Old heads on young shoulders

Now and again I fancy that I should have been an academic. As a general rule one of two things then happens; I either come across a complicated argument and remember that I’m not actually all that intelligent, or else I see an advert for an academic job while browsing and realise that they are generally rather badly paid. This is particularly true for those engaged in the study of British Politics, thanks in no small part to a research funding system which strongly rewards citations in international journals – I suspect you’re much more likely to get those writing about a particle than about participation.

Nonetheless, my fallback plan for the doomsday scenario of local government cutbacks (i.e. one in which I lose my job and can’t get a new one) is to tutor, ideally a position teaching A-Level politics at a well-to-do sixth form college, but I could be persuaded to be flexible on the specifics. If the worst comes to the worst perhaps I’ll move somewhere with a grammar school system and tutor for the 11 plus! For this reason, and because it’s very good, I find myself drawn to the Scenes from the Battleground blog, written by someone much worthier than me in that he is prepared to work in what we shall for now call challenging schools.

Recently, in a tactfully titled post – OFSTED must die - said blog set out the difficulties caused by inspection, and the extent to which the threat of inspection was used as a deus ex to solve arguments in favour of the person invoking the OFSTED-threat. This certainly resonated with me, and the feeling that Councils have been encouraged in the past to “play the Audit Commission’s game”, even when this has involved inspection of a procedure at the expense of the real outcomes involved. In the same way, there can be resource distortion caused by central priorities, meaning that while Councillors and policy staff argue for flexible decision making, fewer targets, less ringfencing of funding, etc etc, service staff in each area will often campaign for their funding to be ringfencing, and in favour of being subject to central targets, as a way of guaranteeing their share of the Council’s spending.

One potential solution to this, according to an academic paper I read recently (which is, in fairness, citing a further paper, I take back everything I said earlier, although that earlier paper is full of maths that I don’t understand), is to have more politically marginal Councils. While the merits of this seem obvious, it’s clear that there is no argument so obvious that it cannot be dressed up in quite fancy theoretical terms.  So;

Using electoral and performance data on English local authorities, [Besley and Preston] examine how patterns of districting affect electoral incentives by making jurisdictions marginal or safe for incumbents. They arue that where the incumbents need to capture the swing voters we should expect to see greater efficiency in government. Competition will enhance governmental effectiveness. Using Audit Commission data on valence issues – that is policies where virtually every voter would concur on what constitutes improvement – they show that patterns of bias within districting do seem to have an effect on local government performance as measured by Audit Commission data.

Or, to put it another way, “Council Leaders who think they’re at risk of losing their jobs will put more of the budget into getting the bins emptied on time and cutting the Council tax, and less into programmes designed to reduce youth imprisonment rates or catch more speeding motorists”. I don’t know about you but I’d say that sounds instinctively plausible…

Maybe I should be an academic after all.

Each bough doth hold its tiny light…

At a meeting towards the end of the week before last – so, mind you, mid-October at best, one of my Councillors wandered in wearing a poppy. It was the first I had seen of the season - though they are already increasingly ubiquitous, particularly among those people who are politically visible and take their cue from PMQs, Question Time, and so on. I am personally of the “November 1st onward” school of poppy-wearing, but each to his own. Everything has to happen before everything else now, which is why my local Co-op has been selling “Mistletoe Kisses” for over a month, and I imagine they’ll be doing 3 for 2 on Easter eggs before we actually make it to 2010.

The Calendar presents a particular difficulty for Councils as we get towards the end of the year, caught as they are between two types of grumpy old man.

First the Scylla of, well, the likes of me, who believe that the Christmas season runs at the very most from Advent to Epiphany, and rue the appearance of Santas, nativity scenes, guiding stars and other more secular accoutrements in every shop window from the day after the Halloween decorations come down if not before.

Secondly, though, Councils face the increasingly more vocal Charybdis of the Christmas Protection League, who hold that anything done between October and March must be branded Christmas, and anything less is a personal attack on Jesus. Holding a civic event for New Year? Diwali? Hanukkah? Then your authority is in league with the forces of darkness, you might as well cancel the December meeting of Cabinet and have them dance around the pagan pine tree in reception chanting win-ter-val win-ter-val. No, wait, that’s not it.

