Edinburgh Council Want Poor Kids to Die

 I’m extremely angry. I’ve been ranting on Twitter; so I thought it might be an idea to write a blog post.

This time last year, across the world, people looked at their empty city streets and thought “this is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for to remake our cities for people, not cars”. In the UK, local councils sprung into action laying down new cycle paths and widening pavements. Us residents in Edinburgh got a bit restless though.

The Council here have been, slowly, trying to make the city’s streets better. Though they have good intentions, they still seem to get stuck with the road traffic engineers’ obsession with “flow” (the disastrous Picardy Place gyratory, that went from a “cyclist blender” to a horrific two-lane motor system) and the overly bureaucratic system (the Roseburn to Haymarket cycleway that’s been stuck in the statutory consultation system for over a decade). But the Council had been making some dramatic plans, including basically closing off the city centre to motor traffic.

Us Edinburgh residents wanted some of their more dramatic plans to come to fruition. Glasgow – the city that had a new motorway ploughed through the inner core a decade ago – was even laying out new infrastructure quicker than Edinburgh. Eventually the Scottish Government got a funding package together and in May cones started springing-up across the city to make the streets slightly better places to be with Spaces for People.

Where we used to live – in Leith – it was good. The road closures due to the tram works, combined with these measures, made the place really nice to walk around. However, I started to notice something was afoot. As the first wave of temporary measures were reviewed, I noticed our local measures – pavement widening on Great Junction Street – were slated for removal. It seemed that if you were a middle class shopper in Stockbridge and Morningside, then you deserved space to walk past a queue for the game butchers, or sourdough bakery, but if you were working class and wanted to walk past a butcher in Leith, then it didn’t matter if someone coughed the rona all over you.

However, we moved in November 2020 and that’s when I realised quite how egregious the inequalities in road safety provision in the city are. We now live in the north east of the city – Pilton to be precise. Our nearest Spaces for People provisions are the new cycle routes on Ferry Road and Crewe Road South. Both are really nice and I use them regularly, but essentially are just cones on existing paint.

We live just off Crewe Road North. It’s a lovely 1930s suburban avenue, surrounded by four-in-a-block housing, and mansion-style interwar tenements; a mixture of council tenants and owner-occupation. At the bottom of the hill there is a nice row of shops. The only pedestrian crossing is at the southern end of the road to control traffic onto Crewe Toll roundabout. Just across the road is social housing which is in the 20% most deprived neighbourhoods in the city.

Not long after moving in, I noticed how fast vehicles shot down Crewe Road. At the southern end, it narrows under the former railway bridge so the pavement is only one paving slab wide with a railing alongside. With the Kent variant of coronavirus surging through the city, if you wanted to socially distance, you had a choice of stepping into the road and risk facing-down a HGV travelling over 30mph; wait patiently for another pedestrian to pass; or don your mask, hold you breathe, and walk quickly while apologising profusely. We thought the traffic was going quite fast, especially since most of Edinburgh’s roads are now a 20mph limit. Surely this residential street had a 20mph limit? And then we spotted the 30 sign.

It got me angry. We’d been living in a very walkable neighbourhood, but now walking to our local shops was difficult because it felt very dangerous. I watched the terrified school crossing patrol officers for the local primary school tentatively step out into the road, just hoping that drivers would stop. I contacted one of my local councillors with my concerns – asking why the road wasn’t 20mph and had so few pedestrian crossings. It was passed onto the Council’s Road Safety Team. They replied that their last survey, in 2019, showed the average speed was 29 mph, so they didn’t feel a 20mph limit was warranted (a quick google shows that puts the kids at the local school at seven times the risk of being killed by a driver) and the same survey showed that very few pedestrian cross the road. I replied pointing out that this was no surprise – as a fit and healthy young man, I find it difficult to cross the road safely. The reply to that (which I eventually got after chasing) just fobbed me off into a bureaucratic process of the review of the 20mph limit that will happen some time in the future.

And then I started getting out-and-about in the city again. I noticed in Barnton, on a very quiet suburban road, where the house price is basically the phone number with a pound sign in front of it, there were some lovely Spaces for People cones out widening a very wide pavement. Meanwhile I was stepping out into the road to walk past people waiting for a bus. In the New Town, there was a quiet residential street which didn’t have a pavement on one side because that was where the shared private garden was, and in the early-nineteenth century you didn’t need pavements to save yourself from being killed by a Range Rover. I noticed there were some lovely Spaces for People cones marking out access to the private garden. Meanwhile, tenants of the Council’s housing don’t have safe access to the Council’s schools.

Frustrated by this visible inequity, I popped in an access to environmental information request, asking for details of how the Spaces for People provision was distributed across the city according to deprivation. It got rejected because the information was already in the public domain. The Council expected me to sit with a map of the hundreds of datazones in Edinburgh and plot on the Spaces for People provision myself. I have appealed this decision, pointing out they can do this with a couple of clicks of GIS.

And this all just leaves me angry. It has been known for decades that children in deprived neighbourhoods are far more likely to be killed by drivers. And I’m using active language because I loathe the passive language of driverless cars accidentally mowing down vulnerable pedestrians. It really feels like Edinburgh Council just do not care about the safety of residents in deprived neighbourhoods. Because our houses are worth less, so are our lives. My research has focused on middle class activism, so I know a lot of this is down to the active, able communities in these neighbourhoods campaigning for improvements. But it is also down to officers and councillors just not caring, or thinking, about deprived neighbourhoods. They should have actively suggested improvements in these neighbourhoods, not wait for residents (who are probably rather busy dealing with losing their jobs to worry) to respond to a consultation. Given this is a brilliant opportunity to make our roads safer temporarily, we should not be forced to have to wait until a review in the future to make our lives safer. Unless Edinburgh Council want poor kids to die.

Park Run and Common Pool Resources

As a tri-afflete I run. Or, I ran. I’ve currently got problems with my ITB at the moment, so I’m not running as much as I’d like to. Although from that Wikipedia article, I think I’ve worked out why (I’m a pigeon-toed cyclist). Anyway, among the running community in the UK the decision of the Stoke Gifford Parish Council to charge their local Park Run for use of a park has caused a bit of a furore – a petition has currently reached 20,000 signatures. From a governance perspective, I find this fascinating.

Let’s start up with what I don’t know about this particular case:

•  It’s not clear from the reporting if there is an issue of conflict, with other users of the park regularly feeling they cannot use this particular park on a Saturday morning because it is over-run with runners (pun not intended).
•  I don’t know the population of the village concerned, or whether the Park Run is a lot of incomers.
•  I do not know if the Parish Council considered increasing their precept on the Council Tax to pay for further maintenance of the park concerned.

