A paper I'm very proud of

I’ve not blogged in a while because of 2020, but a paper I wrote with a researcher colleague Chris Poyner is now out in Public Administration Quarterly and I want to summarise it. I’m also extremely proud of it. It emerged from my research on LGBT+ homelessness and housing which I’ve written about before, and in it I valiantly attempt to set a new research agenda based on a very simplistic use of queer theory.

It had a pretty torrid time getting published. It was eventually (after three rounds of revision) rejected by one journal I suspect for disciplinary reasons – I think they had a very fixed idea of what social science theory, and queer theory, which is essentially a collection of ideas and concepts you can use to look askance at society and culture didn’t really fit that model. However, the editor and reviewers for PAQ were extremely helpful and it was published.

The paper focuses in on one particularly finding from the research: while housing and homelessness organisations were never explicitly homophobic, they were implicitly homophobic. To unpack this I used the concept of heteronormativity from queer theory to demonstrate how, in incredibly mundane ways, they reinforced compulsory heterosexuality.

A key way they did this was to completely ignore sexual identity. None of the organisations involved in the research regularly collected sexual identity data. I know this is a very tricky subject. If they had been LGBT+ identifying people talking critically about it, I would have been less critical. But this was cisgender, heterosexuals, saying they didn’t want to put sexual identity on a standard monitoring form for fear of insulting people (straight people). Ironically, these forms of equality then became forms of ensuring heterosexuality: you could be any ethnicity, gender, race, impairment. But you could not be non-heterosexual.

This became a real problem because the organisations then didn’t know if there were problems that needed to be tackled. The most obvious, and worrying, of these would be homophobic or transphobic abuse by neighbours. The tenants we interviewed talked in graphic detail about the impact this had on their lives (as discussed in this paper) but the organisations didn’t think it was a problem as they never sought to ask their tenants.

The bigger point I make in the paper though, is that if you look across the literature on LGBT+ people and politics and policy, quite rightly and understandably, this is focused on achieving basic legal rights, or combating direct discrimination and violence. This is still the case for the vast majority of places in the world.

However, the UK, and many other northern European countries, now have a legal framework that is largely progressive. In the UK, thanks to the Equality Act, this should also mean policy is progressive and inclusive as well. Therefore, we suggest in the paper, the focus on these contexts needs to be turned much more to these everyday ways that policy and administrative processes reinforce heteronormativity and make the lives of LGBT+ people more difficult. Therefore public policy, and public administration research needs more queer theory.

You can read the paper here or drop me an email for a copy of the pre-print version.

The emerging crisis in Scottish higher education

Given the demands of the current crisis and response to COVID-19, and the need for governments to prioritise expenditure on healthcare and income support, higher education has been nowhere near any government’s priority list. 

But a crisis in higher education is emerging, particularly in English-speaking countries. For decades now, demand for tertiary education from rapidly developing countries – most notably China – has fuelled an enormous growth in the sector. It is well-recorded that the UK has done exceedingly well in this market. Many universities now rely on this income to fund a large part of their activities. In the space of three months, this income has all but entirely dried-up. Higher education is counter-cyclical, so there may be some uptick in domestic students to make-up a small proportion of the income from international students. The impacts on universities will be highly differentiated as well – some have fostered strong local, domestic student markets so may be more resilient; others, particularly some of our most prestigious institutions, are probably looking at not being a going concern in a matter of months as their cash-flow dries up and they’re left with only enough to pay three months redundancy.

The HE sector in the UK itself is highly differentiated as well, and this often gets hidden in debates (including with ongoing industrial disputes in the sector). Indeed, higher education policy is probably one of the areas where there is the starkest difference between the four nations and regions of the UK. Therefore there is a need for analysis to be differentiated and reflect the different decisions by the devolved administrations.

