Much Ado About Windfarms

Now that I've been made redundant, I've decided to become an armchair auditor. As an employee of a local council, I was under an obligation not to allow my personal opinions to interfere with the execution of local councillors' wishes. Such is the democratic operation of local government. This can at times be acutely frustrating, as local councillors sometimes made decisions that were very difficult to justify, and which I personally disagreed with entirely. To begin, an issue of particular interest to me: renewable energy.

South Cambridgeshire District Council covers the doughnut of attractive villages and farmland around Cambridge. It has no major population centres and a lot of picturesque and very expensive rural housing. The council has a rather two-faced approach to renewables; they love solar panels but hate wind farms.

This August their Climate Change Working Group were updated on a project to install solar panels on South Cambridgeshire Hall, the council's office in Cambourne. Which I believe is already quite an energy efficient building, as it would built quite recently. At a full council meeting in July it was also resolved to review its policies in order to encourage the installation of solar panels on listed buildings. Moreover, it is encouraging that South Cambs have kept up their local councillor Climate Change Working Group, as too many Conservative councils ditched any such thing as soon as Pickles lumbered into CLG.

However, their seemingly enlightened approach is rather undermined by Motion 90B:

It was RESOLVED that this Council supports seeking energy from renewable resources. However, applications for wind farms (2 turbines or more) cause deep concerns to our residents by nature of their size, scale and noise. This Council believes that a minimum distance of 2 kilometres between a dwelling and a turbine should be set to protect residents from disturbance and visual impact. If the applicant can prove that this is not the case a shorter distance would be considered. This will be addressed during the review of the Local Development Framework.

Notice the absence of any evidence whatsoever to support the figure of 2 km. It was apparently arbitrarily chosen to ensure that wind farm development would be considered unacceptable throughout South Cambridgeshire, as one local councillor commented that nowhere in the district is less than 2 miles (note different metric) from a dwelling. As far as I am aware, there is no map available to show what, if any, area in the district would be acceptable for wind turbine development under this edict. For reference, the government standard for a buffer zone between a wind turbine and a built-up area is 600 metres.

I was pleased to see that a member of the public responded back to this with a very sensible question:

In what way exactly would a wind turbine be judged differently to another structure of a similar size such as a manufacturing plant, water tower, crane or communications mast etc. as regards visual impact or noise? Does the motion mean that a planning application for a wind turbine might be rejected whereas an application for some other development of equivalent size, noise etc. would be considered for approval?

The councillor's answer shows how hollow the motion was - all planning applications must be considered on their merits, and refusals on the basis of, 'I just don't like wind turbines, so there' will be overturned at appeal anyway. Without evidence that a wind turbine within 2 km of a house will have a significantly detrimental effect, the whole thing is pointless posturing.

This stance would be more defensible were wind and solar capacity in the area comparable. The East of England Renewable Energy Capacity Study looked at the technical potential for renewable energy just last year. The whole report can be found here. It doesn't disaggregate to district level, but the whole of Cambridgeshire has the technical potential to produce 45,536.8 Gigawatt Hours of electricity from wind. The figure for solar is 230 GwH. South Cambridgeshire has a lot of agricultural land, ideal for wind farms, but lacks roofs to put solar panels on so the contrast in potential is likely to be even more stark.

I reserve most of my rancor for Cambridgeshire County Council, though. The County owns quite a bit of agricultural land, which it has been trying to use more effectively to bring in money. One plan was to site wind turbines on some of this land. Councillors agreed to this and a considerable amount of feasibility work was done. This was the plan:

Should all of the 4 sites proceed as outlined, based on current values the Council's income could peak at an annual rent of more than £700,000. The corresponding agricultural rent for the land lost would be less than £1,000

Plus, of course, more renewable energy and lower emissions. Local news coverage was positive and a considerable amount of consultation took place in the identified sites.

Then Councillor Nick Clarke became leader of Cambridgeshire County Council. A report went to the County Council Cabinet on the 6th September seeking to defer and basically kill the project.

It's worth reading that report, in order to confirm that there is no justification provided for the decision. Officers couldn't come up with any reasons for it in their report, but politicians did it anyway. Putting aside the environmental implications, £10,000 has already been spent on developing the project, and thus wasted if it stops. These two sections of the report (which, please note, is supposed to set out why this project isn't happening) are worth quoting:

[...] if wind farm development proceeded on all four sites over the twenty-five year life of the leases the Council’s income would peak at close to £900,000 per annum, unadjusted for rent reviews or inflation. In addition there would be direct payments by developers into local community funds of about £80,000 per annum. There are also Government proposals to allow local authorities to retain all of the business rates from wind farm sites in their area.