What I do know is this – it appears to be a classic case of the difficulty in managing a Common Pool Resource. In economics, a Common Pool Resource is one where you can’t easily stop people using it (it’s non-excludable) but where people using the resource deplete it until it cannot be used by anyone (it’s rivalrous). In this case the park is a Common Pool Resource because the Parish Council couldn't stop Park Run in the first place (it's non-excludable) and it create rivalry in two way: you can't easily share a path with hundreds of runners; and all those stomping feet will create wear-and-tear. This is different to an apple (a private good) which is excludable, no one else can eat it at the same time as you, and once you have eaten it, it has gone (it’s rivalrous); or street lighting (a public good) which is non-excludable (my A-Level economics teacher used to have a great skit on coin-operated street lights) and non-rivalrous, unless someone casts a particularly large shadow.

Neo-classical economics suggests that unless common pool resources are brought into the market (made excludable in some way), or are managed by bureaucracies, then the natural outcome will be the tragedy of the commons: every man (I use the pronoun purposefully) will use up the resource to their maximum extent which will mean it is eventually depleted for everyone. It sounds like this is what Stoke Gifford Parish Council believed was happening here. The Park Run was using the resource and it was being depleted to the detriment of everyone. Therefore a market solution was to make them pay.

The only woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for economics, the wonderful Elinor Ostrom, through actual empirical research, not fancy econometric modelling, basically said the neo-classical argument was rubbish. There were thousands of examples across the world where people had got together to manage common pool resources themselves. Close-knit webs of social ties meant that people trusted each other to use just enough of the resource. It also meant people were aware of the needs of others, so that if they over-used the resource then other people would suffer. Management of such resources can be co-produced by communities and government actors.

It sounds like the organisers of this Park Run wanted to get something like this going. The BBC reporting states:

“Geoff Keogh, a Parkrun organiser, told the meeting he did not believe the run had a significant impact on the park, but volunteers would be willing to undertake maintenance activities or litter picks "as a way of offsetting whatever the perceived costs might be to the council".”

The organisers wanted to give a bit, and ensure their event was still accessible, and regain the trust of the Parish Council. But the Parish Council view is that “it was "unfair" to expect non-running residents to pay for path upkeep”.

The fact that “fairness” has been thrown into the argument does suggest that a level of trust has broken down in this case. It also highlights that where there are difference in culture – in the case of my own research I’m interested in social class dynamics – getting collaborative management of common pool resources going can be very difficult. In this case, it would be really good if the District Council could come in and mediate, but I doubt now that they have the resources – as Helen Sullivan commented, such “Big Society” action to deliver collaborative management actually requires a “Big State”.  

Anyway, I don’t have any solutions for the residents of Little Stoke, or those runners. But it’s a fascinating case, and I hope someone is planning some doctoral research on it. What is more, as local authority budgets get cut more and more and basic maintenance becomes a luxury, I think we are going to see many more example of such battles of common pool resources. 

This is the hyperlinked text of a talk I gave at the annual Built Environment Forum for Scotland Conference in Edinburgh on 9 March. 

And the excellent Graham Ogilvie drew this as I was speaking: 

We put 'class' front & centre #HeritageDiversity @urbaneprofessor pic.twitter.com/Mf9Z5nCPyy

— BEFS (@TheBEFS) March 10, 2016

In the first draft of this talk I aimed to be provocative but conciliatory. However, in the end this version is just provocative; in fact I would go as far to say it is combative and it’s a good job I have to run off and catch the train to Stirling as soon as I finished otherwise I’d probably need bullet-proof armour to get out the room. What I am going to suggest is that the main trouble with heritage protection is that it is an example of middle class self-interest. People do not protect heritage for some transcendent, higher reason, but because it is in their own class interest.

In my research with Professor Hastings at the University of Glasgow we demonstrated that the middle classes are particularly good at getting resources from public services because they take advantage of four different mechanisms. Firstly, they join groups that policy-makers listen to, often because they have statutory duties; the classic example being the Community Council. Secondly, they are just much more likely to engage in policy-making on an individual and group basis. What is more, when they do engage they are more likely to get what they want which is a further incentive to engage. Thirdly, they have greater access to people with the necessary expertise, and also the ability to understand complex technical language, to have influence in policy-making. Finally, policy-makers just make policy to suit the middle classes; because they vote more, but also because they know the middle classes are likely to complain if policy is not made to suit them and their demands.

You are now probably bristling and thinking “I’m not middle class!” or the more sociological question of “what does he mean by middle class?” There is a lot of evidence behind this talk that is available free to access; but also the greatest revelation of this research for me is quite how middle class I am, and then using these mechanisms to get what I want.

Let’s apply this model of middle class influence to heritage. On the first mechanism, heritage groups are archetypal of this type of activity. Many started off as small groups of the great-and-the-good who used their influence to protect heritage – such as civic amenity associations – and then have gradually become a formal part of development processes and people who expect to be listened to.

We just need to look at the most controversial development decisions recently to see evidence of the second mechanism. I could reel off a list of controversial planning applications in well-to-do neighbourhoods in Edinburgh, but this would be unfair to my fellow citizens of this city. But it’s rather telling that the controversy over the proposed demolition of the Red Road flats in 2014 was largely one of the lack of taste in demolishing people’s homes during the Commonwealth Games ceremony, not uproar that we have housed people so poorly that the only sensible thing to do is to demolish their homes after 40 years.

In terms of the third mechanism – I lived in a listed building. It is listed because it is a unique collection of early nineteenth century industrial buildings, with a restrained classical façade, with dressed stone and proportional fenestration to the road elevation. Do I need to say any more? Most people don’t even know what fenestration means – it sounds more like something you’d see your doctor about rather than windows. Further, far fewer people who know someone to contact to tell them what fenestration is so they can get listed building consent and planning permission to do something about their windows. As the story of the Tinker’s Heart movingly showed, you are in a system that actively excludes people who can’t “talk heritage”.

Now the fourth mechanism. “Ah” you’re probably thinking, “look at the Royal High School! The St James Centre! Caltongate! There is no way he can say development policies are suited the interests of middle-class people!” Yes I am. Because the evidence is fairly obvious. As Dr Madgin suggested, we value places based on judgements of taste that come from a specific cultural background. When we afford an untouched neighbourhood of working class council housing the same level of protection because of its social value as we afford Edinburgh’s New Town, then I’ll accept that policy is not made in the interests of the middle classes. But it seems we struggle to even have a reasoned discussion on this. The only suggestion is that we merely continue to expand existing protection systems, slowly allowing different kinds of heritage – industrial, working class, associated with a specific minority group – because we expand the definitional envelope of what should be protected very marginally. We need a discussion about whether we have the right envelope at all.

