The smaller the party, the bigger the manifesto. Labour, the Conservative, Green and UKIP all clock in at around 80 pages, but Nick Cleggs little monster, channeling a 70s wallpaper designer, is 158. The pages are a bit smaller, and a couple of them are taken up with an index (bravo!). As with Labour, and the Conservatives, here are a few things which stood out.
1. There is some genuinely radical stuff in here, which the Libdems have either been a bit coy about, or the mainstream media aren't interested in because they'd rather have arguments about maths. That's a shame, because the radical stuff is potentially the most significant.
2. At the same time, spot the consensus: more free childcare, more nhs funding, 0/7% on overseas aid, control immigration, devolve power both to the countries of the UK and to local governments and cities, reduce tax on the low paid, build more houses. All 3 main Westminster parties are saying the same thing in these areas. They all use the word 'plan' on their first page as well. Snore....
3. It may be that the other parties have put their detail elsewhere, or just left it out of public gaze entirely, but there is a lot of detailed thinking and policy here. This document has the only fully-fledged strategy on climate change and the environment, nearly a fully-fledged strategy on mental health (see below), and a lot more finesse in several areas than Labour or the Conservatives. Before you think I'm getting carried away, there are several things I'm completely opposed to....
4. Greenery: there are more nods from Labour towards this than the Tories, but the Libdems tackle climate change and the environment head on. It's one of their 5 'front page' priorities, along with education, balancing the budget, fair taxes and the nhs, and there are '5 Green Laws' which cover a whole raft of stuff, from conservation areas, to zero emission cars to renewable energy. 60% of energy from renewables by 2030, zero carbon economy by 2050 with zero carbon traffic, 70% recycling rate by 2020 and (I liked this) a commission to look at what resources we're using in an unsustainable way, with power to push us to cut consumption. At the same time there's the only proposals I've seen to build houses resilient to rising temperatures, and a lot more incentives towards insulation, energy efficiency etc. And every time a child is born, a tree will be planted. Not many of these will be popular, or cheap, or give a short-term gain, but the Libdems seem to be the only party who are thinking beyond the 8th of May in these areas. Well done.
5. The other one I really like, and you'd expect me to say this, is their policies on mental health - more money, better standards of care, clear waiting time targets. There's a target of getting 25% of of those suffering mental illness into appropriate counselling treatment - that seems a very low target, but perhaps its symptomatic of how poor the support currently is. Imagine of only 25% of people with a broken leg got a plaster cast.... But, for a party which has clearly done a lot of thinking, there wasn't enough on prevention. Yes there's a plan for a '5 a day' type public health campaign on mental health, more on reducing stigma etc. But a lot of mental illness is rooted in what happens when you're young: family breakdown, poor parenting, poor relationships with main carers. As with Labour, and the Tories, this seemed to be a no-go area. Nobody has the courage, or the ideas, to tackle the epidemic of fatherlessness and family breakdown, or to use the network of health visitors and new mums support to give input on parenting and relationships, as well as caring for the new baby. The Libdems are streets ahead of the rest on mental health, but there are still some streets that are no-go areas, and until we walk them, we'll always have a massive problem on our hands. To be fair, the Libdems say more than the Conservatives about promoting and expanding the Troubled Families programme, and want mediation for all separating couples, but wouldn't it be better to build stronger relationships to start with?
6. Cunning plans: everyone is offering more free childcare, the Libdems is are a bit more tailored - 20 hours per week from age 2, but if you're a working parent then it's available from 9 months in, which is when a lot of new mums go back to work part-time after having a child. Discount bus travel for students aged 16-21 is good, to get them into the habit, out of cars, and support the bus network. Getting landlords to insulate houses to an approved standard, putting RE back into the core curriculum alongside some key life skills like finance management. Oh yes, and giving local authorities more power to cut down on betting shops and the use of addictive betting terminals in their communities.
7. A few contentious ones: minimum unit pricing on alcohol (which has been suggested for a while but nobody has done it), legalising cannabis for medicinal use, and a looser drugs law put under the Health department rather than the Home Office. Decriminalising having drugs for personal use would raise a storm of protest at other times, but there hasn't been a peep about it (yet). Perhaps the Daily Mail is too busy looking for celebrities in badly-fitting bikinis.
8. Being liberals, there's quite a bit on civil liberties, control over what data people can hold about you, freedom to be rude about people and to swim where you like, more support and promotion of equality for people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and gay, bisexual and transgender people. The cuts to legal aid are going to be reviewed, and different forms of punishment trialled (badoom-tish) for crime. 'A large prison population is a sign of failure to rehabilitate, not a sign of success'. So they want more tagging, curfews, weekend prison etc., and if you go to prison there's a skills and education assesment in your first week. After the confiscation of books by the Tories, this is a welcome change of direction.
9. Fair play to Clegg, he hasn't given up on proportional representation, there it is again, alongside an elected Lords, more devolution, caps on donations to parties, and a formal process for working out who is in the leaders debates (tick).
10. One which elevated my eyebrows: 'liberalise rules about the location, timing and content of wedding ceremonies'. I guess it depends how liberal, but the gay marriage reforms raised question marks over whether the government even knew how to define marriage, and this takes it a step further. At what point does marriage stop being marriage, and start being something else? There's a difference between pledging 'all that I have I share with you...till death us do part' and singing each other something by Robbie Williams.
11. Housing - again, plenty of detail and evidence of a lot of thinking. Right to Buy is there, but left up to local authorities not enforced by central government. But again, it's frustrating that a party which has done so much work misses some obvious issues. One is housing density - new estates are crammed, with every home overlooked, miniature gardens, and short on facilities. Many new homes have more space for the plasma telly than for a meal table. Joined up thinking on mental health and wellbeing would ask for a maximum housing density and a minimum standard on social space within a home. The Libdems mention loneliness as a problem - well at least give people the space to invite friends round then!
12. There's some thinking on faith, discrimination etc., mostly around supporting interfaith work, protecting Jews and Muslims from hate crime, but also putting RE back in a more central role at schools and giving freedom for 'religious doctrines' to be explained.
13. British Sign Language will be recognised as an official language of the UK. Excellent. Now offer it at GCSE. Outside London and premiership football, most of us are more likely to come across a deaf person than a Frenchman.
And great news for anyone from the SW who likes the Brecon Beacons - once the debts on the Severn Bridge are paid off, the tolls will be scrapped.
Overall, I was quite impressed. Much more than either of the other two parties, the policies seem to be designed with people in mind, and the stress on the environment and mental health is the kind of long-term thinking we need from our politicians, but rarely get. There are some sensible policy reviews (e.g. the constitutional convention on devolution, rather than Camerons divisive populism, legal aid), and more of a sense that this is rooted in vision and values, rather than managerialism and presentation. It's the nearest thing to what the bishops were asking for a few weeks ago, and is mercifully free of the snide political bashing you find throughout the other manifestoes. I wonder if somewhere in a backroom there are Labour and Conservative strategists going 'why didn't we think of that?'
Because of course, that's the context. Clegg is pitching to 2 sets of people. One is us, the voter. The other is the two other main parties. The Libdems main shot at power is to be a more attractive coalition partner than either the SNP or UKIP. To do that he needs as many votes and MPs as possible, and as many policies as possible which the other parties think they can work with. Given all that's in the manifestoes, a coalition with Labour looks much the better fit: the Conservatives will spend 2 years taken up with an EU referendum and take their eye off the ball, and Labour is offering much less in terms of policy anyway, so there are plenty of gaps for the Libdems to fill. Libdems and Labour are both ok with borrowing to invest, and the Conservatives are riddled with people who simply don't get climate change and green energy, from Owen Paterson to Eric Pickles.
However, I still think that doing all this is a massive challenge if 300,000 new people are arriving in the UK every year; all the money and effort that goes into the nhs, housing and education will only enable us to stand still. Meanwhile there aren't any big ideas, from anyone, on how we integrate communities at a local level. Nobody is producing an evidence-based immigration policy (why do people come here, how many will stop coming if we do x or y) based on a sustainable level of immigration, and leaving the EU is a blunt instrument with too much collateral damage. So we still need UKIP to keep this debate on the table, but probably not UKIPs solution.