It is easy to blame the current situation on my mate Neil Librul. The hens of market logics have come home to roost. If a company’s market vanishes it goes bust. This is capitalism in action. However, because I’ve used discourse analysis in my research to critique neo-liberalism, I do not like using it as a catch-all thing to blame as that disguises who is implementing neo-liberal policy decisions, why and how. So that is what I want to do in the blog post. 

One of the things that sets Scottish higher education policy apart is that, seemingly, the government explicitly rejects neo-liberal logics that higher education is an individual asset that can be purchased as an investment through a loan. Through its flagship policy of “free” higher education it publicly proclaims higher education is a public good. A former First Minister put a stone in the grounds of one of our HEIs to proclaim this very point.

However, I want to suggest that there is an emerging crisis in Scottish higher education because the Scottish Government has never fully funded its commitment to a public education. Indeed, in the operation of its policies it has pushed HEIs towards a market logic. To do this argument justice, I would need a barrage of links to old newspaper articles; SFC reports and university accounts. Frankly, I don’t have the time to do this as in my job I’m trying to stop the crisis in a Scottish university having a massive detrimental impact on the institution. If you want something like that, get a copy of Andrew McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble. Although it focuses on England, most of it also applies to Scotland; the only difference in Scotland is that we still have money coming into universities from the Scottish Funding Council paying for some tuition.

Of course, hair-splitters will point out that higher education was only not “free” in Scotland in a brief period between 1997 and 2001. After that, the up-front fees of just over £1000 were replaced by the “Graduate Endownment” that was tacked onto your student loan when you graduated. When the SNP won the 2007 Scottish elections and formed their first minority government they vowed to make higher education free and even abolish this fee. So, we have the totemic social democratic policy of “free higher education” in Scotland.

As many analysts and organisations such as the NUS in Scotland have pointed out though, this has led to particular quirks in the system. To fund the fees, student grants have steadily been eroded and replaced by loans to pay for maintenance, so that we end up with the odd situation that students in Scotland who come from homes with the lowest household incomes end up with the highest levels of graduate debt.

However, to go back to my core point, the fees policy itself has never been properly fully-funded. I first became aware of this when I was a PhD researcher in 2009 and the Scottish Government first started shuffling the cards to deliver the student numbers they wanted without the bill becoming out-of-hand – they shifted what subjects were in what funding bands, and reduced funding for degrees in the lowest bands (art, humanities and social sciences). When I got my first academic job in 2011, the Scottish Government were effectively only funding three years of the four years of a Scottish undergraduate degree. The idea had been that further education colleges would increasingly deliver the first two years on the cheap through HNCs and HNDs and there’d be growing second and third-year entries to Scottish universities. From what I know of the sector, experience of this has been patchy. Also, the “free higher education” policy was paid for by halving the budget for further education, amalgamating colleges in regional mega-colleges, and drastically reducing provision to highly gendered vocational qualifications in a limited range of industries. And then until this financial year, for a number of years universities have had a flat-cash settlement for the teaching grant and research quality grant from the Scottish Funding Council.

Now, I do have some sympathy for the Scottish Government on some of this. Until the recently increased powers over taxation, it was limited by the funding envelope provided by the Barnett formula. It was having to make difficult choices about what areas to fund and what areas to de-fund. Actually, compared to further education, policing, fire and rescue and local authorities, higher education in Scotland has not done too badly. We’ve not seen the wincingly painful cuts they experienced. And I know this personally from living with a local government officer and seeing the struggle he has to get basic things done because the resources simply are not there. But then again, the Scottish Government could have made painful policy choices in 2011 when they won their majority, such as to completely reform local government finance, getting rid of the Council Tax, and creating a new local tax that could have brought billions into the public sector creating more fiscal leeway. But we are where we are. 