Why is this all class interested? At its most basic, itprotects house prices which are the largest asset for most people. But all this social capital – the links to people of influence; and cultural capital – the valorisation of certain aesthetics and the language used to describe them, puts middle class people in positions of power and influence. And they, you, we, are not going to give up that lightly.

So now I’ve revealed myself as the, self-described “envy-driven author trying to pass off as an intellectual” I’ll don my flak jacket and tin helmet and beat a hasty retreat. 

Community empowerment - optimism?

So, we have a Community Empowerment ACT now in Scotland. And the Scottish Government are very proud of it too, as Minister for Local Government and Community Empowerment Marco Biagi writes. They should be proud too. Scotland has a long history of community empowerment. The minister highlights the example of community land buy-outs. I find the example of community-based housing associations more impressive – they are predominantly urban and commonly created by people in quite marginalised, deprived neighbourhoods being supported respectfully.* They’ve also managed to avoid the pitfalls of legislation such as this, such as the Localism Act’s “Right to Challenge” which is actually a right to have your services privatised due to European Union procurement rules.

I’m also quite impressed by the Scottish Government trying to use the engagement in political issues that emerged with last year’s referendum to try and deepen democracy and democratic engagement in Scotland.

However, I have two problems with the Act that means I cannot share the Minister’s optimism (not that I’d expect a Minister to be critical of their own Act, you understand). Firstly, unsurprisingly, given my interests, is the issue of possible injustices. As my colleague Prof. Annette Hastings said in her submission and oral evidence to the committee scrutinising the original bill, without adequate community learning and development support it is going to be the most affluent and able communities that will be able to take most advantage of these provisions – they could widen inequality not challenge it (as argued in this paper which you can download for FREE).

But, if you don’t know that argument you’ve not been paying enough attention to my stellar academic career, or this blog, so I don’t want to over-rehearse it again. I want to suggest another reason why I don’t share the optimism of the Minister. I just don’t think people are that bothered. It should also be noted that the Scottish Government listened to the concerns of people about the risks around equity and changed the Bill substantially.

I often find myself at events about participation, occasionally asked to speak (though Oliver Escobar is quite rightly Scotland’s go-to man on that count at the moment), and whenever I do I ask the other folk if they ever attend their local community council, PTA, neighbourhood partnership/committee etc. etc. Invariably, these people who are imploring Scotland to be more participatory and deliberative don’t attend such events because they’re too busy and not interested. I honestly say, from spending 15 months of doctoral fieldwork going to such meetings (the endless debate about a grant to a local Budgerigar fanciers organisation was a particular highlight – community budgeting is the future) you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming to such events.

Even if these organisations were given substantial budgets and power over local service areas, I still wouldn’t be bothered to get involved – I want my local services delivered well without me having to tell the local authority that I’d quite like clean streets, good local schools, and enough activities and youth work to prevent youth anti-social behaviour. Why should I attend a meeting to get good local outcomes if we know how to deliver those outcomes?

And this is where I think the Government have made a bit of an error of identification. I was a presiding officer on 5 May and, it is true that representative democracy has been invigorated in Scotland. Unlike every single other election I’ve worked, I had no time to stop and relax really – there was a constant stream through the doors. In my constituency there was a massive swing to the SNP, but the Labour candidate actually increased his number of votes compared to 2010. Everyone was voting more, because it’s easy.

The sort of participatory democracy the Scottish Government wants to create through the Community Empowerment Act isn’t that easy to get involved with. It requires giving up time and effort. It also involves thinking about issues in a very complex way. I’m a policy scholar – I get paid to think about these things. Most folk don’t.

The Scottish Government are attempting this participatory approach in their new National Conversation on a Fairer Scotland – my colleague Prof Paul Cairney has written well about this. I saw a tweet from the Scottish Government official account the other day:

West Dunbartonshire residents say that housing, education, job opportunities and community are key to a #fairerscotland. Do you agree?

— scotgovfairer (@scotgovfairer) August 6, 2015

And I was just thinking, well? Yes? What about these things? Can we have a policy discussion about these? How about evicting older people who are under-occupying massive homes and distorting the housing market? What kind of jobs do we want to create? Those that match the skills of the labour market now, or plan for the future? These are just a handful of the litany of difficult policy questions that spring to mind when you immediately start to think about what a “Fairer Scotland” might be. And heaven forfend that you might suggest some of these debates might cause conflict and rancour and people might disagree! In the New Progressive Scotland we just need to talk more (but not to persuade people, just to listen to them) and hug a bit more. 

Getting mass participatory democracy to discuss such issues is just utopianism, and I say that even though I’ve dabbled in Habermas. For me, Habermas and the political theory of Iris Marion Young are yardsticks, not blueprints.

To be a little bit more critical, I do have to put the ScotCEA into the same category of policies in Scotland that blurring accountability (Paul Cairney again and again). For me, the broader community empowerment agenda has to be seen as part of Cruikshank’s will to empower. Quite often I’ve heard people say that we need participation so people can meet outcomes. I’m sure this is commonly meant in a positive, co-producing way. But I believe it is also about dumping responsibility onto communities – want the council to do something about the closed primary school in your neighbourhood that’s being vandalised and is an eyesore then you should get together and buy it yourself! What? You don’t have enough money? Well, you’re not empowered enough then, are you.

* I used Richard Sennett’s idea of respect in an age of inequality, I used it in my doctoral thesis to argue in favour of a social democratic regeneration policy.

More on the Big Society

Just like Lothian 22 buses – you wait for one academic paper on the Big Society to come along and then two arrive at the same time. This time it’s Homo Economicus in the Big Society, not Bourdieu with it: ‘Homo Economicus in a Big Society: Understanding Middle-class Activism and NIMBYism towards New Housing Developments’ in Housing Theory and Society. It’s for a special issue of the journal that came out of the first of a set of ESRC-funded seminars on the Big Society, Localism and Housing. I presented my work on middle-class activism at the first seminar in Sheffield and this became this paper. The final paper ended up being co-authored with Prof. Glen Bramley and Prof. Annette Hastings.

The paper is actually two bits of empirical work brought (smashed?) together. The argument is:

• British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) data demonstrates alarming opposition to new housing
• This opposition tends to be in suburban, or non-remote rural locations, the sorts of places stuffed full of middle-class community activists
• The only thing that would really overcome this argument is if the development offered more local employment, which housing developments very rarely do
• The logic implicit in neighbourhood planning and the associated financial incentives is that this opposition is driven by peoples’ opposition to costs that affect them individually
• Actually, we argue that the opposition is driven by the threat to peoples’ identity as it is expressed through their housing choices and sense of home.

The two bits of work were actually done separately. Prof. Bramley had done the analysis of the BSAS data, including modelling at a local level. I’d started to think about the other theoretical analysis. We realised we could bring the two bits of empirical analysis together for this paper.