AND IT DOESN'T MENTION HARD WORKING FAMILIES ONCE! YIPPEEE! If you're as intermittently lazy as I am, at last, a party you can vote for.....
Showing posts with label housing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label housing. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Conservative Manifesto: The Longest Coalition Document in History?
Hot on the heels of Labour, David Cameron published the Conservative manifesto yesterday. What was most immediately striking, apart from proposals to create social housing ghettoes (see below), was how much overlap the headline policies had with someone else:
- no tax on people earning the minimum wage (UKIP)
- raise bottom tax threshold to £12.5k (libdems)
- extra £8bn on the nhs (Libdems, except it isn't, Clegg is promising £8bn per year, the Conservatives promise 'a minimum of £8bn over the next 5 years', which isn't the same thing)
- freeze rail fares (Labour)
- 30 hours free childcare for 3 and 4 year olds (Labour, though they only offer 25)
- build more houses (everyone)
- Right to Buy (Mrs Thatcher)
With the exception of the SNP, there are bones thrown in all directions, which either highlights political consensus, or flags up the scope for coalition discussions, depending on how you look at it.
Compared to Labour, it was a much easier document to work through, with some pretty detailed policy sections, and what looked like a comprehensive programme in a lot of areas. Here's what stood out for me:
1. Of the £30bn needed to reduce the deficit - it's 'fiscal consolidation', not cuts folks - £25bn is coming from public services, roughly half from welfare and half from other departments. There's no detail of where most of the welfare cuts will come from, apart from a reduced cap on total welfare income and scrapping Job seekers allowance for under-21s. There'll be a temporary Youth Allowance instead which stops if you don't take one of the 3m apprenticeships or a job.
2. There's a lot of specific regional and infrastructure spending, which makes me wonder why we couldn't have done some of it in the last 5 years. This is a bit of a dividing line with Labour, who despite talking about using borrowing to invest more, don't have the same commitments on infrastructure investment. Curious. However, it does allow them to name drop pretty much every region in the UK, which is politically clever.
3. A lot of devolution - more powers for all the bits of the UK, and for anywhere that chooses to have an elected mayor (and not if you don't!).
4. Tony Blairs Labour had a reputation as the champions of reannouncement, repeating declarations of new spending on several different occasions as though it wasn't the same cash over and over again. The Conservatives go one better, repeating the same announcement within the same paragraph. The pledge not to tax the minimum wage is basically the same as the pledge to raise the income tax threshold to £12,500 per year. At the moment, if you work on the minimum wage for 30 hours a week you earn £10, 452. And the threshold is 10.6k. How convenient! The Tories pledge to get the minimum wage up to £8 an hour, which will earn you £20 per year shy of the £12.5k threshold. So effectively it's the same policy, but announced in two different ways.
5. The married couples allowance stays, and rises marginally, and this is what qualifies as supporting relationships. There's passing mention of the 'troubled families' programme, but no indication of whether it will be renewed, expanded or scaled back. No mention of epidemic rates of relationship breakdown, fatherless families, and the effect all this has on the mental and emotional health of the adults and children involved. There is almost a conspiracy of silence around the family and how to support and invest in it.
6. On education, it looks like things will get a bit quieter - more of the same, rather than revolution. Worryingly for students, there is no mention of the level of the tuition fee cap, so it's left open for this to be increased. Watch this space. There'll also be loans for postgraduate degrees. The education budget is 'protected' - which means that if the number of pupils rises, so will the amount of money. It's not protected against inflation. So there will be a real terms cut in money going into schools under the Conservatives if inflation ever rises above 0%. So the word 'protected' actually means 'cut'. Again and again I was frustrated at the slippery way things were presented in this document, which then made it harder to give credit where it was due. Interesting that they keep the two flagship Libdem policies, free school meals for infants and the pupil premium.
7. The NHS - I really struggled to get my head round how politicians think about this. There's no point recruiting extra doctors and nurses if they're leaving as quickly as they arrive. 5000 nurses are leaving the NHS each year, mid-career. But responding to that entails accepting there's a problem, and like every other section, the bit on the NHS starts with a section on how poorly Labour did and how well the Conservatives have done. Sorry, but there needs to be more reality here. The section on mental health, apart from supporting mums during and after pregnancy (good) had very little. No specific targets, money, or policies. Not good enough.
8. The Big Society is back! All quiet for 3 years, whilst most of us got on with staffing food banks, there's now the new initiative to encourage volunteering (you'll need those extra 3 days a year if you're a governor of an academy, it's a couple of leagues up from being governor of a normal school, and that was demanding enough). I wonder what the Italian paymaster of Westlands, whose workers here in Yeovil will all be entitled to 3 days a year off, will think of that! It's an odd policy, but I think I like it. What I didn't like was the manifesto taking credit for £8bn a year going into heritage art and sport. It claimed this was 'public and lottery funding', but since the lottery puts in £1.6bn a year, that doesn't leave much for the government! In fact, it gets a tax from the lottery, so it makes a profit. Better controls on online pornography are welcome, but I'd have liked to see something on gambling and payday loans.
9. Not many people have picked up on the plan to cut the number of MPs to 600 and revise parliamentary boundaries. That could be quite significant in the long run.
10. Sorry but the Right To Buy plans are like the AV referendum (remember that?) a potentially ok plan scuppered by dreadful delivery. The AV option put to the vote was probably the worst form of proportional representation, and there are a lot of things wrong with the RtB format. Forcing the most expensive properties to be sold off? Well lets have a think. They'll either be the biggest ones (which Housing Associations have previously pulled down to build more, smaller units), or those in the nicest neighbourhoods. Smaller dwellings, and poorer neighbourhoods, will remain social housing. The long term effect is obvious: nicer areas will become almost 100% owner-occupied, and social housing will become more concentrated in areas of lower value. Around here, house prices in Sherborne were recently shown to be £100k higher on average than those in Yeovil. So if you applied the policy locally, all the social housing tenants would end up in Yeovil.
There's also an inevitable time-lag. It takes 10-20 years round here to find and buy land, get planning permission, and build new houses. Without being able to take out big loans, the housing associations won't have the money to buy land and build houses until the RtB units are sold, you can't replace them like tins on a shelf. So RtB will build in an extra shortage on top of the 1.4m that currently exists, around the time it takes to build the replacement properties.
11. Goodbye wind turbines. Subsidies for onshore wind will be scrapped, and they will 'change the law so that local people have the final say on windfarm applications'. Giving local people 'the final say' is a nimbys charter, nobody is campaigning for wind farms to be built on their skyline. What will Eric Pickles do with his time now that he hasn't got all those wind farms to veto? Words about 'cost effective' green technology suggest that economics, rather than carbon emissions, will be the deciding factor for any Tory greenery.
12. I'm worried about propsals to ban 'extremists' from working with children. We all know they mean ISIS sympathisers and the like, but the way the cultural wind is blowing, anyone like me who takes the 'traditional' line on marriage is seen as a phobe and an extremist. Will there be unintended consequences?
13. The manifesto alludes to 'space for resentment to fester' over Scottish MPs voting on English laws. As I recall, this wasn't that much of an issue until Cameron stoked it up after the referendum last year. Standard marketing practice, create a demand ex nihilo then produce a product that meets the manufactured need. Shabby.
14. I was glad to see the case being made for keeping overseas aid at 0.7% of GDP, with some stats on lives saved, children immunised, access to clean water etc. This needs to keep being said. Well done.
There is a lot more to get your teeth into here than the Labour manifesto, but aside from the economy and infrastructure, where there seems to be a fair bit of thinking, other areas of policy get a token nod. There's nowhere near enough on climate change, family support, and mental health. The loud silences in some areas (food banks, details of welfare cuts) the slippery presentation in others (tax on minimum wage, EVEL, school and NHS funding) and the awful ideas around Right to Buy, don't inspire me with confidence. There's a programme of action, but true to Cameron there isn't much of an underlying philosophy.