Oxford did particularly well last year in the “Birmingham Winterval Memorial Trophy” contest last year, being roundly condemned because the Council organised ”WinterLight” which didn’t feature Christmas. Except that it did feature Christmas: including carols, trees, cards, and an advent fair (and the rest of the programme wasn’t organised by the Council, but never mind). I imagine this year the Leader of the Council could dress up as the Virgin Mary and ride to Bethlehem on a municipally-branded donkey and certain newspaper outlets (the ones that don’t have three wise men to rub together) would headline that he was absent from the civic carol service.

Surely, though, the origin of the municipal-war-on-Christmas genre goes right back to the Victorian era when the organisers of the Blackpool Festival of Lights not only banned Christmas from the name, but had the affront to bring it to an end in November each year, missing the point entirely. Following this fine Lancashire precedent Rochdale are alleged to have done sterling work in getting their Christmas Lights up before the August Bank Holiday. Any advance on that?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d better get my sprouts on, I like them well done, and Christmas was two months yesterday. Jingle jingle jingle.

It’s all gone a bit quiet

I’m concerned that if I don’t say something insightful soon, I will be cited by a leading politician as an example of a public sector worker who clearly gets far too much holiday. Ironically all I’ve had over summer is four days on the continent, and I’m now about to take a week in some cold, wet portion of the British Isles, which should be very enjoyable. Silence has been caused much more by the lack of anything terribly exciting going on, by some increased demands on both what I optimistically refer to as my ”9ish to 5ish” time, and on my spare time, for a string of reasons with which I won’t bore you.  Suffice it to say that if I can’t find time for 140 characters it’s even less likely I’ll find time for 500 words all that often.

And yet… it feels busy but there’s an eery calm going on. All the big issues in local government are either trundling along on their merry, productive, but faintly dull paths (think Total Place – fascinated by it and what comes out the other end, but it’s not exactly bloggable) or else they are going into a presumed state of suspended animation as the general election edges ever closer (think unitaries). Otherwise I could trade in gossip – and yes, I love gossip, but I’m neither quite anonymous enough, nor quite well-connected enough to know, and pass on, reliable tidbits. I could tell parochial stories about Councillors nobody has ever really heard of, or I could pass on third-hand ‘probably true’ gossip about why people are or aren’t chairing particular LGA committees. But I won’t.

Nonetheless, for the 150 people a week or so who are still inexplicably coming back to see whether I’ve said anything new – yes, I’m still here, I’m still reading blogs, and I’m still thinking thoughts. Most of them are “I wish I had a multi-year pay settlement right now” and “Inflation is going to be about 5% in Spring, isn’t it?”. Oh well, to be honest if I had to choose between a pay rise and more job security, I’d take the job security - at least until I’ve accumulated enough redundancy entitlement to pay for a career change to something that is likely to prosper in the next decade. My fallback plan at the moment is to tutor resits for what we shall call “well off but less academically inclined” children who fail their A-level Politics (or at a push Religious Studies, Philosophy, History - I know about all sorts, me…) but whose parents remain keen for them to attend university. No idea how big that market is. Perhaps I could tutor for the 11+, that might be a growth industry soon.

Topping the poll

Congratulations to Luke Akehurst for a second year as number one in the “Top Blogs by a Councillor” listings at totalpolitics.  Luke’s blog is undoubtedly a fascinating read if you want to hear about the latest in internal Labour Party fights, the thinking behind Government decisions, and why the Labour Left and the Tory Right are necessarily wrong about everything (the ontological argument for Blairism). Congratulations too to new entry at Number 2 and occasional LGO correspondent Paul of The Bickerstaffe Record.

It is perhaps telling, though, that the further you go up the top 30, the more they are blogs by Councillors, and the less they are blogs about being a Councillor. Perhaps that’s the nature of a poll for which everyone votes – local politics will only rarely be very interesting to people who don’t live in the local area in question. Anyway, well done all, well done as well to those very good blogs who opted out for their own reasons, but would clearly have done well had they participated. Some new reading for me, and maybe some new links to add…

Strengthening Local Democracy – Government Consultation

I could, and might yet, say all sorts about this document. One particular little bullet point hidden away on page 44 caught my eye, though.