Because of this situation, of an underfunded principle policy commitment, Principals and governing bodies of Scottish universities have been forced to make a choice: stick to a flat-cash income from the Scottish Funding Council and watch your university slowly wither away as it loses staff through voluntary severance and natural wastage as staff costs increase, and buildings and equipment fall into disrepair; or make riskier investment decisions in the hope than the return on these is high and allows you to expand. This latter choice of expansion is the policy agenda of the Scottish Government. It needs growing universities to: educate growing numbers of Scottish undergraduates as it seeks to meet its own targets for improving education equality; to invest in regional research and development; to bring in export income; and to be Scotland in international markets.

So we’re left with universities that have aggressively expanded into international higher education markets to pay for new staff, shiny new buildings and equipment, fantastic library resources and who are now horribly exposed as income from international students falls off a cliff. And students from Scotland will suffer because of this, as universities are forced to make staff redundant so class sizes increase and as very basic services like libraries and IT are curtailed to make budget savings.

I’ve tried to be measured about writing this and thinking this through, but I’m not. I’m angry. I’m angry and frustrated that the Scottish Government have pushed universities into this situation. Its made me angry during our current industrial disputes. We’re meant to be angry at our management, but I’m not. I can see why they made the decisions they made. I’m angry at the Scottish Government. And both my trade union and the employers have both been told, explicitly, by the current Higher Education Minister in Scotland that if the sector needs more money then it has to raise it itself through attracting in international students. The Scottish Government want a world-class higher education sector, but the money is not there. 

As I wrote at the start of this post, the current COVID-19 crisis is bringing this into stark relief. Some Scottish institutions will be just as exposed as those in England. So, what to do? This is interesting as higher education in Scotland is such a totemic part of our national identity that the government portrays on an international stage – Scotland had more universities than England until the late nineteenth-century. Higher education is what Scotland does. Therefore, I cannot see the Scottish Government allowing an institution to go bankrupt and a reduction in the number of HEIs through forced mergers (a proposed 2011 merger between Abertay and Dundee never happened). There is also the unquestioned assumption that a Scottish undergraduate degree is four years. Woe betide the Scottish HE minister who suggests that a Scottish degree should only be as long as it’s actually funded for. To clarify, I think the four-year degree is a good thing; I only wish it were funded. 

There was going to be a small real terms uplift in funding from the Scottish Funding Council for universities in Scotland this year anyway. Given the counter-cyclical nature of higher education, the Scottish Government could just chuck more grant income into the sector and hope for the best. Yet for some institutions this will only be pennies compared to what they will need because of the gaping hole from international student income. However, the economic collapse due to COVID-19 might put an almighty hole in the Scottish Government’s budget as income from devolved taxes falls. It remains to be seen whether Barnett Consequentials from UK Government expenditure will be enough to make up the shortfall, or if the Scottish Government’s limited borrowing powers are enough to tide it over until tax income increases again.

But why are we even talking about institutions going bust? Well, that’s the odd quirk of the British higher education system that, due to historical quirk and the demand for academic freedom, our universities are private charitable companies and governed as such. They just happen to get the majority of their income from government. I’m on the board of a similar organisation, so I know well the odd pressures it put on the governing body. On the one hand, you want to deliver a public service, but on the other, you’re subject to company law and have to ensure every year that you are a financial going concern. You have to borrow from commercial money markets, with all the limits that entails.

Which, oddly, brings us to another policy option that would be a sort of radical status quo – turn HEIs into public sector institutions, as they are in many European countries. Government agencies that shadow each HEI could be created and staffed TUPEd across. The charitable companies that are left, with their liabilities could be wound down over time. Academics and all university staff would become civil servants. The sector would become wholly dependent on the whim of government policy, rather than be subject to the “freedom” of the market.