Despite the levels of detail in some areas, it just doesn't leave me with a sense of a party which has really got to grips with all the issues we face. It's not just about the economy. The Bishops call for an 'attractive vision' of a society has fallen on deaf ears. The most eye-catching policies are of the 'retail politics' variety - vote for us and we'll give you this. There isn't much here, aside from the aid target and the volunteering scheme, that calls on us to put others first, to think of 'us' rather than 'I'.
- no tax on people earning the minimum wage (UKIP)
- raise bottom tax threshold to £12.5k (libdems)
- extra £8bn on the nhs (Libdems, except it isn't, Clegg is promising £8bn per year, the Conservatives promise 'a minimum of £8bn over the next 5 years', which isn't the same thing)
- freeze rail fares (Labour)
- 30 hours free childcare for 3 and 4 year olds (Labour, though they only offer 25)
- build more houses (everyone)
- Right to Buy (Mrs Thatcher)
With the exception of the SNP, there are bones thrown in all directions, which either highlights political consensus, or flags up the scope for coalition discussions, depending on how you look at it.
Compared to Labour, it was a much easier document to work through, with some pretty detailed policy sections, and what looked like a comprehensive programme in a lot of areas. Here's what stood out for me:
1. Of the £30bn needed to reduce the deficit - it's 'fiscal consolidation', not cuts folks - £25bn is coming from public services, roughly half from welfare and half from other departments. There's no detail of where most of the welfare cuts will come from, apart from a reduced cap on total welfare income and scrapping Job seekers allowance for under-21s. There'll be a temporary Youth Allowance instead which stops if you don't take one of the 3m apprenticeships or a job.
2. There's a lot of specific regional and infrastructure spending, which makes me wonder why we couldn't have done some of it in the last 5 years. This is a bit of a dividing line with Labour, who despite talking about using borrowing to invest more, don't have the same commitments on infrastructure investment. Curious. However, it does allow them to name drop pretty much every region in the UK, which is politically clever.
3. A lot of devolution - more powers for all the bits of the UK, and for anywhere that chooses to have an elected mayor (and not if you don't!).
4. Tony Blairs Labour had a reputation as the champions of reannouncement, repeating declarations of new spending on several different occasions as though it wasn't the same cash over and over again. The Conservatives go one better, repeating the same announcement within the same paragraph. The pledge not to tax the minimum wage is basically the same as the pledge to raise the income tax threshold to £12,500 per year. At the moment, if you work on the minimum wage for 30 hours a week you earn £10, 452. And the threshold is 10.6k. How convenient! The Tories pledge to get the minimum wage up to £8 an hour, which will earn you £20 per year shy of the £12.5k threshold. So effectively it's the same policy, but announced in two different ways.
5. The married couples allowance stays, and rises marginally, and this is what qualifies as supporting relationships. There's passing mention of the 'troubled families' programme, but no indication of whether it will be renewed, expanded or scaled back. No mention of epidemic rates of relationship breakdown, fatherless families, and the effect all this has on the mental and emotional health of the adults and children involved. There is almost a conspiracy of silence around the family and how to support and invest in it.
6. On education, it looks like things will get a bit quieter - more of the same, rather than revolution. Worryingly for students, there is no mention of the level of the tuition fee cap, so it's left open for this to be increased. Watch this space. There'll also be loans for postgraduate degrees. The education budget is 'protected' - which means that if the number of pupils rises, so will the amount of money. It's not protected against inflation. So there will be a real terms cut in money going into schools under the Conservatives if inflation ever rises above 0%. So the word 'protected' actually means 'cut'. Again and again I was frustrated at the slippery way things were presented in this document, which then made it harder to give credit where it was due. Interesting that they keep the two flagship Libdem policies, free school meals for infants and the pupil premium.
7. The NHS - I really struggled to get my head round how politicians think about this. There's no point recruiting extra doctors and nurses if they're leaving as quickly as they arrive. 5000 nurses are leaving the NHS each year, mid-career. But responding to that entails accepting there's a problem, and like every other section, the bit on the NHS starts with a section on how poorly Labour did and how well the Conservatives have done. Sorry, but there needs to be more reality here. The section on mental health, apart from supporting mums during and after pregnancy (good) had very little. No specific targets, money, or policies. Not good enough.
8. The Big Society is back! All quiet for 3 years, whilst most of us got on with staffing food banks, there's now the new initiative to encourage volunteering (you'll need those extra 3 days a year if you're a governor of an academy, it's a couple of leagues up from being governor of a normal school, and that was demanding enough). I wonder what the Italian paymaster of Westlands, whose workers here in Yeovil will all be entitled to 3 days a year off, will think of that! It's an odd policy, but I think I like it. What I didn't like was the manifesto taking credit for £8bn a year going into heritage art and sport. It claimed this was 'public and lottery funding', but since the lottery puts in £1.6bn a year, that doesn't leave much for the government! In fact, it gets a tax from the lottery, so it makes a profit. Better controls on online pornography are welcome, but I'd have liked to see something on gambling and payday loans.
9. Not many people have picked up on the plan to cut the number of MPs to 600 and revise parliamentary boundaries. That could be quite significant in the long run.
10. Sorry but the Right To Buy plans are like the AV referendum (remember that?) a potentially ok plan scuppered by dreadful delivery. The AV option put to the vote was probably the worst form of proportional representation, and there are a lot of things wrong with the RtB format. Forcing the most expensive properties to be sold off? Well lets have a think. They'll either be the biggest ones (which Housing Associations have previously pulled down to build more, smaller units), or those in the nicest neighbourhoods. Smaller dwellings, and poorer neighbourhoods, will remain social housing. The long term effect is obvious: nicer areas will become almost 100% owner-occupied, and social housing will become more concentrated in areas of lower value. Around here, house prices in Sherborne were recently shown to be £100k higher on average than those in Yeovil. So if you applied the policy locally, all the social housing tenants would end up in Yeovil.
There's also an inevitable time-lag. It takes 10-20 years round here to find and buy land, get planning permission, and build new houses. Without being able to take out big loans, the housing associations won't have the money to buy land and build houses until the RtB units are sold, you can't replace them like tins on a shelf. So RtB will build in an extra shortage on top of the 1.4m that currently exists, around the time it takes to build the replacement properties.
11. Goodbye wind turbines. Subsidies for onshore wind will be scrapped, and they will 'change the law so that local people have the final say on windfarm applications'. Giving local people 'the final say' is a nimbys charter, nobody is campaigning for wind farms to be built on their skyline. What will Eric Pickles do with his time now that he hasn't got all those wind farms to veto? Words about 'cost effective' green technology suggest that economics, rather than carbon emissions, will be the deciding factor for any Tory greenery.
12. I'm worried about propsals to ban 'extremists' from working with children. We all know they mean ISIS sympathisers and the like, but the way the cultural wind is blowing, anyone like me who takes the 'traditional' line on marriage is seen as a phobe and an extremist. Will there be unintended consequences?
13. The manifesto alludes to 'space for resentment to fester' over Scottish MPs voting on English laws. As I recall, this wasn't that much of an issue until Cameron stoked it up after the referendum last year. Standard marketing practice, create a demand ex nihilo then produce a product that meets the manufactured need. Shabby.
14. I was glad to see the case being made for keeping overseas aid at 0.7% of GDP, with some stats on lives saved, children immunised, access to clean water etc. This needs to keep being said. Well done.
There is a lot more to get your teeth into here than the Labour manifesto, but aside from the economy and infrastructure, where there seems to be a fair bit of thinking, other areas of policy get a token nod. There's nowhere near enough on climate change, family support, and mental health. The loud silences in some areas (food banks, details of welfare cuts) the slippery presentation in others (tax on minimum wage, EVEL, school and NHS funding) and the awful ideas around Right to Buy, don't inspire me with confidence. There's a programme of action, but true to Cameron there isn't much of an underlying philosophy.
Despite the levels of detail in some areas, it just doesn't leave me with a sense of a party which has really got to grips with all the issues we face. It's not just about the economy. The Bishops call for an 'attractive vision' of a society has fallen on deaf ears. The most eye-catching policies are of the 'retail politics' variety - vote for us and we'll give you this. There isn't much here, aside from the aid target and the volunteering scheme, that calls on us to put others first, to think of 'us' rather than 'I'.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Labour Manifesto - Working Hard for The Kingdom of Ed
I wonder if its ever struck politicians that if 'hard working families' are as hard working as they're cracked up to be, most won't have the time or the energy to read an 86 page manifesto, even if a lot of it is pictures. They/we are too busy working hard, getting on, doing the right thing, or whatever it is the Stakhanovs do most of the time.