163. This raises the question of whether sub-regional structures are sufficiently visible and accountable to citizens. If they are to be granted significant powers and responsibilities, it is vital that local people are able to understand and be involved in the arrangements that are in place to manage activity and make decisions at this level.

164. Any new proposals will need to fit with the ideas set out in the first chapter of this consultation of local residents understanding of where they can hold local services in an area to account. We also wish to raise the question of whether citizens should be more directly involved in electing representatives to structures at this level, if significant additional powers, as was the case with London, are to be granted. Any reforms in this area would of course require public support. Whilst the government’s policy on mayoral governance at local authority level remains as outlined early in chapter 2, we are interested to hear views on other possible options including:

• establishing ‘city-region leaders’ – existing sub-regional partnerships could elect, from among their members, a single leader who would be a figurehead for the partnership. This would not lead to more powers but would provide greater visibility for the work of the partnership to citizens
• creating new sub-regional local authorities – rather than current and planned sub-regional bodies, which are limited to specific issues such as economic development and transport, new sub-regional local authorities could be established with a much wider range of powers. Any direct elections to these authorities would lead to greater engagement with the sub-regional level but there would need to be a clear division of responsibilities between the new and existing tiers, and scrutiny could be complex
• mayors for city- and sub-regions – executive mayors with powers over strategic issues could be created for city- or other sub-regional areas and be directly elected by the population. This would provide strong accountability but there would again need to be a clear division of responsibilities. The role of existing local authorities would be reduced, although they could scrutinise the activity of the mayor
• a combination of a directly elected executive mayor and directly elected subregional scrutiny body – this is similar to the model of the mayor and assembly established in London. The mayor would have executive power, potentially over a wide range of issues, and would be held to account by a body of people directly elected by citizens for that purpose.

Ahem.

The Councillor won’t see you now – a Whodunnit

Wandsworth Councillor James Cousins (whose blog I am allowed to recommend because he’s opted out of the Total Politics poll) is hosting an interesting little debate on surgeries. Broadly, he thinks nobody is coming to them and they’re therefore not much use. He sets out this case here, and provides an update based on both the discussion and e-mails he’s received here.

I used to work quite closely with a Conservative Councillor who was very forthright about not holding surgeries (in fairness he was very forthright about everything) and whose line was “I don’t need to hold a surgery, my constituents know which pub I drink in, and they can come and see me there if they need to”. I guess that’s one of the advantages of representing a large rural village. I know plenty of urban Labour Councillors who have given up holding surgeries too, and use that time to knock on doors in the area, asking if people have any problems they wish to raise, or deliver a leaflet the night before saying “Please put this in your window if you would like to talk to your Councillor tomorrow”.

So let’s assume for now that traditional surgeries are on the way out. What killed them, and is it an adequate replacement for them? My initial list of suspects runs as follows;

• E-mail. Going and seeing your Councillor can be a good way of outlining a problem with which you need help, particularly if the alternative is writing a letter, waiting for a reply, then explaining in more detail, and so on. On the other hand dropping an e-mail to someone is quicker, both in delivery and the likely speed of reply, than a letter, and (I think) less intimidating than a phone call. As people lead busy lives and may not be able to make it to a surgery at a fixed time, e-mail is likely to prove an attractive alternative. The growing social trend towards instant gratification means that with a problem arising on a Tuesday, many people may not be willing to wait until Saturday to talk it over.
• The internet more generally. Increasingly Councils are moving towards electronic systems which put individuals in direct contact with officers working on an issue – this can be seen particularly in the case of potholes, broken road signs, faulty street lights, and so on. Systems like Clarence, or websites like FixMyStreet, mean there is no need for Councillors to be involved. This may be less true of problems with, say, meals on wheels, but even there the drive towards choice and personalisation may mean negotiation is more frequently done with Council officers directly, rather than via an intermediary. The reformation coming to local government, 500 years after Martin Luther? Sorry, I just compared myself with God there didn’t I, must be more careful.
• Councillor Disempowerment. In line with the above, there is perhaps less to be gained now from seeing your Councillor for many problems. Certainly the day when befriending your local Councillor was a good way to move yourself up the council house waiting list are (rightly, I would suggest) gone – although Councillors increasingly have devolved budgets to spend on small projects in their local area, so a surgery may be a good way to raise the profile of your proposed project in advance of that decision.
• Social Working MPs. The late Tony Banks complained that the job of an MP was often to act as “a high-powered social worker”, and while many MPs might sympathise with his view that “It’s 22 years of the same cases, but just the faces and the people changing. I found it intellectually numbing, tedious in the extreme”, they will continue to do the work, as it’s a good way of gaining favour with their constituents who are helped. While it may be tedious, it’s also a good way of keeping MPs in touch with the problems faced by ordinary people. It would still be good, though, if Councillors were able to solve more problems, and MPs able to devote more time to debating and amending laws, and holding the Government to account. As matters stand (and I have been on both sides of this) Councils are undoubtedly more ’scared’ of MPs, and a letter on behalf of a constituent from an MP will almost always carry more weight than one from a Councillor. I have no recent evidence, but I bet most MPs get people at their surgeries.