[...] Several tenants, with the Council’s encouragement, have been investigating the potential for small scale wind turbines on their holdings. One tenant was looking at a 100m tall but most were looking at 20m turbines which are smaller than a telecommunications mast. These capitalise on Feed in Tariffs which are expected to change in April 2012 and are considered by many to be an excellent business opportunity and are mostly receiving planning consents from District Councils.

It is also proposed that these developments are halted too. These have less of a visual impact than full size wind turbines and produce good financial returns for both the tenants and the Council. It is proposed to reimburse one tenant’s abortive costs for feasibility work which will be in the region of £5,000.

So Cambridgeshire County Council is forgoing a considerable amount of money, losing several thousand through contract breaking and abortive work, all because 'Fenland has too many wind farms already'. As the report notes, that is a purely anecdotal view; the people consulted in detail about the projects had much less negative, simplistic opinions.

You might ask why I blame this decision, which I believe is nothing short of moronic short-sighted NIMBYism, on Councillor Nick Clarke. Well, he boasts about it on his blog. His comment about putting people before profit is priceless. His inaugural speech as leader began with the phrase 'open for business'. He believes Cambridgeshire County Council should above all support and involve businesses, although apparently not those that develop wind farms. Choosing to 'put people first' in this context is a bit rich when you consider the cuts to transport, schools, and social care which merited no such consideration. Indeed, some of those cuts need not have happened if the council had, say, uncovered a large and steady source of annual income from its farmland.

Despite Councillor Clarke clearly thinking this decision was a crowd-pleaser, local media coverage was at best ambivalent. But this wasn't the end of the story, as not every County Councillor agreed with Clarke. The Enterprise, Growth, and Community Infrastructure Overview and Scrutiny Committee called in the decision. Although they didn't have the authority to overturn it, they have kicked it back to Cabinet, with a request to give reasons this time.

Quote from the minutes:

In discussion, Committee Members raised the following issues:

Wind farm development was supported and promoted by both local and national policies, and was also the policy of the Administration’s party. There was no rationality, either through evidence or policy basis, in the Cabinet decision;

Pointed out that there was a natural limit to the number of wind turbines that could be constructed. The Cabinet decision would not stop wind turbines being developed, it would merely stop the County Council and County Council tenants receiving any benefits from wind farm development;

A number of Committee Members indicated that they had been consulted prior to this Cabinet decision and had indicated that whilst some of them were not opposed to windfarms in principle, they were opposed to further wind farm development on the basis of the feedback received from their residents. It was also pointed out that the subsidies offered to develop wind farms ultimately came from tax payers’ pockets;

Suggested that the blanket ban approach needed to reconsidered, possibly to include permitting small applications below a certain height, or on a case-by-case basis;

Stressed the Council’s responsibility for its tenant farmers, and the need to reconsider this decision very carefully on the basis of evidence, and in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders; [...]

Cabinet will discuss this again on the 25th October, with a recommendation to at least lift the blanket ban on wind turbines. Cabinet meetings are open to the public, but unfortunately I have lectures that clash so can't attend. No doubt it will be enlightening.

Here is a further insight into the County Council Leader's views on wind farms:

I recognise that there are an extreme range of opinions from eco warriors who want to save the world and think that emitting less carbon in Cambridgeshire is the answer to those who just don’t like them towering over the landscape.

The trouble is if you mix in some political mantra, a Liberal Democrat opposition party who have lost their way and finding it very difficult to make any traction politically and a ruling group who want to make a positive difference for the people of Cambridgeshire a fuss is bound to happen.

(That is a direct copy and paste; I have resisted the urge to correct the punctuation and grammar.)

This should not be a party political issue. The wind turbines were proposed by a Conservative County Council administration and are now being ditched by another Conservative County Council administration. Moreover, Councillor Clarke admits that there hasn't been a proper consultation, just a few people from Fenland saying they don't like wind turbines. When this much money is at stake, that's just not good enough.