Maybe Labour knew they wouldn't get beyond page 1, so they stuck this on the cover:
Britain only succeeds when working people succeed. this is a plan to reward hard work, share prosperity and build a better Britain
Odd that they pitch the manifesto to a minority of the British population, given that over half of us aren't working, being too young, too old, too ill, or too busy volunteering (of which more later)
It's a clear pitch to be the Labour party, the party of working people, but with a lot less socialism and toff-bashing than in the good old days. There's a brief swipe at the Conservatives, and no mention of the LibDems (keeping the door open for the coalition negotiations which are bound to begin on 8th May).
There's plenty of commentary elsewhere, but a few things really stuck out to me:
1. There are pledges to increase the number of GPs, nurses and midwives. Unless there's a big change to GP training in the pipeline, it takes longer than a single parliament to train a new GP. So, where do they come from? Will Labour be trying to get health professionals who have quit the NHS to return, or (as under Blair) will they be recruiting overseas? There is a massive moral question mark over this, we have one of the best health services in the world, most other countries need their doctors and nurses more than we do. The Labour manifesto makes much of the UK re-engaging with the world, promoting the Millenium Development Goals (good) but if we poach doctors from developing countries then white man speak with forked tongue.
2. Kids, wave goodbye to your parents. You'll see them again in 18 years. Labour wants an education system that starts with 25 hours free childcare at age 3 (provided by your renewed Sure Start centre), extends to 50 hours by the time you are 4 (yes, 50 hours. schools will have to provide access to 'wraparound' childcare from 8am - 6pm), and continues until you are 21. Out of work benefits won't begin until you turn 21, prior to that it's a Youth Allowance dependent on whether you're in training. Some of this will be welcome news to parents who need more flexibility so that they can work to bring in the pennies, some of this will simply mean families spending less time together. It's bizarre that in a document which declares Labour believes a decent society grows out of family life and relationships the main policy direction is one which will mean families seeing less of each other. Does Ed Miliband not get on with the rest of his family?
3. The wraparound school clubs are all going to be provided by volunteers. Really? How? It's a nice aspiration, but there's no suggestion of how it could be achieved. Worse, if it is achieved, where do those volunteers come from? There's no national strategy for encouraging volunteering, so they will have to come from the existing volunteer pool. That's the folk who look after the elderly, run playgroups, staff foodbanks, pop in on neighbours etc. Good luck on either score. We can't even find the handful of adults needed locally to keep a single council youth club up and running for one evening a week.
4. Also on family policy, there are warm words about 'strengthing the institutions that help individuals, families and communities to thrive' but nothing about strengthening families themselves. Sure Start will be resurrected, but mainly as a national childcare agency. 'Early years intervention' is fine, but there's no suggestion of tackling the reasons why this might be needed. Family breakdown remains the elephant in the room, responsible for vast levels of misery, mental illness, educational failure, substance abuse etc. Labour wants a constitutional convention to look at how the UK can hold together, but when did it (or any other party) ever give serious thought about how to hold families together?
5. One oddity: Labour want to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, but set up an equivalent version in education, a local Director of School Standards who monitors performance, intervenes in underperforming schools and can commission new schools. Local authorities will continue to be players in the school system, so I'm not quite sure where that leaves LEAs. The roles of PCC and DSS are slightly different, but it seemed odd to be scrapping one and inventing the other!
6. 200k new houses a year won't go very far if 300k people are being added to the population each year. There are no targets for sensible immigration, just a few policies around benefits and controls. This is a real problem. Yes we need immigrants, but there is surely an optimum rate at which people can be assimilated, and infrastructure be put in place? We are adding a new county's worth of people every 3 years to the UK, but short of a specific cap, I haven't yet seen a policy that amounts to more than hoping the problem will go away if we look tough. That hasn't worked yet.
7. Foreign policy: Labour propose a 'global envoy for religious freedom'. Good. Gordon Browns next job perhaps? It would be good to see a specific role though: they also propose an envoy for LGBT rights whose goal will be to secure the decriminalisation of homosexuality worldwide. I'd be thrilled if the goal for the religious freedom envoy was to secure the decriminalisation of conversion to Christianity.
8. Labour seem to be taking climate change more seriously - there's a welcome goal of a zero-carbon electricity supply by 2030, and interest free loans for energy improvements will reboot the domestic solar energy market. Right noises, but I don't see enough on, for example, public transport (most of the policies are devolved to local level) to see a thorough response. There's a welcome commitment to keep the 0.7% aid target and refocus it on the poorest countries.
9. Mental health: will be 'given the same priority as physical health'. I wonder what that means in practice? The document says there'll be the same right to psychological therapies as to drugs. If true, that means free, lifelong access, rather than 8 weeks after a 5 month wait, as is the current (approximate) situation. Do they really mean that? Access to drugs doesn't stop after a set number of weeks, so if that's what's really being promised for talking therapies, then that's a very hefty commitment. And please, not just CBT, it doesn't fix everything. And if you do offer CBT, please lets have proper professional counsellors, not a nurse who's done a short course. Labour wants more access to counselling at schools (good) and there's a suggestion of putting mindfulness on the national curriculum. There's no extra money committed here, only a promise that a higher % of the mental health budget will be spent on children. That, of course, means a lower percentage on adults, so without a significant rise in the overall budget, there's the prospect of a cut to adult mental health funding. Surely not?
Overall Labour are trying not to frighten the horses, but I'm not sure whether the horses will be very inspired either. I guess a proper rationale for the policies (e.g. the 50 hour school week), or proper details of how they'll work (adult mental health) would have needed a longer document. Labour seem more aware of the vulnerable - disabled, users of food banks, low wages - than the current government, but I don't see much of a great vision here. It's a bit more of an engineers budget, how do we make this system work better, and produce more of what we want (houses, good healthcare, clean energy at affordable prices). I can't see it setting many pulses racing, and as the first page states, its a 'plan...for a better Britain'. The P-word again. The 2015 election is the Battle of the Plans.
Maybe Labour knew they wouldn't get beyond page 1, so they stuck this on the cover:
Britain only succeeds when working people succeed. this is a plan to reward hard work, share prosperity and build a better Britain
Odd that they pitch the manifesto to a minority of the British population, given that over half of us aren't working, being too young, too old, too ill, or too busy volunteering (of which more later)
It's a clear pitch to be the Labour party, the party of working people, but with a lot less socialism and toff-bashing than in the good old days. There's a brief swipe at the Conservatives, and no mention of the LibDems (keeping the door open for the coalition negotiations which are bound to begin on 8th May).
There's plenty of commentary elsewhere, but a few things really stuck out to me:
1. There are pledges to increase the number of GPs, nurses and midwives. Unless there's a big change to GP training in the pipeline, it takes longer than a single parliament to train a new GP. So, where do they come from? Will Labour be trying to get health professionals who have quit the NHS to return, or (as under Blair) will they be recruiting overseas? There is a massive moral question mark over this, we have one of the best health services in the world, most other countries need their doctors and nurses more than we do. The Labour manifesto makes much of the UK re-engaging with the world, promoting the Millenium Development Goals (good) but if we poach doctors from developing countries then white man speak with forked tongue.
2. Kids, wave goodbye to your parents. You'll see them again in 18 years. Labour wants an education system that starts with 25 hours free childcare at age 3 (provided by your renewed Sure Start centre), extends to 50 hours by the time you are 4 (yes, 50 hours. schools will have to provide access to 'wraparound' childcare from 8am - 6pm), and continues until you are 21. Out of work benefits won't begin until you turn 21, prior to that it's a Youth Allowance dependent on whether you're in training. Some of this will be welcome news to parents who need more flexibility so that they can work to bring in the pennies, some of this will simply mean families spending less time together. It's bizarre that in a document which declares Labour believes a decent society grows out of family life and relationships the main policy direction is one which will mean families seeing less of each other. Does Ed Miliband not get on with the rest of his family?