The trouble is, the paper is based on 2010 BSAS data. Since then, the 2013 BSAS data on attitudes to new housing have been published (pdf) and it shows a bit of a different story. The extremely good news is opposition has dropped from 46% to 31% and support grown from 28 to 47%. Now, if I were Eric Pickles I’d be thinking “woo, neighbourhood planning has worked! Everyone wants new housing!”.

However, I’d suggest that, as I argued a couple of years ago, the problems of never-ending house price rises and the growth of the incredibly poor quality private rented sector, means housing is becoming a middle-class issue and rising up the political agenda as little Sebastian or Tabatha struggle to get a decent home on a professional salary. And we all know that these housing problems are a combination of: a lack of regional planning, meaning the market focuses growth in London and the Southeast; low interest rates and thus the low cost of mortgages and increase in effective demand for housing; as Danny Dorling has argued, the lack of housing supply due to under-occupancy in the owner-occupied sector by older people (my mum in her four-bedroomed house); and a lack of new building.

A couple of the findings of the latest BSAS data do continue to support our thesis. Opposition among homeowners to new housing is still far higher than for renters in either private or social sectors. These are the people we suggest would have most to lose if their sense of elective/selective belonging – their identity – was threatened by 200 Barratt/Bellway boxes turning up on their doorstep. Also, although overall opposition in the highest income decile fell from 49% to 33%, supporting my housing-as-a-middle-class-problem thesis, it remained high, at around a third, in the places we’d expect – suburbs and non-remote towns.

Rather interestingly, this time around BSAS asked questions directly about the so-called “Boles bung”; or to be precise they were asked if they would support new housing if extra money was provided for local public services. Again, I’d argue, the results support our thesis: 47% said it would make them support; 50% said it wouldn’t. If homeowners were homo economicus, making rational decisions based on the immediate costs we’d expect to see much greater support if local public services were improved. These results suggest a much more pyscho-social homo democratus is at work here, positioning themselves in society with their residential choices and having and internal and external debate about anything that would affect this. 

Bourdieu and the Big Society

Writing this I’m thinking “if my A Level Sociology teachers could see me now”. I studied sociology in school but really didn’t think I’d return to it, but now it seems a lot of my academic output wrestles with social theory.

The latest output from my work with Annette Hastings on middle-class community activism has now hit the presses – Bourdieu and the Big Society: empowering the powerful in public service provision? In Policy and Politics(£). And very good it is too, in my humble opinion. I really cannot claim that much credit for it. Annette did the hard theoretical work (including all the reading of Bourdieu), and it was a lengthy process of rewriting and bashing it back-and-forth between us. At one point it was a 13,000 word unruly beast and I recall sending an email stating that we weren’t trying to write a book. Editing out a third of it and responding to the excellent comments from Bourdieuan scholar Pat Thomson and from the reviewers has made it a very nice final polished paper.

Essentially the paper riffs from one of the four causal theories we identified in our overall review and published in our paper for Social Policy and Administration.* This was that the alignment between the cultural capital of service users and service providers means that middle class people benefit disproportionately from the state. We return to a richer discussion of how Bourdieu conceived of class interests and how they operate in society and then bring the range of evidence we review to this theoretical structure to demonstrate it in action.

The title including the words “The Big Society” might seem a bit odd or dated, but essentially this was just a policy to hang our ideas off and give the paper salience. However, what did interest us was the continued move towards local empowerment in policy, as implemented in Big Society ideas and practically in localism and the Localism Act in England, without concomitant investment in community development, might lead to greater empowerment of middle class groups. The evidence we reviewed showed pretty conclusively that it is very likely it will.

I remember just at the time we were going to submit the paper a conversation on Twitter along the lines of “does anyone even talk about the Big Society anymore”. And it is a very good point. After the umpteenth relaunch failed the government stopped talking about the Big Society and now the policy is increasingly mired in scandal.

However, as you’ll see from the reference list, for once, when the coalition government, with its commitment to localism and the Big Society, academia actually did quite well at getting a swift response out to these policy moves. I think partly because there was a lot of stuff in the pipeline about former community policies by the Labour government which could easily be changed, but also because community engagement and participation had become such a substantial area of research in the UK, people were ready to step up to the mark fairly swiftly and offer strong theoretical and evidence-informed critique.

Further, I think that the Big Society and the associated localism policies caused such an immediate response because at its kernel there is a lot of interesting stuff to get at. The most shallow level of analysis would suggest that it uncomfortably combines a one-nation Tory belief in the power of civic society in the tradition of the Primrose League and Rotary Societies, and a more Thatcherite, neoliberal redistribution of responsibility and risk to individuals, albeit recognising they are in communities. Because of the coalition it also brings in a liberal attitude to government more generally. Much as the label “the Big Society” has died a death, it’s a good metonym for all of this sort of stuff, including policies such as the Scottish Government’s Community Empowerment and Renewal agenda (which I discussed in relation to this research back here).

Further, and this is the crux of our argument in our paper, there is the very real and present danger that community empowerment initiatives just empower the vociferous middle classes. As many of the critiques of the government policy highlight, this is particularly the case in our current period of austerity when, apart from the community organisers programme, very little investment in community engagement is going into the most deprived neighbourhoods. It is an example of middle-class norms dominating policy-making to the benefit of the middle-classes themselves; the middle-class state.

We believe that using a Bourdieusian understanding of social class adds to our understanding of policy-making and the unequal operation of the state. Hopefully our paper will lead to a broader research agenda along these lines, moving beyond education policy, the traditional focus of Bourdieusian analysis.

*as ever, most journal articles by me available in my institutional repository here though in this case you’ll have to wait a year. Do email me if you want a copy though.

Making peace with Cambridge

I keep it quite quiet(ish), but I am a graduate of the University of Cambridge. I graduated with a first* in history from Robinson College exactly ten years ago today. I’m using this post to reflect on this. I was not happy at Cambridge; in fact I almost committed suicide. Like most Cambridge graduates I went back four years after I “matriculated” to get my free upgrade to an MA, a visit marked by, firstly how unbelievably shite our B&B was and secondly, by some very unpleasant emotional reactions, and spending twenty minutes sat in the sun on Jesus Green weeping.

The great span of a decade, and also my experience of different universities since, has allowed me to reflect on this. So, you’ll be pleased to note this won’t be a psychological moan (although there will be a bit of that) but a reflection on the inequalities in the UK’s education system that, I now realise, led me to be as unhappy as I was during my undergraduate degree.

A bit about my background first. I’m very middle class. I was brought up quite middle class, by a social worker and a teacher, in a reasonably well-to-do suburb of Bradford. I went to a state comprehensive that was very mixed, would probably now be referred to as “coasting” (failed the poor kids, didn’t stretch the clever rich kids) which usually got one or two pupils into Oxbridge from sixth form each year. I’d estimate about 20 per cent of my year went to university eventually; mainly the new universities and often those closest to Bradford.