Now that I'm no longer working for a local council, I, like Nick Clarke, can 'tell it as it is'. In this case, a huge pile of bullshit. Putting people before profits, huh? People were not given the choice between a few wind turbines and local services cut being because the council ignored a £900,000/year source of income!

Properly designed wind farms, sited with local consultation, do not blight people's lives. Rolling blackouts might, and that is what we will have in 2018 if we do not invest in ALL methods of energy generation, as well as energy efficiency. There isn't a choice between wind farms and business as usual, there's a choice between wind farms and blackouts. Councillors claim that their electorates wouldn't tolerate wind farms, because they are happy to listen to small but very vocal campaign groups. Turbines aren't appropriate everywhere, but councillors wilfully ignore empirical evidence, which they seem to see as threatening. By promoting a needlessly adversarial approach to planning wind farms, councillors are preventing communities from sharing in their financial benefits. Neither is it true that everyone in Cambridgeshire hates them on principle. In Gamlingay the community are installing one of their own.

However, there are reasons to be cheerful. I comfort myself that Councillor Clarke can huff and puff against wind farms all he likes, but it'll do him little good. Although it can impede wind development on its own land, the County Council has no planning powers to prevent it elsewhere; these lie with the districts. Moreover, the anti-wind districts will find that the presumption in favour of sustainable development overturns every refusal of permission on appeal.

I've largely lost faith in the ability of local government to tackle climate change, at least in its current form. The government is wilfully ignoring the incongruence between the binding targets of the Climate Change Act and Carbon Budgets and the fact that many Conservative local councillors won't even listen to the phrase 'climate change'. There is no leadership on environmental issues to be found in most local council chambers, just apathy and cowardice disguised as 'reflecting the concerns of the electorate'. Their electorate includes young people like me, and our voices are not being heard.

This is not the case throughout Cambridgeshire, though. Cambridge City Council deserves much wider recognition for its efforts to tackle climate change. There is also a project trying to approach planning for renewable energy in a constructive, positive manner: the Cambridgeshire Renewables Infrastructure Framework. It is well worth getting involved with, as it brings individuals, businesses, and politicians together to discuss renewable energy reasonably, like adults. Such informed dialogue is badly needed to redress the balance. Local councillors are making retrogressive and short-sighted decisions; their electorates must hold them to account.

Who Cares

This was not an easy post to write, but has been on my mind for a while. Social care recently made the news due to the possible collapse of Southern Cross, which cares for 31,000 frail elderly people in 750 homes around the country. Prior to that story breaking, I suspect much of the public knew little about how social care works in this country, unless they needed to ask for it. The government's online portal Directgov largely bundles social care into its 'Disabled People' section, but its remit is wider than that. As well as the disabled, care should be available to all other vulnerable people who need it: the elderly, children, even whole families. The responsibility for this lies with upper tier (county) and unitary councils, not the National Health Service. However practically all councils have contracted out elements of care to the private sector, for example paying for elderly people to stay in private care homes like those run by Southern Cross.

The British population is an ageing one. Government statistics state that between 1984 and 2009 the number of people aged 65 and over in the UK increased by 20% to 10.1 million. In 2009, 16% cent of the population were aged 65 and over. The number of people aged 85 and over more than doubled over the same period to 1.4 million and the percentage aged under 16 fell from 21 per cent to 19 per cent. People are living longer, which is cause for celebration. However, the public sector is not keeping pace with demographic change. It is inevitable that as the population ages, the cost of social care for the elderly will rise. It is already one of the largest chunks of county council expenditure, generally second only to education provision.

To date, the government's approach to social care strikes me as disgracefully negligent. The Department of Communities and Local Government took the largest budget cut of any government department in the Spending Review; their administration and programme budget reduced by 51% over three years and their capital budget by 74%. This is the department that funds local government, and naturally the cuts were passed on. Cambridgeshire County Council, for example, needs to cut £116 million from its budget in five years, including cutting 25% of social care funding. Yet Communities and Local Government takes no responsibility for social care, as it ostensibly belongs to the Department of Health. Unless I've misunderstood somehow, having completely seperate government departments funding and setting policy for such an important service is incredibly dangerous and counterproductive. CLG's sudden reductions in grants to local councils are putting vulnerable people in need of social care at great risk.