3. The wraparound school clubs are all going to be provided by volunteers. Really? How? It's a nice aspiration, but there's no suggestion of how it could be achieved. Worse, if it is achieved, where do those volunteers come from? There's no national strategy for encouraging volunteering, so they will have to come from the existing volunteer pool. That's the folk who look after the elderly, run playgroups, staff foodbanks, pop in on neighbours etc. Good luck on either score. We can't even find the handful of adults needed locally to keep a single council youth club up and running for one evening a week.
4. Also on family policy, there are warm words about 'strengthing the institutions that help individuals, families and communities to thrive' but nothing about strengthening families themselves. Sure Start will be resurrected, but mainly as a national childcare agency. 'Early years intervention' is fine, but there's no suggestion of tackling the reasons why this might be needed. Family breakdown remains the elephant in the room, responsible for vast levels of misery, mental illness, educational failure, substance abuse etc. Labour wants a constitutional convention to look at how the UK can hold together, but when did it (or any other party) ever give serious thought about how to hold families together?
5. One oddity: Labour want to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, but set up an equivalent version in education, a local Director of School Standards who monitors performance, intervenes in underperforming schools and can commission new schools. Local authorities will continue to be players in the school system, so I'm not quite sure where that leaves LEAs. The roles of PCC and DSS are slightly different, but it seemed odd to be scrapping one and inventing the other!
6. 200k new houses a year won't go very far if 300k people are being added to the population each year. There are no targets for sensible immigration, just a few policies around benefits and controls. This is a real problem. Yes we need immigrants, but there is surely an optimum rate at which people can be assimilated, and infrastructure be put in place? We are adding a new county's worth of people every 3 years to the UK, but short of a specific cap, I haven't yet seen a policy that amounts to more than hoping the problem will go away if we look tough. That hasn't worked yet.
7. Foreign policy: Labour propose a 'global envoy for religious freedom'. Good. Gordon Browns next job perhaps? It would be good to see a specific role though: they also propose an envoy for LGBT rights whose goal will be to secure the decriminalisation of homosexuality worldwide. I'd be thrilled if the goal for the religious freedom envoy was to secure the decriminalisation of conversion to Christianity.
8. Labour seem to be taking climate change more seriously - there's a welcome goal of a zero-carbon electricity supply by 2030, and interest free loans for energy improvements will reboot the domestic solar energy market. Right noises, but I don't see enough on, for example, public transport (most of the policies are devolved to local level) to see a thorough response. There's a welcome commitment to keep the 0.7% aid target and refocus it on the poorest countries.
9. Mental health: will be 'given the same priority as physical health'. I wonder what that means in practice? The document says there'll be the same right to psychological therapies as to drugs. If true, that means free, lifelong access, rather than 8 weeks after a 5 month wait, as is the current (approximate) situation. Do they really mean that? Access to drugs doesn't stop after a set number of weeks, so if that's what's really being promised for talking therapies, then that's a very hefty commitment. And please, not just CBT, it doesn't fix everything. And if you do offer CBT, please lets have proper professional counsellors, not a nurse who's done a short course. Labour wants more access to counselling at schools (good) and there's a suggestion of putting mindfulness on the national curriculum. There's no extra money committed here, only a promise that a higher % of the mental health budget will be spent on children. That, of course, means a lower percentage on adults, so without a significant rise in the overall budget, there's the prospect of a cut to adult mental health funding. Surely not?
Overall Labour are trying not to frighten the horses, but I'm not sure whether the horses will be very inspired either. I guess a proper rationale for the policies (e.g. the 50 hour school week), or proper details of how they'll work (adult mental health) would have needed a longer document. Labour seem more aware of the vulnerable - disabled, users of food banks, low wages - than the current government, but I don't see much of a great vision here. It's a bit more of an engineers budget, how do we make this system work better, and produce more of what we want (houses, good healthcare, clean energy at affordable prices). I can't see it setting many pulses racing, and as the first page states, its a 'plan...for a better Britain'. The P-word again. The 2015 election is the Battle of the Plans.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Lone Voice
South Somerset District Council has just agreed an £8m discount package to a housing developer, so that a local housing site can be rendered 'viable'. The alternative is that it gets mothballed (that's the claim anyway: Barratts tried that one a couple of years ago on the other side of town then declared record profits the week after the agreement was signed). So that's less social housing, poorer maintenance for community play and open space, less money for community facilities, bus routes, etc. More houses, shabbier environment.
I'm pretty disappointed and annoyed by this, especially as the viability maths was badly skewed (I'll explain if you like but it would take a while).
But I'm just as disappointed and annoyed by this. Scroll to page 4. Only one local resident wrote in to complain. One. There's been plenty of sound and fury on Facebook, of course. And a local politician who's hoping to unseat David Laws as MP next year has been in the papers opposing it. But I note that nobody from his party actually wrote in.
This is potentially a new community of 1500-1700 people. There is a massive social housing shortage in the area. And nobody cares enough to formally speak up. (Note: putting :-( at on a Facebook comment doesn't qualify as 'caring'. That wont fix the swings, provide a bus route, or house a family.)
Someone I meet up with for prayer has a saying 'you've gotta love 'em'. Even on the days when Yeovil makes me sad and angry, I've gotta love em. Drat, it would be so much easier not to, but I don't think Jesus gives us any wiggle room on that.
I'm pretty disappointed and annoyed by this, especially as the viability maths was badly skewed (I'll explain if you like but it would take a while).
But I'm just as disappointed and annoyed by this. Scroll to page 4. Only one local resident wrote in to complain. One. There's been plenty of sound and fury on Facebook, of course. And a local politician who's hoping to unseat David Laws as MP next year has been in the papers opposing it. But I note that nobody from his party actually wrote in.
This is potentially a new community of 1500-1700 people. There is a massive social housing shortage in the area. And nobody cares enough to formally speak up. (Note: putting :-( at on a Facebook comment doesn't qualify as 'caring'. That wont fix the swings, provide a bus route, or house a family.)
Someone I meet up with for prayer has a saying 'you've gotta love 'em'. Even on the days when Yeovil makes me sad and angry, I've gotta love em. Drat, it would be so much easier not to, but I don't think Jesus gives us any wiggle room on that.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Housing Policy - Mind the Gap
I'm one of the few people outside East Coker who's been following every twist and turn of the planning process in South Somerset. The District Council plan - covering development in the area up to 2028 - is currently up in the air, after a government inspector said that in its current form it wouldn't pass muster.
Under new government rules, if there is no Local Plan in place, developers can propose schemes pretty much wherever they like. There is a 'presumption in favour of sustainable development' in the national policy, a deliciously vague term which will surely generate a steady income for the legal profession over the next few years.
I spotted this comment today on a thread about planning policy (wake up at the back there)
Planning rules have already been massively relaxed with the adoption of the National Planning Policy Framework, with its mumbo jumbo "presumption in favour of sustainable development". In my area the Council has put together a 5 year housing plan which specifies where development may take place. Developers simply ignore it as it`s not yet been officially sanctified by the Planning Inspectorate, get turned down at local level and appeal to the Inspectorate, who then quote the "presumption" and allow the appeal, sometimes awarding costs against the Council, on the grounds that they have not demonstrated a 5 year supply of housing land.
The longer we have no Local Plan, the more opportunity there is (especially with the market picking up) for speculative applications. And what a national developer learns in one part of the country, they'll apply everywhere. The sooner we have the Plan in place the better - even if it isn't perfect, it will be better than the alternative.
Under new government rules, if there is no Local Plan in place, developers can propose schemes pretty much wherever they like. There is a 'presumption in favour of sustainable development' in the national policy, a deliciously vague term which will surely generate a steady income for the legal profession over the next few years.
I spotted this comment today on a thread about planning policy (wake up at the back there)
Planning rules have already been massively relaxed with the adoption of the National Planning Policy Framework, with its mumbo jumbo "presumption in favour of sustainable development". In my area the Council has put together a 5 year housing plan which specifies where development may take place. Developers simply ignore it as it`s not yet been officially sanctified by the Planning Inspectorate, get turned down at local level and appeal to the Inspectorate, who then quote the "presumption" and allow the appeal, sometimes awarding costs against the Council, on the grounds that they have not demonstrated a 5 year supply of housing land.