I happen to know that crisis talks between representatives of Scottish HEIs, the trades unions, the Scottish Funding Council and Scottish Government are ongoing. And this is a crisis. There needs to be a policy resolution to the crisis in Scottish universities in the next few months otherwise there will be mass redundancies, massive reductions in investment in research infrastructure, and if the “market doesn’t correct” quickly then HEIs will be forced into the decisions their public sector cousins have been forced to make since 2013: cutting even essential functions just to keep some lecturing staff in the classroom; a fire-sale of buildings and land and an end to pretty much all ongoing investment in infrastructure. Yes, the Principals of Scottish universities have made risky, market-based decisions, that have led them into this situation, but as far as I am concerned, this is because an underfunded Scottish Government policy has left them with no other choice.

Is it a bit shit to be gay in the USA?

This is a blog post I should’ve written last week and posted on Monday. Oh well. I’m now wrapping up my small research project on LGBT+ housing and homelessness. I should’ve written this post last week as we launched the two reports on Monday – one for housing providers and one for homelessness service providers.

Our recommendations in both are pretty straight-forward, and should not come as a surprise to readers of my blog post – service providers should routinely ask service users their sexual and gender identity and get over their own cringe. In doing so, we would start to get decent data, but also begin a conversation with service users that is: “we are interested if you are LGBT+ because we realise it might matter to you”. One of the recommendations focusing on homelessness services might seem a bit odd though: we explicitly state that we don’t think LGBT+ specific provision, such as hostels or other supported accommodation, is required in the context of the lives of people who participated in our research in Central Scotland.

A lot of the lobbying for LGBT+ specific provision comes from two concerns. One is that LGBT+ homelessness is an enormous problem; we just have not found evidence for this. In fact, we recreated the methodology of The Albert Kennedy Trust, and surveyed homelessness services in Scotland. We got a very low response rate, and some really ropey data. If I were to make an estimate based on that, I’d say around five per cent of homeless people identify as LGBT+, compared to three per cent of whole population identifying as LGBT+.

Second is a presumption that the cause of homelessness in the case of LGBT+ is family rejection – that is, people come out as LGBT+ and then their families ask them to leave. We really did not find evidence of simple causation like this in our data. For example, two of our gender-queer participants had periods of homelessness because their families were not accepting of their gender identities, but their families were also emotionally abusive and this was just the latest example of this, so they had to leave the family home. In such complex cases, we cannot say for sure, but we could surmise that they would have ended up homeless because of leaving their abusive family whatever their gender identity. Similarly, another bisexual participant became homeless after their relationship with an abusive partner broke down and they started relationships with people of a different sex. Again, the causes of the homelessness are very complex here – we cannot say that the person was homeless because they were bisexual.

Because of these two reasons, we don’t think LGBT+ specific provision is suitable in a Scottish context. What is needed is better training among service providers to make the excellent current service provision more inclusive. 

Now, to get to the subject of this blog post – I also think that the drive for LGBT+ services comes from the USA (and to a lesser extent Canada) and, from what I’ve read among LGB studies, it looks like being LGBT+ in America is really bad. It really struck me when I was reading this paper that compares UK data to a wider literature review. That paper analyses data from the UK longitudinal panel study Understanding Society. It demonstrates that in some categories there is a small negative impact on your life from being LGBT+ in the UK. But the comparison data Uhrig pulls together from the US in particular, is far worse. To give one example that really shocked me: data from the US in 2013 showed that women with same-sex sexual attraction did far worse in terms of educational outcomes. In the UK, lesbians were three-times more likely to be educated than their heterosexual counterparts.

What’s going on then? Why do things seem to be worse in the US? I suspect there’s a lot of methodological things going on here. Firstly, data on sexual and gender identity is pretty poor everywhere, but it seems to be quite staggeringly bad in the US. The main source of data used by many researchers is the US Census, which has allowed same-sex couples to “out” themselves on their forms for a while and say they are a household. There’s three main problems with this: it misses single people, and we know LGBT+ people are more likely to be single; it doesn’t really allow for bisexual people to be recorded anywhere, and certainly ignores transgender people (but then, so do most surveys); and finally, it’s a self-selecting sample, from what I can gather, you don’t have to fill it in if you don’t want to. Whenever you create “prefer not to answer” categories in questions like this, you end up with that being your second biggest category after straight.