That's the national picture, horrifying in a dry statistical way. Contrast this with a personal experience. My Grandfather was born in 1920 and worked for the National Health Service as an administrator from the end of the Second World War until his retirement. He is 91 years old and my Grandmother, who is 85 years old, can no longer care for him, as she has been doing for many years. He is incontinent, can barely walk even with a frame, and has dementia. He was taken into hospital three months ago with an infection and has remained there since. The infection has cleared up, but the frailties of 91 years cannot be cured. The county council's social services have determined that my Grandmother cannot take care of him alone and he needs overnight care. However the county council do not provide overnight care at home. Whether this is a long-standing policy or a recent cut I'm unsure, but the result is that my Grandfather needs a place in a nursing home.

All the affordable care homes within a reasonable distance are full and have waiting lists, leaving my Grandfather in hospital limbo. He cannot be discharged as he cannot be cared for at home, so for the past few months he has been a textbook bed-blocker. Although he is generally quite content, this is an extremely upsetting and difficult situation for my family. My Grandfather does not need to be in hospital, but there is an acute shortage of the kind of care that he does need.

This is the reality of social care for the elderly today. There aren't enough places in nursing homes for people that need them. Even when places are available, quality of care is variable and sometimes totally disgraceful. Southern Cross demonstrates the ugly side of privatisation - when companies fail their customers suffer. A public service responsible for the lives and wellbeing of the frail elderly should never be allowed to fail. It should not be the case that you can only have a comfortable, secure old age if you can pay at least £500 a week for the privilege. I am ashamed that I didn't realise how bad things had become, and how much they may worsen as cuts continue, until my Grandfather needed care.

I was utterly sickened by Vince Cable's statement that the government wouldn't consider bailing out Southern Cross. Eight hundred and fifty billion pounds was spent bailing out the banks. £850,000,000,000. It was apparently worth propping them up despite their refusal to reform, but putting £230,000,000 towards the care of 31,000 of Britain's most vulnerable people is considered unreasonable. To put that in the clearest possible terms, the rent bill that Southern Cross is struggling to pay is less than 0.03% of the cost of the bank bailout. Southern Cross clearly acted in a financially irresponsible manner; so did the banks. But banking is not an essential public service, and care of the elderly is. I defy Vince Cable to look into the eyes of a ninety-one year old man and tell him that care homes don't deserve a bailout. I defy him to look into my eyes, the eyes of anyone with a frail elderly relative that they love, and say that care homes can be allowed to go bankrupt. Why should Vince Cable even make such a statement? He is Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. How does that position give him the authority to talk about care of the elderly?

The Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights recently criticised the UK's privatised social care model for failing the most vulnerable, which was reported with unusual forthrightness in The Telegraph. The government cannot continue to ignore social care and treat it as purely a problem for local councils. Major reform and investment are needed. As a society we need to face up to old age and give the elderly the care and dignity that they deserve. This is not a party political issue and there is no question of whether we can afford to care for our older generations. It is our fundamental responsibility as a society to do so.

I love my Grandfather and have so much to be grateful to him for. He helped to instill in me a social conscience and awareness of the importance of learning from history. He deserves so much better than his current situation and it makes me very angry that there's little I can do to improve it. Even if a care home place does finally turn up for him, it's incredibly worrying to think that he might get poor care or that the home could go bankrupt. At least my Grandfather has a wife, children, and grandchildren who love him very much and are doing our best to get him what he needs. I hardly dare think of how frail elderly people with distant or disinterested relatives, or no-one at all, cope with the current system.

National action is needed now to save social care from collapse, but I fear that the current government will continue to put austerity first. The Coalition insists that cutting public spending is their absolute priority. I disagree with this for many reasons, but what it really boils down to is that I think human rights are more important than the mirage of What Is Best For The Economy. Comfort and dignity in the last years of your life are rights, not products. In a country as rich as the UK this should go without saying. My Grandfather and his generation were my age when the government brought the welfare state into being. He worked throughout his life with the belief that the government would take care of him in his old age if he needed it. It's despicable to take away that safety net now that he does need it and no longer has the ability to fight for it. Those of us who can stand up for the right of the elderly to be cared for must do so. Not just for those who need it now, but to secure our own future wellbeing.

Don't You Know There's A War On?

I know I should be used to it by now, but I still can't help getting enraged by the government's specious and hypocritical War on Town Hall Non-jobs (currently being enabled by The Telegraph). Quite apart from the fact that this is a 'war' on a largely low-paid, majority female workforce that are trying to make other people's lives better, it's the bare-faced idiocy of it that really gets to me. Quote:

This week Mr Cameron singled out Manchester city council for what he said were “politically-driven” cuts.