The longer we have no Local Plan, the more opportunity there is (especially with the market picking up) for speculative applications. And what a national developer learns in one part of the country, they'll apply everywhere. The sooner we have the Plan in place the better - even if it isn't perfect, it will be better than the alternative.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
South Somerset Local Plan: Advantage East Coker
Update: BBC report here, report from Western Gazette here.
Update 2 (29/7): SSDC has voted to suspend the plan for 6 months, pending further work
A little local difficulty: South Somerset District Council (SSDC) has been working for years on its Local Plan, covering development in the district up to 2028 in things like housing, jobs, environment etc.
The centrepiece of the Plan is a Sustainable Urban Extension (SUE) to the South of Yeovil, of 2500 homes including a secondary school, health centre (and possibly a site for a church), and land for employment and community use. This has been hotly contested by East Coker, a village to the S of Yeovil, whose expensive views/rural tranquility and quality of life (depending on how you look at it) are seen to be at stake.
The plan has recently been going through a public enquiry with a government planning inspector. This is the crucial hurdle - if he declares the plan 'sound', it has legal force and becomes the basis for local planning and development for the next 15 years. If he declares it 'unsound', then we fall into the untested hands of the NPPF (National Policy Planning Framework), with its presumption that planning permission will be granted on new developments, and is effectively a government sanctioned development free-for-all, with added spin-offs for the legal profession in deciding what the broad principles of the NPPF actually mean.
The inspector has just released his interim findings, and they are grim reading for SSDC. He has three major concerns - one is a technical issue about employment land in some of our larger villages, one about the growth of Ilminster (on both he judges the plan currently 'unsound'), and the biggie is about the SUE. Though he supports the principle of a 'sustainable' large estate (i.e. one which has most of its required facilities and employment land on site rather than off-site), there is a catalogue of weaknesses in the evidence for where it should go. SSDC had used a scoring system covering several key factors (travel, employment, access to services, health and wellbeing etc.) to compare alternative sites: the inspectors report argues that they have consistently over-egged the South Yeovil option, and that in reality there is much less to choose between alternative sites than SSDC have claimed.
There is so much remedial work to do on the Plan that the inspector also questions whether a 6 month 'time out' would actually give the council time to rewrite a 'sound' Plan, but if they don't revise it, it seems likely to be thrown out anyway. And then we are through the looking glass. To use a tennis metaphor, the first serve has gone out, and there's a serious danger of a double fault.
The council have responded in a remarkably upbeat way, noting that large swathes of the Plan are seen as ok (including projected housing totals, which have been a persistent bone of contention, and a repeated focus of lobbying).
I really do hope they can get this together: whilst I imagine the report has gone down well in East Coker - and vindicates their consistent and detailed lobbying - it's not good news for the rest of the District. At least with SSDC in control of the planning process, there are people who are accountable to the community and have something resembling its best interests at heart, even if they don't always deliver on that. Whilst we have some smaller local developers who want to work with the community, (the estate I live on was put together by a local developer and works really well), that's not a reputation shared with the likes of Persimmon and Barratts.
Update 2 (29/7): SSDC has voted to suspend the plan for 6 months, pending further work
A little local difficulty: South Somerset District Council (SSDC) has been working for years on its Local Plan, covering development in the district up to 2028 in things like housing, jobs, environment etc.
The centrepiece of the Plan is a Sustainable Urban Extension (SUE) to the South of Yeovil, of 2500 homes including a secondary school, health centre (and possibly a site for a church), and land for employment and community use. This has been hotly contested by East Coker, a village to the S of Yeovil, whose expensive views/rural tranquility and quality of life (depending on how you look at it) are seen to be at stake.
The plan has recently been going through a public enquiry with a government planning inspector. This is the crucial hurdle - if he declares the plan 'sound', it has legal force and becomes the basis for local planning and development for the next 15 years. If he declares it 'unsound', then we fall into the untested hands of the NPPF (National Policy Planning Framework), with its presumption that planning permission will be granted on new developments, and is effectively a government sanctioned development free-for-all, with added spin-offs for the legal profession in deciding what the broad principles of the NPPF actually mean.
The inspector has just released his interim findings, and they are grim reading for SSDC. He has three major concerns - one is a technical issue about employment land in some of our larger villages, one about the growth of Ilminster (on both he judges the plan currently 'unsound'), and the biggie is about the SUE. Though he supports the principle of a 'sustainable' large estate (i.e. one which has most of its required facilities and employment land on site rather than off-site), there is a catalogue of weaknesses in the evidence for where it should go. SSDC had used a scoring system covering several key factors (travel, employment, access to services, health and wellbeing etc.) to compare alternative sites: the inspectors report argues that they have consistently over-egged the South Yeovil option, and that in reality there is much less to choose between alternative sites than SSDC have claimed.
There is so much remedial work to do on the Plan that the inspector also questions whether a 6 month 'time out' would actually give the council time to rewrite a 'sound' Plan, but if they don't revise it, it seems likely to be thrown out anyway. And then we are through the looking glass. To use a tennis metaphor, the first serve has gone out, and there's a serious danger of a double fault.
The council have responded in a remarkably upbeat way, noting that large swathes of the Plan are seen as ok (including projected housing totals, which have been a persistent bone of contention, and a repeated focus of lobbying).
I really do hope they can get this together: whilst I imagine the report has gone down well in East Coker - and vindicates their consistent and detailed lobbying - it's not good news for the rest of the District. At least with SSDC in control of the planning process, there are people who are accountable to the community and have something resembling its best interests at heart, even if they don't always deliver on that. Whilst we have some smaller local developers who want to work with the community, (the estate I live on was put together by a local developer and works really well), that's not a reputation shared with the likes of Persimmon and Barratts.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Centre for Social Justice - watch this space
The Centre for Social Justice, the thinktank set up by Iain Duncan Smith, published a poll yesterday to flag up a new project which could underpin future Conservative social policy. The headlines from yesterdays press release point to possible areas of policy focus, for example:
Family breakdown and the decline in the importance of marriage are cited by the public as key causes of the serious social problems facing Britain, according to a new opinion poll.
The survey found that 55 per cent of people – the equivalent of 25 million people across the land – say at least one of their local communities is plagued by broken families, crime and poor schools.
Some 60 per cent say that over the last few decades, marriage has become less important to society and that is having a damaging effect on the country.
And with 89 per cent agreement, the public identifies better parenting and stronger families as the key to mending the broken society.
We haven't seen that phrase 'broken society' for a while, I'm glad it still has some currency because it's still true, perhaps even more so in some places since the Coalition came to power. I also wonder why the CSJ needs to report again on families and parenting when it's already done so in a fairly meaty way, and only seen a few of its recommendations taken up.
Christian Guy, (his name, and who knows, perhaps a personal description too?) the head of CSJ, also flags up poverty as a key focus: we have brought together a genuine team of experts with frontline poverty-fighting experience to help us draw up a new social policy blueprint to tackle the challenges of the 21st century."
A longstanding CSJ theme has been, in line with Conservative (and Libdem) policy, that local/voluntary/community solutions are better than those delivered by the state. The government is starting to promote and support 'community franchise' approaches in key areas of social policy. Remember David Camerons 200,000 'problem families'? The money for that is going to local councils, who have to identify local providers who can deliver results. The local contract in South Somerset has gone to a church-based initiative, who are now fielding requests for information from other parts of the UK. Chris Graylings' ideas for mentoring recently released prisoners are based on the same model, and Sure Start is about to head the same way. At the same time organisations like the Cinnamon Network are promoting 'franchise' models of community engagement for churches - projects set up in 1 place, but which can be replicated in many settings without reinventing the wheel.
Update: this is all the more significant as a report today shows that one of these projects, using charities and businesses to get the long term unemployed back into work, has failed quite badly.
