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.

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.

Striking A Balance

In the spirit of austerity, I've been on staycation for a week. I spent half the time with my family in the wilds of East Anglia. Although I was deliberately trying to keep my brain off matters political (I virtually stopped checking the Guardian website, even), the change of scene did make me consider how localism and the Big Society might operate differently in rural and urban areas.

But that post hasn't quite formed in my head yet. At the moment it's the holiday season, so the office is quiet and edicts from politicians have slowed to a trickle. This provides a helpful opportunitity to consider the implications of what's been announced so far. To this end, I've discovered a fun new toy, the Essex County Council Budget Maker.

This webpage sets out the fact that to keep up the 2009/10 level of service for the county, Council Tax would have to rise by 14.1% to balance out the government's cuts in grants. Apart from being somewhat politically contentious, this would be impossible. The June Budget froze council tax for next year. So, what to cut? My approach was to go through the service headings and shave what I'd consider a reasonable amount off each. I tried to protect care for young & old people, as well as skills budgets (vital given current levels of unemployment), but didn't increase spend on anything.

My budget was completely unaffordable; it would have required a 6% rise in council tax. Somewhat depressed, I then systematically shaved a percentage point off every sector until I got it in balance. I was harshest to Olympic Legacy (22% cut), Essex Championed (17% cut - these functions strikes me as something that could be integrated into other services) and transport infrastructure (12% - no major investments for a while). Despite those high cuts, schools took a 4% hit, as they're by far the biggest cost in the whole budget.

In my view, Essex County Council have hit on a very useful communication tool here. Recent research shows that most of the population still don't realise how deep cuts will bite. Their widget lets you play with a large council budget, bringing home just how difficult the prioritisation decisions of local councillors and senior officers are going to be. I wonder if Cambridgeshire County Council would consider creating one of these?

In the meantime, I suggest that you have a go yourself.