My parents on the other hand were from very working class backgrounds, and in my mum’s case absolute poverty. They were products of the postwar expansion of education and the welfare state. I’m also openly gay, but only came out to my parents when I was 20. So that gives you a bit of an idea of the 19 year who toddled off to Cambridge back in 2001.

Cambridge is really weird

As presents heading off to Cambridge I was given a video of the classic TV series Porterhouse Blue by my mum and a bottle of Turning Leaf red wine by my mum’s friend whose daughter had gone to Oxford. The wine, it was explained, was to share at my first formal hall. At this I started to think Cambridge was a bit odd, but generally I was just scared and excited about going off to University.

As I didn’t have a video player at University I didn’t get to watch Porterhouse Blue until I came home after my first term for Christmas. If you’ve never seen it, I would recommend it. It stands with the opening chapter of Clive James’ May Week was in June as one of the greatest satires of Oxbridge establishment. It tells the parallel stories of a new master at Porterhouse College who wishes to reform it from its medieval ways and a young doctoral student plodding through his studies. It absolutely pillories the conservatism of Oxbridge, especially in terms of the ludicrous “traditions” – in the case of Porterhouse exemplified by a swan being served for dinner.

I laughed a lot watching it, and recognised a lot of what I’d already experienced in Cambridge in it. But I was defensive, and explained to my mum that Robinson wasn’t like that because it was the most modern college and was the only Oxbridge college founded as co-ed.** On reflection though, Robinson was modern in look, but was as conservative as the ancient colleges could be. We had formal hall twice a week, although attendance was optional, and in many regards the college had pretentions to be ancient. What I now recognise as the shame of the college management as to their listed building modernist building, also testifies to this. I’ll come back to pretentions later.

As I now understand, Cambridge is really weird in how it teaches. In organisational terms what would be programmes or degree courses at other universities was the “tripos”***; modules or courses were “papers”. I got my marks at the end of semester by going to see my Director of Study who would talk me through it (I can still recall passing one of my peers running, in tears, out of our DoS’s house at the end of first year). My final mark was posted on a sheet of A4, along with all the other students, on a board outside Senate House for all the world to see (Data Protection Act?).

In terms of teaching methods, in history you basically did an essay a week for eight weeks and submitted it for supervision with an academic and discussed it with them for an hour. The supervision/tutorial system is supposed to be what makes Oxbridge so good in terms of education. And in what other university would a student get eight hours of one-to-one tuition every term? I was lucky in that most of my supervisors were ok, although one did make me cry in a supervision. But as a timid comprehensive school lad, I can’t say the teaching method did much for me. Good feedback would have been sufficient.

Lectures were optional and as a result I only ever made it through all eight lectures of one lecture series. In the final lecture, me and two other students filled out the feedback sheets for the lecturer. He looked at them and commented that the same thing happened every year – he got glowing feedback, but only a handful of students stuck with him for the whole semester. Another lecturer essentially read out his textbook that had been published in 1983. It was out-of-date in about 1992. I did not stick around for all eight weeks of that one.

In one of my first lectures, Prof Blanning’s series on modern European history, he mentioned the setting up of the University of Berlin and its pioneering seminar method of teaching. He went on to mention, as an aside, that this was far superior to the supervision method. I experienced good seminars for two terms in my final year – in the special subject I had to do as a history student called Mid-Victorian culture wars. As someone who has experienced a range of higher education teaching techniques since, I now realise this was the only good teaching I ever got at Cambridge. It was student-led, with us all volunteering each week to do a report (I spent days pouring over the London Illustrated News on microfiche in the University library to produce a witty précis of the Great Exhibition of 1851, including a good chunk on the inventor of the square wheel) with proper seminars where, as a group, we were treated as equals. The reading was predominantly original historical material which we then had to reflect on in the exam.

Apart from my dissertation, and a 2,500 word research report I had to produce in second year (which got a special mention for being particularly bad in the examiner’s report) all the assessment was exams. My final term at Cambridge was basically spent in libraries revising and writing mock exam papers. My hand was so crippled at the end of it I lost marks for my handwriting. I came out knowing remarkably little about the historical method; a remarkably specialised knowledge of mid-Victorian culture and eighteenth and early-nineteenth century history; and a lot of emotional baggage.

In terms of basic pedagogy, a learning outcome was never mentioned to me; as a learner I gained no transferable skills through my study (you had to get those through extracurricular activities); admittedly I was there 2001-4, but still only one lecturer used PowerPoint and a projector; I did not realise you could access journal articles online until halfway through my MSc degree at Heriot-Watt. My first experiences at other universities, Heriot-Watt and the University of Glasgow, was just how superior their teaching methods were; how much more challenging and rewarding it was; and how much more enjoyable it was. These are all lessons I’ve taken into my own teaching.

So, yes, Cambridge was, and I presume still is, weird. But what I’ve come to realise since, is Cambridge is weird because of social class.

Social class and Cambridge

I want to start this section with two stories of my time. In 1999 my school sent a group of us down to Cambridge to look around on an open day. Naively it just sent us off to Robinson, Queen’s, and in my own case Gonville and Cauis (pronounced “keys”) because the school had got students into them before. As part of the open day we were taken to the office of the Director of Studies for History at Cauis. We all sat around and he asked who we were and which school we were from. I was quite near the end. Every other prospective student went to a private school, some of which I had heard of. When everyone mention this the DoS replied with something along the lines of “oh good school. Do you know so-and-so, good chap”. The most awful one was the discussion with one about which position he played at Rugby as they’d been to the same school (which might have been Rugby). When it got to me I enthusiastically explained I went to “the Salt Grammar School, in Saltaire, the Victorian industrial model village built by Sir Titus Salt. You might have heard about it?”. He replied with “that’s nice” and went on to the person next to me. I felt literally winded and thought I’d ruined my chances of getting to Cambridge there and then.

Then on my first day we had our first ever formal hall. I didn’t take the bottle of Turning Leaf down as the college actually provided barely drinkable wine. As we awkwardly sat around I chatted to the guy next to me. It turned out he was an old Etonian. After the Latin grace, we sat down to eat and the guy asked me which set of cutlery he should use for the starter. Somewhat aghast I explained you worked from the outside in. I knew that because my grandmothers had been in service so laid the table like this for great families. As respectable working class and aspiring middle class, when we had a posh tea with that many courses (high days and holidays) that’s how the Sheffield silver plate cutlery was laid.