This is a bit of a brave new world - it's been a long time since we looked elsewhere than the state to 'sort things out'. It's an interesting model - comparisons to the US and Victorians are wide of the mark, provided the state remains in place as a guarantor of quality and resources, even if delivery is left up to the voluntary or private sector. Labour co-opted many charities as arms of the state, throwing funding around with gay abandon, thus making many voluntary groups just as state-dependent as the people they were trying to help. Ironically, the Conservatives are actually taking this further. I hope this is as far as they go: devolving funding and activity may work better, but lets hope this isn't a step towards the state withdrawing completely, leaving the voluntary sector with all the caseload and none of the funding or policy leadership.
I hope the CSJ are going to be truly radical, and challenge everything which brings poverty and family breakdown. 24 hour opening, deregulation of Sunday trading, increasing shift work and unsociable hours all limit the time which parents and families can spend together. Extending parental leave at the beginning of life is good, but that's then rather undermined if, once little Johnny/Joanna is 1, the parents never see each other, or their child, because they're both working daft hours and the kid is in childcare from 7.30am to 7pm every day (the opening hours of our local nursery). When asked to draw a picture of the most significant person in their life, how many 3 year olds will draw their childminder or key worker?
And why are the parents both out to work? Because the average house costs 9x the average wage, compared to the 3x it did back in 1990. Everyone who got in on the property bubble? We did that. Yes, the state could have held things back, built more houses, told the banks to be more responsible about mortgages. But there's no way out of this without substantial pain, and at the moment new buyers are getting most of it. If the CSJ can find a solution for this (and make sure that all new homes have space for a family to eat together round a table, rather than the TV) then they'll have done something really radical. If we're serious about family breakdown, then the economic and 'free market' factors have to be brought to heel: not everything that business wants is good for families. There is no such thing as a free market, someone always has to pay. Part of the governments job (and ours too) is to identify the vulnerable parties in that equation, and protect them.
Family breakdown and the decline in the importance of marriage are cited by the public as key causes of the serious social problems facing Britain, according to a new opinion poll.
The survey found that 55 per cent of people – the equivalent of 25 million people across the land – say at least one of their local communities is plagued by broken families, crime and poor schools.
Some 60 per cent say that over the last few decades, marriage has become less important to society and that is having a damaging effect on the country.
And with 89 per cent agreement, the public identifies better parenting and stronger families as the key to mending the broken society.
We haven't seen that phrase 'broken society' for a while, I'm glad it still has some currency because it's still true, perhaps even more so in some places since the Coalition came to power. I also wonder why the CSJ needs to report again on families and parenting when it's already done so in a fairly meaty way, and only seen a few of its recommendations taken up.
Christian Guy, (his name, and who knows, perhaps a personal description too?) the head of CSJ, also flags up poverty as a key focus: we have brought together a genuine team of experts with frontline poverty-fighting experience to help us draw up a new social policy blueprint to tackle the challenges of the 21st century."
A longstanding CSJ theme has been, in line with Conservative (and Libdem) policy, that local/voluntary/community solutions are better than those delivered by the state. The government is starting to promote and support 'community franchise' approaches in key areas of social policy. Remember David Camerons 200,000 'problem families'? The money for that is going to local councils, who have to identify local providers who can deliver results. The local contract in South Somerset has gone to a church-based initiative, who are now fielding requests for information from other parts of the UK. Chris Graylings' ideas for mentoring recently released prisoners are based on the same model, and Sure Start is about to head the same way. At the same time organisations like the Cinnamon Network are promoting 'franchise' models of community engagement for churches - projects set up in 1 place, but which can be replicated in many settings without reinventing the wheel.
Update: this is all the more significant as a report today shows that one of these projects, using charities and businesses to get the long term unemployed back into work, has failed quite badly.
This is a bit of a brave new world - it's been a long time since we looked elsewhere than the state to 'sort things out'. It's an interesting model - comparisons to the US and Victorians are wide of the mark, provided the state remains in place as a guarantor of quality and resources, even if delivery is left up to the voluntary or private sector. Labour co-opted many charities as arms of the state, throwing funding around with gay abandon, thus making many voluntary groups just as state-dependent as the people they were trying to help. Ironically, the Conservatives are actually taking this further. I hope this is as far as they go: devolving funding and activity may work better, but lets hope this isn't a step towards the state withdrawing completely, leaving the voluntary sector with all the caseload and none of the funding or policy leadership.
I hope the CSJ are going to be truly radical, and challenge everything which brings poverty and family breakdown. 24 hour opening, deregulation of Sunday trading, increasing shift work and unsociable hours all limit the time which parents and families can spend together. Extending parental leave at the beginning of life is good, but that's then rather undermined if, once little Johnny/Joanna is 1, the parents never see each other, or their child, because they're both working daft hours and the kid is in childcare from 7.30am to 7pm every day (the opening hours of our local nursery). When asked to draw a picture of the most significant person in their life, how many 3 year olds will draw their childminder or key worker?
And why are the parents both out to work? Because the average house costs 9x the average wage, compared to the 3x it did back in 1990. Everyone who got in on the property bubble? We did that. Yes, the state could have held things back, built more houses, told the banks to be more responsible about mortgages. But there's no way out of this without substantial pain, and at the moment new buyers are getting most of it. If the CSJ can find a solution for this (and make sure that all new homes have space for a family to eat together round a table, rather than the TV) then they'll have done something really radical. If we're serious about family breakdown, then the economic and 'free market' factors have to be brought to heel: not everything that business wants is good for families. There is no such thing as a free market, someone always has to pay. Part of the governments job (and ours too) is to identify the vulnerable parties in that equation, and protect them.
Thursday, September 06, 2012
So much for the Local Plan
According to a story in todays Western Gazette, one observation by one planning inspector is threatening to spanner the whole planning process for South Somerset. The local council has spent years trying to develop a local plan which, ironically, has had most opposition from people suggesting it over-estimated the need for new housing. A government inspector has now announced she reckons they're 5000 homes short. There's speculation that it could lead to a development free-for-all in the area.
Personally I'd rather have the Council leading the process of building and developing new communities, with suitable planning for facilities, infrastructure etc. (even if they have made a mess of this at times in the past), rather than a developer or (in Yeovils case) an Oxford college, whose prime concern will be maximising revenue. They don't have to live with the consequences, we do.
Maybe East Coker will suddenly swing behind the council plan now, if this is the alternative. I just find it bizarre that one comment from one government official could create such disruption and uncertainty.
All this on the day the government announces plans to loosen up planning laws so as to jump-start the housing market. With average prices still 9-10 times the average income, I really can't see any planning reform making that happen. 15 years ago, prices were only 3x the average income. At the same time, they're cutting the requirment for social housing, as waiting lists grow and (with the changes to housing benefit) this is only going to get worse. Unless the homeless are all going to lodge in these new conservatories that the middle classes will build, I really can't see the logic of the proposals.
There is a case for making things quicker - I'm aware of a couple of local cases where Somerset County Council's involvement has slowed things down considerably. But it would be better to bring everything under one planning authority, rather than scrap the planning rules entirely.
Personally I'd rather have the Council leading the process of building and developing new communities, with suitable planning for facilities, infrastructure etc. (even if they have made a mess of this at times in the past), rather than a developer or (in Yeovils case) an Oxford college, whose prime concern will be maximising revenue. They don't have to live with the consequences, we do.
Maybe East Coker will suddenly swing behind the council plan now, if this is the alternative. I just find it bizarre that one comment from one government official could create such disruption and uncertainty.
All this on the day the government announces plans to loosen up planning laws so as to jump-start the housing market. With average prices still 9-10 times the average income, I really can't see any planning reform making that happen. 15 years ago, prices were only 3x the average income. At the same time, they're cutting the requirment for social housing, as waiting lists grow and (with the changes to housing benefit) this is only going to get worse. Unless the homeless are all going to lodge in these new conservatories that the middle classes will build, I really can't see the logic of the proposals.
There is a case for making things quicker - I'm aware of a couple of local cases where Somerset County Council's involvement has slowed things down considerably. But it would be better to bring everything under one planning authority, rather than scrap the planning rules entirely.