It seems there are very few population-level surveys which include LGB, or transgender, questions in the US. This means a lot of the US research that I’ve come across, for example focusing on homelessness, comes from a problem perspective and samples populations with problems, which as people like Prof Mark McCormack point out, leads you to find particularly troubling findings. To give one example, in my hunt for the source of that bloody 25 per cent stat (that a quarter of young homeless people identify as LGBT+), I discovered the root of one of the more bizarre versions – that a whopping 40 per cent of young homeless people identify as LGBT+ – comes from this report. You just have to read the subtitle to work out how they got that stat: funnily enough a lot of people who identify as LGBT+ use LGBT+ services. To be fair on the authors of that report, it seems that the stat has got mangled in translation.

The other methodological issue is the complex intersection of sexual identity and socio-economic status. I’ve only seen glimmers of this in what I’ve read, but I suspect middle class people in the UK feel more comfortable in their sexuality, which might explain why things don’t look too bad in our data.

However, I do wonder if there is something qualitatively different about the experience of LGBT+ in the USA, that it is a more socially conservative society. It certainly seems that social attitudes are marginally more conservative, with a small majority of people in the USA in 2014 still believing same-sex relationships were not “not wrong at all”. This compares to the UK, where in the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey, the vast majority of people think same-sex relationships are “not wrong at all”. More recent data from the US suggests that they are equally supportive of same-sex marriage as people in the UK are of same-sex relationships, however I would caution the conclusion that the US has become very socially liberal, not just because of the current POTUS, but because I think there’s some qualitatively different in the socially-sanctioned institution of marriage, and same-sex relationships more broadly.

As an aside, as I’ve commented before, I think these questions no longer collect accurate data due to social desirability bias, and we need to start asking some more, possibly more explicit questions, to get to the heart of peoples attitudes.

Finally, I think another issue is the lack of a decent welfare state in the US. For example, in terms of homelessness, one UK scholar commented that “[t]he sheer cruelty and vindictiveness of the US system, indeed, is sometimes difficult for Europeans to fathom”. To give one example, if you were a single, young, gay man in Scotland and your family kicked you because of your sexual identity, you would be unintentionally homeless, and your housing authority would have a duty to provide you with housing. I’m sure it’s not as simple as this, and housing authorities would try and wriggle out of it – one shocking example I read was of a housing authority in southern England who said a young man had made himself intentionally homeless because he chose to come out. But despite these cases, and despite the increases in homelessness and rough-sleeping in the UK over the past seven years, homelessness support is much better in the UK than it is in the US. And this cuts across a wider range of social and public services. If your welfare state is stronger, then if you come across a bump in your life, say due to exclusion related to your sexual or gender identity, then it is going to be easier to get your life back up-and-running again. So, I wonder if this is why outcomes do not seem to be as bad for LGBT+ people in the UK compared to the US, and it’s also why we don’t think LGBT+ specific provision is suitable in the UK. We have good mainstream services, we just have to make sure they are inclusive and supportive. 

Official stats, and how to publish them - a post with Taylor Swift

I’ve previously discussed on here how I found the portrayal of one particular set of government statistics – the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation – problematic. To summarise that argument – reporting, based on government press releases, called certain neighbourhoods “the poorest”, even though IMD does not measure poverty, is a relative measure, and most problematically, this added to the stigma of the neighbourhoods. I covered some of the impact of this in one of the papers I’m most proud of. So when I was contacted by the statisticians working on SIMD16 to come and have a chat with them about how they could present it in a better way, I leapt at the opportunity. When their report came out I was extremely impressed. You can download it here – it’s quite a big PDF. The things I particularly like were: 

• The very clear statement of what SIMD measures and how it works, and can be used, on page two 
• The case studies that demonstrate that living in a neighbourhood ranked as deprived by SIMD isn’t awful, and that it can help target resources for great things to happen 
• The very clear “do not use SIMD for” list on page six 
• The fact that nowhere does it say which is the “most” or “least” deprived neighbourhood. 