In my research now, I’m becoming increasingly knowledgeable about, and supportive of a Bourdieuan cultural understanding of class and for me these stories exemplify this. The latter story on the cultural capital of dining (although why Eton isn’t teaching this, God only knows. If I was a parent, I’d want my money back), the former story on the exclusionary nature of social and cultural capital as replicated in the UK’s schooling system as it is deployed in social settings.

I thought I fitted in at Cambridge, but in respect I did not because of this force of cultural and social capital. Yes I was very middle class and knew how to eat properly, but I hadn’t been to private school and did not know how to behave. What is more, as a timid young man, learning to live with his sexuality, it was never a skill I gained. I write this not long after the death of Richard Hoggart. In a wonderful tribute Lynsey Hanley explains the difficulties Hoggart, and herself, felt at university as “anxious and uprooted voices”. This very much resonates with my experience. I obviously cannot prove the counterfactual, but I think I would have been more comfortable at a redbrick university. As it was I was an “anxious and uprooted voice” because of social class at Cambridge. Yes, Cambridge has done a lot to widen access, but it cannot get away from the fact that a vastly greater proportion of it students went to private school then you will ever meet in everyday life. Those who went to state schools largely went to the best schools surrounded by similarly very middle class people. Much as I tried, I could not learn the comfort others had in social settings – the cultural capital – to feel like I fitted-in.

In retrospect, I found this article in the Telegraph, of all places, epitomises this. The bit that particularly resonates for me is the mention of the student who “prattled on about how you didn’t have to enjoy punting or drinking champagne to think about putting Cambridge on your UCAS form.” In my experience, you absolutely have to enjoy punting or drinking champagne (both of which I did) to fit in at Cambridge. I remember the summer I left there was a documentary on BBC2 about the experience of ethnic minority students at Oxbridge and it included some footage of people queuing to get into Trinity college ball - £150 a, very exclusive, ticket with all the champagne and oysters you could consume if you made it to the other side. Sat watching this footage of very wealthy young people in ball gowns and dinner suits from the sofa in my mum’s three-bed semi in Bradford, I realised how different Oxbridge was from the rest of the UK.

A further dimension of how social class expressed itself particularly as an exclusionary force is exemplified by the infamous Bullingdon Club photo of David Cameron and his cronies. When people raise charges of elitism in reference to this photo, it is, all too easily, dismissed by them as the language of envy and class war. But drinking societies in Oxbridge matter. My college had one ironically called “The Robinson Rentals” referring back to the humble beginnings of David Robinson who made his first millions renting out TVs in the east of England. Being a member of a drinking society essentially meant you were in the in-crowd and had friends and connections for life. Even if you were not invited to join, if you were on the periphery it helped you get on socially. If you were excluded then you were one of the bullied geeks around the place.

Although they were both less exclusive, it is fair to say that the Cambridge Union Society and the Cambridge University Conservative Association (the two organisations were indistinguishable when I was a student), played a similar role in social networks and social exclusion within Cambridge.

The dominance of the drinking societies meant that a certain form of classed behaviour predominated in social circles – a behaviour of low-level bullying and drinking that came straight out of boarding schools. In my second year I was the LGBT rep on our college Students’ Association. One Saturday morning I awoke to a bed sheet that had been tied to the balcony walkway outside my window, on which someone had scrawled “this college is gay”. This was the most direct homophobic attack on me as a person I had experienced since I had left school. Everyone knew it was the Rentals that had done after they’d got pissed on Friday night. But among the students it was dismissed as “a laddish prank”. It took the enlightened intervention of the Senior Tutor to email all students and express how appalling the incident was.

This is the behaviour you see Cameron doing in his “flashman” moments. The fact that the press so blithely accept the “it’s class envy” argument when things like the Bullingdon Club are mentioned, for me, demonstrates the hegemonic dominance of such people and such ways of behaving in British society. The dominance of private schooling and Oxbridge in the elite of the UK ensures class inequalities are perpetuated. If you can’t access these things by birth, then you seek to imitate them through getting your kids into the best school, and the pretensions of non-Oxbridge universities, and their students, to be like Oxbridge.

I know a lot of comprehensive school kids from similar backgrounds will read this and go “this is rubbish. It wasn’t like this at all. This is all about you”. That is a fair argument. Of the non-private school students who get to Cambridge, I’m sure many do very well. I’m sure my story will resonate with others, however. And while I was not in a happy place as an undergraduate generally, I am now very much aware of the role social class had in this, and that cannot be denied. Similarly, I’m sure people will point to the laddish behaviour of students at other universities – the University I’ll soon be moving to is a case in point – as to why that behavioural aspect of my experience at Oxbridge is nonsense, it exists at all universities. But the unique thing for me, is the sheer dominance of people educated at Oxbridge in the elite of our nation means this matters a lot more than Stirling’s hockey club.

As an undergraduate in my first two years I took part in Cambridge’s access work, going to my local FE college in Bradford to eulogise to them about applying there. I remember talking about how happy I was and how it wasn’t all posh, and then going on to say how much I enjoyed punting and the May balls. I know for a fact I managed to put one student off applying. I couldn’t do this now. If I was to do it I would be forced to admit punting was an activity started by Edwardian toffs with little else to do and was actually quite pricey; the price of a May Ball ticket was probably much more than someone from the majority of the households in the UK could afford to pay once they’d forked out for their tuition fees; I’d have to tell them that whenever they mentioned which FE college they had attended they would be ridiculed; I would have to tell them that the people they meant who sneered at them for their background, who described their college as “looking like a prison” out of sheer snobbishness, would then be in power over them, setting the agenda for debate at a national level in the UK. I would tell the students to go to any other university in the UK because the teaching will be better, the mix of students more inclusive and interesting, and the opportunities to be yourself far wider.

* my first is why I am a very understanding member of exam boards as an academic now. At Cambridge your final degree classification is decided on the results of your second “tripos” which in History is your final year. It consisted of four papers and a dissertation, and since everything was double-marked, 10 marks. On my dissertation and two other papers I had very divergent marks. Off the top of my head, my marks were something like 51, 53, 68, 68, 68, 70, 70, 73, 75 and 80. I can’t remember for sure, but basically, with my mean mark I’d barely scraped a 2ii, however I was told by my Director of Studies that the exam board debated me for a long time, and agreed to give me my median mark of a First.

** although, there was a myth that the wonderful building designed by the partnership of Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan at Gillespie, Kidd & Coia was not originally fitted with showers in the bathrooms because one of the women on the panel who supervised the design was of the view that “ladies do not shower, they bathe”.

*** Latin for a three-legged stool. Need I say more?

Middle-class nation state?

This afternoon I told a struggling undergrad dissertation to go an write. Just write. Anything. Write, write, write. I also explained I had the idea for this post in my head and had been desperate to write it out all day after reading this paper(£) on the train this morning. So, apologies, it's scrappy and not very hyperlinked, but I needed to get the ideas out.