He said that, rather than closing help centres, libraries and swimming pools to save £110 million, the council should look closer to home at the chief executive’s pay, for example.

So the Manchester City Council Chief Executive is being paid more than £110 million a year? Somehow I doubt it. Moreover, David Cameron is hardly in a position to tell anyone else off for making 'politically driven cuts', is he?

You know, I wish this much-touted localism was actually genuine. Then maybe local councillors would be able to freely decide who councils employ to do what and, as long as the community were happy, it would be absolutely none of Eric Pickles' or David Cameron's damn business.

Numbers Game

If yesterday's Cambridgeshire County Council meeting was dramatised as a Hollywood movie, the trailer would sound a little like this:

Fifty-four councillors...
Nine and a half hours...
Two arrests...
£161 million cuts over five years...

ONE BUDGET

The full details of Cambridgeshire County Council's budget can be found here. I've been trying to digest what they mean. The meeting really did last until 8pm and was repeatedly held up by hecklers. Amongst all this kerfuffle, the council meeting discussed the budget by five service areas.

Children and Young People's Services will no longer be universal, but rather targeted at the most vulnerable. This includes Connexions, Youth Service, and Children's Centres. Services that are currently provided to all schools will also be targeted in this way, notably transport to school. Subsidies for music activities will end. Capital funding for new schools has all but disappeared, so the need for more school places 'may mean mobile provision in the medium term'. Non-urgent repairs and improvements to schools are to be delayed until more money becomes available.

Community and Adult Services take up the largest proportion of council spend, as it includes care for the elderly, disabled, and abused. Almost all adult social care services are already outsourced, so there is little the council can do to reduce their cost other than asking providers to find efficiency savings. The emphasis is on trying to prevent the need for costly care, by encouraging continued independence. The so-called 'offer to users', in other words the extent of support available, will reduce by 25%.

Community and Adult Services also includes libraries, which will see a 40% cash reduction in their budget over five years. 13 libraries in the county are under review; if they cannot be integrated with other local services or run by communities, they will close by April 2012. The frequency of mobile library visits will be reduced by 50%.

Environment Services cuts include the complete phasing out of bus subsidies, reduced road maintenance, fewer road safety campaigns, and the removal of universal road safety education in favour of targeting 'accident clusters'. The Trading Standards service will be restructured and reduced. Spending on the environment and climate change will be cut by nearly half a million.

Corporate Services includes the back office stuff like coroners, customer service, scrutiny, and democratic services. All of those areas are being reduced, as well as communications, emergency planning, and IT (which will cease to exist as a separate team and be cut by 35%). This rather unsettling phrase sums it up: 'there will be a move towards greater self-sufficiency and uniformity'. Opening hours for contact centres will be reduced, with the aim of ensuring as many people as possible get information online. The council will stop publishing magazines, reduce building maintenance by 38%, and stop any work on energy management. Several offices will be closed.

The final service consists of everything shared with Northamptonshire County Council, in a scheme that was designed to save money before anyone even knew to fear Eric Pickles. It covers things like legal services, human resources, finance, and procurement. Cost savings will be squeezed from here too, by reducing management and improving use of technology.

The documents available to the public don't specify which services the 450 council employees are being made redundant from. The answer is all of them.

Councillors obviously had incredibly difficult decisions to make, faced with £50.4 million savings to be found in a single year. Towards the end of this epic meeting, though, they really misjudged the public mood by overwhelmingly voting against a 5% cut in their allowances, proposed by the single Green councillor. If life was indeed a Hollywood film, at this point someone would have stood up and made a stirring speech about how we're all in this together and the motion would have carried. However this is the real world and the meeting did not end on such a happy note. So if you live in Cambridgeshire, make the most of your local library, rural bus services, specialist teaching, and transport to school now. Soon they will be replaced by the Big Society, or not.

The Big Issue

The phrase Big Society has been ubiquitous recently. Frankly I am getting tired of hearing it, particularly as no-one really knows what it means. Last week I watched Ten O'Clock Live, which was pretty entertaining and is still available on 4od here. The best bit was a loud argument between Johann Hari, Shaun Bailey, and Phillip Blond. Ostensibly this was meant to be about whether the Big Society is a good idea, but was really a debate about what it is. Each panellist had a different view. Amusingly, they apparently continued to argue about this off-air.