You can probably add reasons of your own, but I think the more important question is “Does this new scenario deliver the level of support in dealing with the authorities that people feel they need?”. I suspect there may be an excluded middle going on, and that problems are either simple enough that people feel they don’t need a Councillor’s help (broken street lights) or so complicated that even a very experienced Councillor may not be able to help very much – child protection may often be in this class.

Over to you.

21st Century Vanity Publishing

I’m certainly not asking anyone to do this – apart from anything else getting recognition seems to be a fast route to losing anonymity for bloggers of my ilk. I do, though, think it’s a good thing in principle – more to raise the profile of different blogs than to rank one over another – and a reader has already been in touch to say they have voted for me, so:

Vote by e-mail to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com. Vote for ten, in order, no more, no fewer. Sadly the rules forbid me from telling you how I plan to cast my own vote, lest I seem to be running some sort of unofficial slate. Being anonymous I could even vote for myself, but I shall rise above such petty temptations.

Despite some apparent confusion, you don’t have to be a blogger yourself to vote. Anyway there we are, in the tradition of all good election campaigning, vote how you want, but do vote.

Oh look, an automated graphic smiling face rather than just text – that reminds me, and indeed much more importantly: I forgot in my review of LGA Conference to mention what was clearly the best thing at the exhibition. I want one.

The Real Real Hustle

Sometimes I really worry at what publicly funded bodies appear to be trying to con people into doing.

I know the fashion is for having a go at smoking cessation co-ordinators, or five-a-day school promotion officers. Whatever, really. The criticism there is generally based on believing the job isn’t worthwhile, and that people should be trusted to look after themselves. My experience of the cost to the state, let alone employers, of people with unhealthy diet and habits is enough to persuade me that a substantial proportion of people can’t, and the debate I want about the above rôles is whether they work, not whether in principle the state should be neutral on lifestyle issues – I don’t think it should.

Anyway, setting aside that risky foray into political philosophy (blame Saturday’s BBC Documentary on Robespierre - happy Bastille Day to all readers) I’m far more concerned about the money we are wasting encouraging people to do unwise things they didn’t rationally ought to do, than the money we are spending encouraging people to do sensible things that they merely don’t want to do. 

So I am going to pick on Family Mosaic Housing, and I apologise – I’m doing so simply because they happen to have crossed my desk, rather than being particularly bad offenders. As far as I can tell they’re good at what they do – managing outsourced housing for a few Councils, and building affordable homes for sale, rent, shared ownership and so forth.

One of those shared ownership properties is in North London, a 1-bed flat for sale. There are a number of 1-beds available in that development, and I have, for the purpose of fairness, picked the cheapest. I assume everyone is familiar with shared ownership – handy for people who want to own some property but can’t get a mortgage for anything like what they aspire to. You buy some of the property, and rent the rest. A number of things leap out of this advert, at least to me.