For some context, you might also want to see my blogs about my middle class activism research here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

So Haugaard argues, via Marx, that the nation state subverted class interests by creating other social structures, in Foucault’s terms, the technologies of governance, schools etc. He frames this in terms of creating a habitus – a being in one’s self – that is being part of the nation state. The symbolic violence that makes this seem natural obscures the activation of power by the state. Now, we can accept this as positive power, as the enabling of good things to happen.

However, we can link this to T.H. Marshall’s concept of welfare citizenship and social rights as a development from civil and political rights. In his framing of the development of the welfare state he saw people gaining greater citizenship as the benefits of the state enabled them to participate fully. Further this developed a social contract across the nation, nation-state reciprocity. This can be seen as the positive power, as just mentioned. However, the obvious criticism is that this was a paternalist state. The growth of the welfare state led to a growth in social mobility through a growth in technical professions, as Mike Savage has argued. The UK, in particular, stopped being a gentlemanly country/state and became an increasingly technocratic one. Goldthorpe and Lockwood wanted technically competent knowledge of the affluent workers of Luton through using cutting-edge sociological methods.

So to argue that the postwar welfare state created a welfare citizenship based on social rights is already looking a bit flimsy – it created a state of the minds of the technically proficient bureaucrats who were managing it: of householders managers by the Corporation Sanitary Inspectress and latterly social workers; of suburbs and city centres of the planners’ ideal type; of hospitals which treated people with the same problems as the consultant’s or GP’s friends. The social mobility associated with these professions arguably created a new social class, particularly as identified by Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s Weberian schema that became NS-SEC.

If we turned to a Bourdieusian conception of class we can get at this a bit more and bring the debate back full circle to consider habitus and symbolic violence. I am using the shorthand here of “the middle class” to describe these professionals who were created by and created the postwar welfare state, and also those with the social capital that links to them, and similar cultural capital. As myself and Annette Hastings have argued, the middle classes, so conceived, are particularly effective at extracting gain from the welfare state, especially in terms of services that suit their needs and demands – a subtle form of Tudor-Hart’s inverse care law. We can suggest that in the period 1945-1979 the growth of the state, the high social mobility, and increasing equality led to a devaluation of economic capital in securing class positions. Instead, a large group of people gained an enhanced class position through social and cultural capital – the 11+, investment in the arts and culture (National Theatre, Arts Council etc.). They then created a middle-class state in their own image; a state where middle-class habitus, the being in one’s self, helped you get on. It helped you get into the right school; it helped you get on in that school; it helped you get the best treatment from your GP or consultant; it helped you oppose that social housing development that might detract from your neighbourhood; it enabled you to get your street swept more regularly than the inner city neighbourhoods; it meant you felt comfortable in the plate glass university you went to; increasingly now it means you have the means to shield your assets from being used to pay for your care and being able to use your personal budget to buy absolutely excellent care or get you into the best care home.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, but the evidence suggests that to suggest that we created a middle-class state in the UK is not that far-fetched an idea. This is acceptable during a period like that from 1945-1979 where we had large amounts of upward social mobility. There was lots of space, for people like my parents, to be in this middle class. But this social mobility has stalled. What is more, a lot of these people (with a household income of £60k - £100k based on two professionals working full time) are in the top quartile, decile or even percentile of the income scale yet they do not recognise this. So this group are sailing away from the rest of society who have very little chance of joining them and yet they are still creating the state in their own mould because they expect or presume everyone to be like them. Their habitus and symbolic violence makes it seem natural that, for example, you should work very hard to get your child into the best school. As a result non-middle-class parents begin to feel guilty about making a choice based on family connections, or just what school is nearest and easiest to get to.

So where does this leave us? I feel uncomfortable in our middle classes work because if you follow the logic to its conclusion you can argue that state resources should be withdrawn from the middle-classes as it just entrenches inequality and be focused solely on those poorer in society. But for me that leaves us with the problem that services for the poor are poor services. However, if we conceive of the modern welfare state as a middle class state, then what is important is to reduce inequality and make sure there is social mobility. Then we can return to Marshall’s model of social citizenship as it will be something all can benefit from. Further, to link Marshall’s point about reciprocity to the Wilkinson and Pickett Spirit Level argument, and particularly their point that is does not matter how you get your equality either by having equal incomes, or progressive taxation what matter is equality. Then what we need to ensure the welfare state does not entrench and exacerbate inequality is to produce equality so that everyone is paying in equally, or that the wealthier are paying in more but seeing the benefit to all around them.

I think.

Social class in Britain

So after two days the Great British Class Survey is still the most visited page on the BBC News website. And to think, we’re a society not interested in class. When I first did the test I misread the income question and put my pre-tax household income in and came out as Elite. Now I’ve adjusted this I’m now Established Middle Class. And you all know how much I like the middle classes.

It would be rude of me not to comment on this given our work on the middle classes. I’ve also recently finished reading Mike Savage’s book Identities and Social Change in Britain Since 1940 so I have a good idea where the analysis of the GBCS is coming from. So, in this post I just want to briefly comment on the GBCS and link it to our own work on the middle classes and then do a mini review of Identities and Social Change.

The response to the GBCS on twitter was bemusement followed by many questions that sociologists of social class ponder about a lot: does one’s social class change over time? What does social class mean? Is it linked to occupation? Or is it all about social status. And then there were the Marxists pointing out there are two classes – the exploited and the exploiters. If you haven’t, I’d recommend reading the article in Sociology that supports the news coverage – it’s a good run-through of the theoretical presumptions behind the study and answers most of these questions.

As a tangential point – I think this is a really excellent example of open-access done well and sensibly. There will be thousands of people who want to read this article because of its news coverage; it’s written in a very accessible way; and no one will have to pay $30.

One of the very telling things in the article is how vastly skewed the self-selected sample in the first, BBC run, Great British Class Survey compared to the population of the UK. People who read the BBC news are wealthier and in higher-status occupations than the general population. This is self-selection seems to be repeating itself in the people who are now seeing if they’re “Established Middle Class” or not and then moaning about it. Given the emphasis in the research on cultural capital, the irony cannot be lost.

So, how does this align with our own work on class. One of the questions we always get asked is “what do you mean by the middle class”. At the stage our research is at (a review of existing evidence) we can get away with saying “it’s what the studies defined it as” but it is something that troubles us. The Bourdieuan perspective of Savage’s work really helps us though in thinking through what our definition of middle class might be. In particular, our evidence shows that is the cultural capital of the middle classes, but even more importantly the alignment of cultural capital between service users and service deliverers that means the middle classes benefit disproportionately from the state’s services. In Savage et.al.’s new framework, this is the established middle class talking to the established middle class.