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Poverty, House and Home
Nationally, Save the Children have just launched their first appeal to support UK children in poverty, with 3.5m and rising believed to be below the poverty line. And there's plenty more to come, the following has just come through from South Somerset District Council - government grants towards Council Tax are being reduced, and our area is losing £1.3m. This is on top of a whole swathe of other benefit cuts coming down the line, on housing benefit, rent levels etc.
The council is consulting on how to apply the cuts (see below), but I can't help thinking we'll be back here again next year, with more cuts to apply. Thousands of local households have already been hit with reductinos to housing allowance.
At the same time government is trying to use the housing benefit system to reshuffle occupancy: some social housing is overcrowded, whilst other tenants have more bedrooms than they need. So, just swap them over? Easy, except that you're turfing out someone who's lived there for decades from a house full of memories, or taking away the guest room kept by an elderly tenant which is regularly used by family members. It's a pretty impossible circle to square, and there doesn't seem to be a painless way to do it.
The Government is ending the current national Council Tax Benefit scheme and all Council's have to replace it with their own local Council Tax support scheme.
Council Tax Benefit helps people with low income to pay their Council Tax.
New local schemes will start on 1 April 2013. To make sure it suits our communities, South Somerset District Council is consulting with residents on proposals for our local scheme.
The Government is reducing funding by at least 10%. For South Somerset residents this means we will receive approximately £1.3 million less than we do currently. The cost to the Council will increase further if the number of people claiming support goes up more than we expect or if Council Tax increases in future years.
This shortage in funding means we have to make some difficult decisions about who gets financial support, and how much they receive.
Council Tax helps pay for the full range of local authority services including child protection, support for children with disabilities, adult social care, roads and pavements, waste and recycling, trading standards, enforcement of environmental crime, noise nuisance, policing and fire fighting etc. Over a third of council funding comes from Council Tax.
Will the new local scheme affect me?
Households that receive Council Tax Benefit where the applicant or partner is of State Pension Credit Age -Your benefit will not be affected.
In the case of couples, where one is of pension credit age and one is of working age and in receipt of Income Support, Income Based Jobseekers Allowance or Income Related Employment and Support Allowance - You will receive less help with your Council Tax under the proposed new local scheme.
Households of working age that receive Council Tax Benefit -You will receive less help with your Council Tax under the proposed new local scheme.
What if the new local scheme doesn't find the £1.3 million savings needed?
The local scheme proposals if all agreed will cover the £1.3 million cut imposed by the Government. If they are not each local authority can do some or all of the following:
Introduce some of the proposals
Increase Council Tax
Cut the level and range of local services
Our new local scheme proposal
South Somerset's proposed local Council Tax support scheme for working age households has been produced using the following principles and the rules of the current Council Tax Benefit scheme. We believe that any reductions in the level of support should be proportionate and remove unfairness in the current Council Tax Benefit scheme:-
Principle 1 - Everyone should contribute something towards the cost of local services through Council Tax
We believe all working age people should pay something towards their Council Tax
Principle 2 - All income should be included to ensure the scheme is fair
We will include all income except Disability Living Allowance, War Widows and War Disablement Pensions
Principle 3 - Greater account should be taken of the total income of a household
We will consider every adult's income to calculate Council Tax support
Principle 4 - Provide incentives to encourage people to work
We will support and encourage people to work by ignoring more of the money they earn
Principle 5 - It should provide protection for the vulnerable
We will continue to ignore Disability Living Allowance, War Widows and War Disablement Pensions and include a hardship scheme
Principle 6 - The scheme should not penalise those that have already saved for the future
We have decided not to change the current Council Tax Benefit rules regarding savings and capital
In our consultation questionnaire we have set out our proposals that show the areas where the proposed new scheme forworking age households is different to the current Council Tax Benefit scheme.
For each proposal there is an example to help you see what the change would mean. Some or all of the proposals may be in the new scheme so more than one proposal may affect you. At the end of the proposals there is an example to help you see what a combination of those proposals could mean.
Your say on the proposals will help us decide on the final scheme design. It is important that all of you have the chance to give us your views and opinions on the possible ways to manage the funding cuts. This will help us plan council spending for next year (2013/14).
Everyone currently in receipt of Council Tax Benefit on 31 March 2013 will have their Council Tax support calculated using the information we already hold.
http://www.southsomerset.gov.uk/benefitsconsultation
The council is consulting on how to apply the cuts (see below), but I can't help thinking we'll be back here again next year, with more cuts to apply. Thousands of local households have already been hit with reductinos to housing allowance.
At the same time government is trying to use the housing benefit system to reshuffle occupancy: some social housing is overcrowded, whilst other tenants have more bedrooms than they need. So, just swap them over? Easy, except that you're turfing out someone who's lived there for decades from a house full of memories, or taking away the guest room kept by an elderly tenant which is regularly used by family members. It's a pretty impossible circle to square, and there doesn't seem to be a painless way to do it.
The Government is ending the current national Council Tax Benefit scheme and all Council's have to replace it with their own local Council Tax support scheme.
Council Tax Benefit helps people with low income to pay their Council Tax.
New local schemes will start on 1 April 2013. To make sure it suits our communities, South Somerset District Council is consulting with residents on proposals for our local scheme.
The Government is reducing funding by at least 10%. For South Somerset residents this means we will receive approximately £1.3 million less than we do currently. The cost to the Council will increase further if the number of people claiming support goes up more than we expect or if Council Tax increases in future years.
This shortage in funding means we have to make some difficult decisions about who gets financial support, and how much they receive.
Council Tax helps pay for the full range of local authority services including child protection, support for children with disabilities, adult social care, roads and pavements, waste and recycling, trading standards, enforcement of environmental crime, noise nuisance, policing and fire fighting etc. Over a third of council funding comes from Council Tax.
Will the new local scheme affect me?
Households that receive Council Tax Benefit where the applicant or partner is of State Pension Credit Age -Your benefit will not be affected.
In the case of couples, where one is of pension credit age and one is of working age and in receipt of Income Support, Income Based Jobseekers Allowance or Income Related Employment and Support Allowance - You will receive less help with your Council Tax under the proposed new local scheme.
Households of working age that receive Council Tax Benefit -You will receive less help with your Council Tax under the proposed new local scheme.
What if the new local scheme doesn't find the £1.3 million savings needed?
The local scheme proposals if all agreed will cover the £1.3 million cut imposed by the Government. If they are not each local authority can do some or all of the following:
Introduce some of the proposals
Increase Council Tax
Cut the level and range of local services
Our new local scheme proposal
South Somerset's proposed local Council Tax support scheme for working age households has been produced using the following principles and the rules of the current Council Tax Benefit scheme. We believe that any reductions in the level of support should be proportionate and remove unfairness in the current Council Tax Benefit scheme:-
Principle 1 - Everyone should contribute something towards the cost of local services through Council Tax
We believe all working age people should pay something towards their Council Tax
Principle 2 - All income should be included to ensure the scheme is fair
We will include all income except Disability Living Allowance, War Widows and War Disablement Pensions
Principle 3 - Greater account should be taken of the total income of a household
We will consider every adult's income to calculate Council Tax support
Principle 4 - Provide incentives to encourage people to work
We will support and encourage people to work by ignoring more of the money they earn
Principle 5 - It should provide protection for the vulnerable
We will continue to ignore Disability Living Allowance, War Widows and War Disablement Pensions and include a hardship scheme
Principle 6 - The scheme should not penalise those that have already saved for the future
We have decided not to change the current Council Tax Benefit rules regarding savings and capital
In our consultation questionnaire we have set out our proposals that show the areas where the proposed new scheme forworking age households is different to the current Council Tax Benefit scheme.
For each proposal there is an example to help you see what the change would mean. Some or all of the proposals may be in the new scheme so more than one proposal may affect you. At the end of the proposals there is an example to help you see what a combination of those proposals could mean.
Your say on the proposals will help us decide on the final scheme design. It is important that all of you have the chance to give us your views and opinions on the possible ways to manage the funding cuts. This will help us plan council spending for next year (2013/14).
Everyone currently in receipt of Council Tax Benefit on 31 March 2013 will have their Council Tax support calculated using the information we already hold.
http://www.southsomerset.gov.uk/benefitsconsultation
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