people to realise that:

- Ownership of a car is not a necessity of life for everyone.
- A parking space is not a fundamental right.
- Free use of a motorway is not a fundamental right either.
- If you live in an urban area, a car can be a costly liability.

I definitely don't think that the government would dare to say any of those things, but as cuts bite they shouldn't need to. In case you have yet to notice, my personal views are resolutely anti-car. Just as former smokers can be the most enthusiastically anti-smoking, I am a recovering car owner.

When I lived in Kent I learned to drive, bought a car, and commuted to work daily on the M20. I absolutely hated this enforced commute and deeply resented the bad location of the office that I worked in. I felt constantly, crushingly guilty that I was wasting petrol, adding to congestion, and not getting any exercise. I found it depressing how aggressive driving in traffic made me, and that I caught myself overtaking and zooming too fast along motorways on the odd weekend when they were unclogged.

Upon moving to Cambridge, I realised how unnecessary a car was in a compact urban area. I had to go out of my way to use the thing in summer, and eventually decided I'd be better off with a bike. Problem was, I'd never cycled before. A wonderful, patient friend taught me, and as soon as I was confident enought to commute by cycling, the car became utterly useless. I got rid of it a year ago and have never regretted it. I've saved serious amounts of money - bikes don't need an MOT, insurance, tax, or petrol. When something goes wrong with my bike that I can't fix myself, a repair costs £20 rather than £200. Cycling has also made me fitter & healthier than I've ever been before. Since getting rid of my car, I feel better in mind, body and soul.

People associate cars with freedom, and in rural areas I can see why. But in urban centres, they offer the very opposite. In a city you are so much freer with a bike, your feet, and the odd bus and train. The anxieties of where to park, what if traffic is bad, what the hell does that guy in the van think he's doing, and so forth are vastly reduced. Average traffic speeds in most city centres mean is cycling quicker, too. I think that driving is a useful skill and one I'm happy to have, but why own a car if you don't need to? If in need of one for a specific trip, there are plenty of options. For work journeys, a pool car. Otherwise, Streetcar, hiring, or putting myself on parental car insurance for a short while.

Despite our unreconstructed Minister for Transport, who has unsurprisingly worked in the oil industry, I think that now is a great time for a change of mindset on roads. Given the department's budget cuts, anything but critical maintenance to motorways will become increasingly irrelevant. At a local level, County and Unitary Councils make the decisions, and their budgets are also being severely compressed. New infrastructure projects aren't affordable, so we must use what assets we have to the best effect, getting revenue out of them where possible. That's what the DfT are saying, but they won't spell out what this actually means. Drivers will pay more of the social costs they impose (pollution, congestion, accidents, etc) through parking charges, road pricing, and congestion charging. Making such projects local to a district or county is sensible, as accountability is then clearer. When revenues from road pricing can be seen to pay for local transport improvements, paying such a levy will seem reasonable.

Given its strong existing cycle culture, Cambridge is ahead of the game. It isn't Copenhagen quite yet, but I think it could get there. Transport is one of the few areas in which austerity measures could genuinely improve quality of life, if people try and think beyond cars. Which, trust me, is definitely possible.