• Total cost of ownership is still not that low for a 1-bed flat round those parts. £350 a month mortgage, £280 a month rent, and £130 a month service charge takes it to £760 a month. £850 would rent a 1-bed flat privately without the responsibility for repairs, and so on. Bear in mind that these properties are subsidised with Social Housing Grant from the Homes and Communities Agency, formerly the Housing Corporation.
• The maths used to market the property are “Based on a Full Market Value of £225,000“. The problem is, that simply isn’t the full market value of a small 1-bed flat in that area. Here is a similar, and I suspect slightly larger, flat in a decent condition on the other side of the main road, which is on the market for £40k less and in the current climate with the stamp duty exemption might be expected to fetch at most £175,000. I was watching The Real Hustle On Holiday, last night, when they persuaded someone to buy Yen at 50 to the pound by showing them a fake website listing the exchange rate as 25. Oldest trick in the book.
• “The minimum single income required to qualify for this apartment is £21,691″. So, to be clear, if we accept their claims about the market value, we have a state-funded agency encouraging people to buy houses which are worth over ten times their annual income, at a cost of almost 60% of their take-home pay, before food and bills. Am I alone in thinking this is crazy? According to that maths I could, with my savings, be expected to buy a house worth almost £500,000. Of course I wouldn’t even dream of it. Well, alright I would dream of it, but I wouldn’t do it! The minimum joint income for the property suggests that a quarter-million pound house is a sensible purchase for a couple each on the minimum wage. Is it?

All of the above seems to me a situation which replicates itself with alarming regularity in the sale of shared ownership homes, rather than being an outlier. I wouldn’t mind that much (I’d still mind, but less) if housebuilding companies were doing it as a mere marketing exercise, or new business model, but that public/third sector bodies are doing it with taxpayer money, well, it rankles.

Now, with that rant over, I return to my lines. 100x “This is not a housing blog”. I will doubtless return to the topic when it becomes clear which faction has come out on top in the current tussle over Conservative housing policy, if not before.

Heaven waits here at my door

Expanding slightly on a point I made earlier this week at the Pickled Politics blog. There’s something a bit puzzling in the recent research telling us that immigrants aren’t “jumping the housing queue”. From here; “Just 11% of new arrivals get help with housing – almost all of them asylum seekers. But after five years, when many immigrants are able to get residency and become entitled to government help, one in six live in social housing – exactly the same proportion as those who were born in Britain.“

But surely if 11% of new arrivals are going straight into social housing, then they are ‘jumping the queue’. They might really really need to jump the queue because there’s no way they can live anywhere else as they don’t have the right to work, but they are still newly arrived at the queue, and going to the front of it. Similarly someone in situation x who has been in the country for five years is ‘jumping the queue’ if they get housed when someone who is in situation marginally-better-than-x who has been on the waiting list for six years doesn’t.

The reason that sounds strange is that the housing queue isn’t a queue at all in the sense most (well, alright, some) people understand say a Tesco queue – it’s more of a throng from among whom the cashier occasionally picks someone to get served who looks like they have lots of shopping and seems to be getting tired. It’s not a sedate English line of people taking their turn, it’s a triage ward of angry people with needs of varying urgency, all clamouring to be seen, and resenting anyway who arrives after them but is seen ahead of them. Ironically I suppose it’s a bit like a ladder.

For as long as we say “it’s a queue”, or even worse, “a waiting list”, then the complaint “but I was here first” will resonate, however much research the IPPR and CEHR do. It is in my view a necessary part of the definition of a queue that if you wait for a sufficient length of time, you will get to the front of it. That’s not how social housing works. In any case I incline towards the view that most of this is a distraction from the real issue - not enough housing for the number of people who live here, or at least not in the same places as the jobs. Governments could do a number of things to alleviate this problem. All of them have advantages and drawbacks which I don’t think I need to enumerate.