A lot of the comments on Twitter around the GBCS on Wednesday morning focused the methodology. And this brings me onto Identities and Social Change and my mini-review. I’ll start with a nice anecdote. I studied A’ Level sociology and I’m very glad I did – I have a working knowledge of the various main theories and methods of sociology that have stood me in very good stead indeed. In the bit of the course on stratification we studied Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s famous Luton study of the Affluent Worker. When I came to study history at university I did a course (I initially was going to refer to this as a “paper” to reveal my elite education) on modern British socio-economic history and studied the Affluent Worker as a historical text. This amused me quite a lot and I Yahoo’d (those were the days) John Goldthorpe and discovered his email address at Nuffield College Oxford and dropped him an email explaining all this. Amazingly in about two hours I got a very nice reply, which I included as an appendix to my essay. He commented that this was a sad indictment of the state of British sociology and made some cutting remarks about Fiona Devine’s study of Luton.

Anyhow, when I launched into Identities and Social Class I immediately fell in love with it as it’s not a book on sociological methods, it’s a history of sociological methods and a historiography of sociological methods. As a historian I was quite shocked to be faced with my presumption that the sociological method had been “always there”. The novelty of the large social survey was something I’d never really considered before. And the story of how the qualitative interview came to dominate sociology in Britain was compelling and made me understand all the more why my dissertation students are ready to run out and do a handful of interviews, of dubious merit and quality, at the drop of a hat.

So, if you really want to understand the GBCS I really would recommend reading Identities and Social Change. However, it does end on an interesting note, that even three years later is beginning to be dated. Savage points out that in the World of Big Data companies like Tesco and Experian have more data on our society than a sociologist can ever hope to capture. With the rise of Google even the Tesco Clubcard database is surely paling into insignificance. And that’s what I wonder about the GBCS – Sian Campbell, in a somewhat light-hearted discussion on twitter, commented:

@siancampbell1 @urbaneprofessor @mcnurse Isn't this just a rubbish version of Mosaic?
— GoldilocksZone (@SianCampbell1) April 3, 2013

And I think that’s quite a telling critique. In inductive class surveys you can use whatever data you want and chop it up using advanced statistical methods to divide society into classes. I actually think the methodology of GBCS was more nuanced than the likes of MOSAIC particularly because it brings in social capital. For me, this is where the Marxist and deductive class theorists are possibly right as what matters for me isn’t so much what class distinctions there are, but recognising that there are class distinctions and this has a major impact on people’s lives around things like the delivery of public services.

Community empowerment and renewal

The Scottish Government are currently consulting on a Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill. I see this as a sort of Scottish Localism Act. A couple of my colleagues have done very good blog posts on the consultation and I’d recommend you read them: Dr Kim McKee and Malcolm Combe.

I thought I’d add my tuppeneth worth here as well. Most of my response is going in as part of an AHRC Connected Communities project, Reframing Citizen-State Relations (see job advert for that project here as well) so I’m not going to be answering every question here. I just want to raise three points on: community empowerment; processes of community participation in different services; and Scottish Government consultations.

Firstly, throughout the consultation document and implicit in many of the questions is the presumption that community engagement is a good thing. I have a couple of problems with this. From our work on middle-classcommunity activism I do not think community engagement and empowerment is always a good thing. In fact, it seems to me that in many ways it can just recreate and reinforce inequalities in wider society – empowering the already powerful. This comes across in the discussion around Community Councils. We know that middle-class people are more likely to join groups such as Community Councils (a bit like English Parish Councils). What is needed is much greater investment in community development resource to bring in those who wouldn’t get their voices heard. I’d also be interested in if there is community development literature on getting people to shut up. One of the most interesting bits of my doctoral research was watching an Inspector from Lothian and Borders Police calmly tell a very middle –class person that the police would not routinely patrol by their allotments to combat a spate of stealing from sheds, as every evening the police were completely stretched maintaining a level of normalcy in less affluent neighbourhoods. The police officer recommended the purchase of insurance. A much braver person than me! But an extremely valid point.

There is also the point, made quite often during the heady days of the late 1990s and early noughties of the New Labour government, of community engagement seen as a way to improve communities themselves as well as services. I ended my PhD thesis with this quote from a document produced by the Scottish Social Inclusion Network that neatly summarises my views on this:

‘…community participation should not be seen as a pre-requisite for the delivery of decent services.  People living either in poor or more affluent areas are entitled to both quality services and an acceptable living environment.  We should not accept a situation where people living in more deprived communities have to go to countless meetings or engage in endless arguments with decision makers simply to receive a level of service that other people take for granted.’

Scottish Social Inclusion Network, Strategy Action Team (1999). Inclusive Communities. Edinburgh, p. 23

Another way to put it is “you can’t eat engagement”. I see a worrying trend along these lines in the proposals for community ownership and communities being given the right to run services. What I fear is that while affluent communities will be able to choose what services they want to run public services will use these provisions as an excuse to disinvest from services only used in less affluent neighbourhoods (such as community centres) and then “offer” them to the community to run. This is not empowerment but injustice.

Secondly is the actual process of community engagement in different services. One of the proposals is to place a general duty on engagement across all public services. I disagree with this and will probably be copying and pasting this into the consultation form for my own response. I disagree from my perspective as a planner. I’ve never worked as a planner, and am still not a member of the RTPI, but I still call myself a planner. Planning in the UK is interesting as, as far as I’m aware, it was the first public service in the UK to include a statutory right for the general public to be consulted on policies and decisions. Since the Skeffington Report in 1969 a vast chunk of planning research and practice has been done on public engagement. And a lot of it is quite atrocious and the system is still balanced towards developers. But the statutory right exists and the statute, especially in Scotland since the Planning etc. Scotland Act 2006, say when the public can expect to be engaged. From this a whole host of policy on engagement, specifically focused at the planning system has been developed. My fear is that a general duty would lead to a race to the bottom on community engagement and all services would revert to worst practice (not mentioning any large organisations of three letters beginning in N and ending in S).

Finally, in a Twitter conversation between Kim, Malcolm and myself Kim mentioned how badly the consultation document has been designed. This is becoming an increasing bug-bear of mine. The document is huge, but what is even worse is there are more pages of questions than of text being consulted on – 49 questions in total. It takes someone quite dedicated (sad?) to fill in that consultation, not your average community activist. I worked on the consultation analysis for the Scottish Government’s tackling poverty framework in 2007. If I remember rightly, this was led by the Poverty Alliance and it showed – a few broad questions that produced really interesting responses (still didn’t stop my analysis being broadly slated, but hey-ho). Now, the Scottish Government approach seems to be “we don’t know the answer to a question, so we will shove that in the questionnaire” rather than actually letting us respond to the issues that might interest us within the consultation document. Something needs to change in Scottish Government Towers if consultation is going to be worthwhile.