Hari described Big Society as a mere phrase, used as a pretext to justify huge cuts in public services.

Bailey saw Big Society as agreement that the government would stop interfering with charities and let them solve social problems in their own way.

Blond enthused that Big Society would lead to co-operatives springing up everywhere, and public services being run by independently by, presumably, enthusiasts.

Evidently, each man's view was entirely shaped by his background and particular hobbyhorses. Bailey is a former Conservative candidate for Hammersmith and now runs a charity there. Hari is a left-wing journalist, columnist for the Independent, and a staunch critic of the cuts. Blond is director of a right-wing libertarian think-tank that has been banging on about mutualisation, collective ownership, and co-operatives for ages.

I can see how all three perspectives have some merit, but overall the debate just gave me the impression that the Big Society is a void into which each individual projects their opinions. This is curious, given the fuzzily-articulated philosophy of collectivity and togetherness that seems to underpin government rhetoric. Of course, for the intended definition of Big Society, it's worth checking with the man who foisted it upon us, Cameron himself. In a recent Guardian article, he laid it out:

...it combines three clear methods to bring people together to improve their lives and the lives of others: devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny; opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve; and encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community.

The article is actually worth reading, as it is a lot clearer than most of the waffle that the government has put out on the subject. Some of it even makes sense, but it is a totally partial approach. Cameron talks of the cuts to public services as an opportunity, but ignores the element of risk. The current government, many of them millionaires, don't see the public sector as a necessary safety net but as an impediment to progress. This post sets out this problem with the Big Society, along with a number of others.

More important than what the Big Society is, though, is what it'll mean. I agree with the David Cameron that the Big Society could transform Britain. It could turn it into a more compassionate, actively involved, resilient place - eventually and in some areas. In others, it could exacebate inequality and tensions between social groups, cause a rapid deterioration in infrastructure and the public realm, and trap people in blighted communities. Basically, diffusing public services into a confusing mass would cause rapid divergence.

That is, if you take David Cameron at face value. Let us look in more detail at his three policy threads, 'devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny; opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve; and encouraging volunteering and social action'.

Devolving power: the Localism Bill defies its name by containing over a hundred new powers for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, including the ability to decide what constitutes an 'excessive' council tax increase. Urban areas without an established 'neighbourhood forum' won't be able to make use of the planning powers in the Bill, and require local councils to mediate between competing bids to take on this status. They also rely on planning authorities to provide advice and resources, which will not be available. Taking control of your destiny through planning is only meaningful if development of some sort happens, which requires investment. Not much sign of public investment any longer, so this require the private sector. Small, largely inexperienced and unresourced groups vs huge developers; the former may notionally have the statutory planning powers, but I think the public sector is needed as a mediator here, or at least a backup.

Opening up public services: the Localism Bill doesn't give community groups any precedence over private companies in bidding to run public services. Realistically, who is going to bid lower? Who is going to demonstrate economies of scale and a track record of delivery? It'll be the big companies. As for collective ownership, I'm not seeing a lot of enthusiasm for that at the coalface of local government cuts. Where's the support for mutualisation? Where are the precedents? Blond mentions one, a port. Has this been tried for housing services, planning departments, highways? All are being cut back at the moment. How do you take collective ownership of something like that? Anyway, when faced with cuts this sudden, local councils just don't have the time to properly consider outsourcing or 'opening up' services. Budget cuts of 20% will arrive before the Localism bill becomes law.

Putting trust in professionals: TRUST? Don't make me laugh! Have you read any press release from CLG lately? Have some samples:

Mr Pickles has raised strong concerns over the frequency of council papers, politically contentious advertising and use of lobbyists, pledging to rewrite the rule book. He believes councils should redirect resources into protecting front line services.

Whitehall has cut back the red tape which holds local community groups back and councils should now do their bit to support this national day of celebration

The taxpayer has a right to look under the bonnet of their Town Hall and see what decisions are being made on their behalf and where their money is being spent [...] Today I'm publishing a new code that will help decipher the Town Hall maze of middle management, bringing more public information to light. This will also give the few remaining refuseniks a clear game plan to follow.