• Build more housing, both by allowing local authorities to do that (getting there!) where the funding from the private sector has dried up, and also by taking on the “pickle rural England” lobby and accept that many market towns and villages need to grow to become viable – and encouraging housebuilding companies to build houses that look like they belong in their context rather than uniformly bland housing estates which could be in any settlement in any part of Britain.
• Limit the growth of the population until infrastructure has caught up. At risk of failing tests of economic growth and international obligations, the Government could find ways of reducing immigration (or indeed encouraging and facilitating emigration – plenty of people still have hopes of a better life in roomier countries like Australia, Canada, etc!)
• Move more jobs through changes in taxation and investment to places where houses are available. There are drawbacks to this and the South-East already feels hard done by, but it remains a strange state of affairs when modestly sized houses in small towns in the South of England can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, while similarly sized houses in the Pennines have been bulldozed for lack of willing occupants at almost any price (as opposed to as part of specific regeneration schemes).
• Force pensioners to take in lodgers. I jest only slightly, since there is a real issue in our society with many pensioners living in houses they can no longer really afford or manage to maintain, while younger people want to move away from their family homes whether for work or study or greater independence, but can’t afford the cost of housing. Some Councils do run services where old and young people in those situations can be matched up, giving the older person help around the house and a little extra income, and the younger person nicer accommodation at a lower cost than they would otherwise be able to acquire. We could provide a little extra help by allowing them to keep their single person discount for council tax, to alleviate not only the financial consequences, but also the burden of bureaucracy.

Those would all be honest options for discussion. What I think it’s dishonest to do is to shift the blame onto the allocation system or individuals, whether because they are from abroad or because they are Britons and resent their aspirations going unmet. Speaking of hypocrisy, a failed asylum seeker can’t get housing help from the local Council because they have “no recourse to public funds”, but if they have children and those children might end up in a vulnerable situation if they aren’t helped, the Council has to find them housing under the terms of the Children Act. If that wasn’t a mad system enough, it means that in two-tier areas the County Council, which isn’t a housing authority, has to find them housing, because it is a children’s authority. Got that?

Right, I’m going for a drink.

Not just another drop in the ocean

Duncan criticises the economics of the proposed public sector pay freeze. Nigel criticises the equity. I’m inclined to criticise the politics.

MPs got a 2.3% pay rise this year. Local Government workers have been offered 0.5%. Already, that doesn’t look terribly good given the headlines of recent months. I appreciate many private sector workers are suffering badly from the recession and high public sector pay increases would anger them. At the same time, public sector pay is obviously less likely to be cyclical, and indeed so it should be. When inflation was roaring up towards 5% at the end of the boom, we were told to accept 2.8% and shut up about it, to help the economy control inflation. I did wonder at the time whether if deflation materialised we would get a huge pay boost to help crank it back up. I rather assumed not and have been proved right – you have to be a banker for the Government to accept that logic.

Steve Bundred at the Audit Commission, who was the first to float the pay freeze as a ‘pain-free’ way of tackling the deficit, is 67th on the Taxpayers’ Alliance list of public sector fat cats, with a salary of £245,000. If you want to freeze my salary at £245,000, Steve, I’m more than happy for you to do that. You would have to double it and then triple it and then add a bit more first, though. Even so, a pay freeze might annoy me at a time when everything I buy is getting more expensive, but it wouldn’t cause me any real hardship – I’m fairly well paid and very frugal. But it makes you look a bit silly, I think, when you are proposing a real terms cut in the income of people earning about 5% of your wedge. Less, in fact, than it costs to live. That’s why it’s often called a ‘cost of living’ increase, Steve.

Alistair Darling, who says that “Public sector pay has obviously got to reflect prevailing conditions and in particular inflation has come way down“, seems not to have noticed that inflation has been above target for 20 months in a row, and indeed for those of us who don’t have mortgages it is still around 3% (slightly more or less depending whether you think the VAT cut is a real fall – I bet wages aren’t increased to compensate when it goes back up!). Alistair Darling earns around £150,000, plus expenses and a small income from a flat he owns in London and rents out since he has a free house in Downing Street. Claiming inflation is low makes you look like a bit of an idiot, Alistair, like when MPs are asked the price of things like a loaf of bread or a pint of milk and turn out not to have the faintest idea. £250 a week, isn’t it?

Of course none of them really mean any of this. Alistair means “Look at me, I’m independent from Gordon and I can prove it. You should vote for me because I’ll be tough on public spending without cutting services”, and Steve means “I know you want to abolish my organisation Mr Cameron, and I know most of your party thinks I’m a Labour stooge, but look at all these helpful things I’m saying, I’m sure we can come to some arrangement”.