And those are just from the past week! Also within the week, CLG responded incredibly defensively to a Local Government Chronicle article interrogating the department's published spending information. Quote:

The Local Government Chronicle has made claims that "Eric Pickles has spent millions on consultants since he took the reins in the Department for Communities and Local Government reflecting the cost of the reorganisation under way at Eland House."

This assertion is based on a factually inaccurate analysis of the spending over £500 that the Department now publishes as part of its commitment to transparency.

A spokesperson for the Department for Communities and Local Government said:

"It is completely untrue to suggest that millions have been spent on consultants since the change in administration. Several of the figures quoted are incorrect, refer to spending under the previous administration or have been incorrectly entered as consultancy. [So in most cases, it was their mistake not LGC's interpretation]

So much for trust. No wonder the relationship between local and national government is at an all-time nadir. Public servants are being painted as faceless, wasteful bureaucrats in order to justify making hundreds of thousands of them redundant.

Returning to Cameron's 'power in the hands of people', in general this is not a new power or legal change as such, but the expectation that sudden absence of public services will unleash innovation and creativity in dealing with, say, potholes. There are shades of Shumpeter's 'gales of creative destruction' here, the concept of something new and better emerging from chaos. A very old idea, almost always promulgated by those who would remain entirely unaffected by such chaos.

Last of the Big Society characteristics is the encouragement of volunteering and social action. This is laudable, but should also be bounded by realism. Twenty-four per cent of people volunteered formally at least once a month in April-September 2010, which is a fall from 29% in 2007/8 but still not bad. Can volunteers really replace trained public sector professionals, especially when the volunteers need to earn a living themselves?

Meanwhile, the support mechanisms that would allow people to donate more of their time to the community are being cut. Disabled Living Allowance, Child Benefit, in fact all benefits are being cut and/or capped. Social housing is being phased into 'affordable rent' - 80% of market rent unless circumstances are 'exceptional'. Cutting Education Maintenance Allowance and raising tuition fees will reduce access to further and higher education. None of these developments will foster a sense of security and resilience, both of which seem vital to the Big Society even starting to seed in an area.

I don't feel that I've got my head around the Big Society yet, but it doesn't look like anyone else has yet, either. The point that sticks out in my head is this, though. The reductions to public services, the cuts in benefits, and the retreat of the state are not uncertain. They are happening now. The Big Society is still potential, small-scale, and vague. It will work in some places but not others. It is characterised by a huge risk, that when the public sector withdraws, nothing will fill the space in some places. The government thinks this risk is worth taking and indeed seems quite keen on risk in general (just look at what they're doing, or rather not doing, with the economy). That's all very well for politicians, all they have to lose are votes. The majority of the public could find their life blighted if they make their home in a place where society remains that bit too small.

Happy New Year

It's 2011. The sky is grey, it's raining, and Cambridgeshire County Council are making 450 people redundant this year. Unions expect a further 450 or so jobs to go in subsequent years.

The latest survey of local councils, police authorities, fire authorities, and national park bodies suggests that 102,000 jobs will be lost in total. What's striking about this figure is that it covers the 131 of about 500 such organisations. The other 369 organisations have yet to announce their job cuts. Every local authority will be making people redundant. All councils, police, and fire services are facing unprecedented budget reductions. If anyone still thinks that such cuts and job losses will have no effect on services, they must be entirely deluded.

A local council chief executive has even dared to say what every single local government employee is thinking:

You've got this clown of a secretary of state saying that in well-run councils, the public won't notice any difference, I mean what planet is this guy on?

Public servants aren't supposed to be angry, but you look at this and it's unfair.

It's the big lie tactic that if you tell a big enough lie, and say it often enough, then people will believe it.

Like every other public servant, I am supposed to be impartial. But how can anyone with a conscience remain supportive of government policy when its this destructive? Like every other local authority, Cambridgeshire County Council needs to make savings from all services. That includes protection of vulnerable children, care for elderly and disabled adults, and primary and secondary education. Kids and vulnerable adults will pay for mistakes made by bankers. The same bankers whose bonuses will not be limited by the government.

The most important purpose of the public sector is to protect the people who need it. When the government prioritises an ideological war on public spending above essential health, education, emergency, and social services, it is fundamentally failing to do its job. Public servants picked up on this last year. In 2011 I think the wider population are going to realise what austerity means, and they will get angry too.

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.

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.

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.