The team that did SIMD were nominated for a UK Civil Service Award, which they won!

Here’s @PermSecScot congratulating member of Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations team-winners of #csawards Use of Evidence award. Her pride is plain to see! pic.twitter.com/1uYo8ULhiB

— Suzannah Brecknell (@SuzannahCSW) November 23, 2017

I was incredibly pleased on their behalf, because they really deserve it.

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And, they’ve only gone and done it again – not won an award, but produced a report that is staggeringly good.

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It’s a report on a set of experimental statistics that have used new questions on material deprivation asked in the Scottish Household Survey to create a local poverty measure. Have a look at it here. It is soooooo good. 

Again, they’ve combined qualitative data with the presentation of the statistics to make the reality of lived experience come to life, but in a non-stigmatising way, for example on page six “Mary” describes how: 

“My kettle blew up, so I went and got a kettle off my catalogue. Cause I wouldn’t have been able to afford to just go and buy a kettle. And I didn’t want to say to anybody, ‘I can’t afford a kettle.’ Ken, people are coming in for a cup of tea and that, and ‘oh my kettle’s blew up, and I can’t afford another one’” 

An absolutely brilliant way to describe what material poverty means. 

And it gets better. There are bar charts throughout which show a percentage with confidence intervals. Rather than getting bogged down with complex descriptions of confidence intervals and statistical significance, the charts are simply labelled “The bars show measurement uncertainty. Where two bars overlap, there may not be a real difference between the two groups”. I mean!!!!!!

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AND AND AND it gets even better. Not only do they have CI’s clearly labelled, they then go onto interpret them for you. Each chart has a very clear description of “What the data says” and “What the data doesn’t say” to ensure that people don’t misunderstand the charts.

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And the data is really interesting. I just wish all official statistics documents were published this well, with this much thought put into their presentation.

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With thanks to the Taylor Swift Open Data Institute.

Becoming a queer scholar

A lot of my recent posts have been about my research on the experiences of LGBT+ people in homelessness services and housing. This post is about what a revelatory journey this has been for me personally. It’s also a sort of late coming-out day post.

Some of you may have noticed that my last post – about getting married – ended up being picked up by The Times and we became national news while in Hiroshima on our honeymoon. The only way I could be more out than that would probably involve riding a unicorn across the pitch during the FA cup final wearing nothing but a gold lamé thong and a rainbow feather boa.

I came out to my close friends at school when I was 15 and was out when I went to university as an undergraduate. That was when I came out to my parents, when I was 19. So I’ve not been closeted, but like many LGBT+ people I always felt awkward; ashamed even. Earlier in the year I listened to Archive on 4 by Peter Tatchell about the decriminalisation of male homosexuality. This included clips from the House of Commons debate about lowering the age of consent between men. I was 12 when that happened in 1994, so just beginning to realise my difference. The hatred and bile that was spoken snapped me right back to the bullying and overwhelming, explicit homophobia of my teenage years. So it’s very little wonder that I was not necessarily comfortable in my sexuality.

So I was definitely not a Queer academic – my identity as a gay man was not part of my research. In fact, when I did my MSc in urban and regional planning in 2005/6, Richard Florida’s work on the creative class was just coming to the fore and my now-husband suggested I might want to do my dissertation on gay places. This was also a time when Newcastle Council had actively planned for the “Pink Triangle” to boost economic development. I rejected this idea.

Why? Well predominantly because I was being quite a bit “post-gay”, in that Nate Silver “ethnically straight”. There was a gay male lifestyle projected to me, through a particular commercial gay male culture, that I did not (and still do not) feel a great affinity too. I was never going to be Stuart in Queer as Folk. I also thought the world was “post-gay” (how naïve I was) and that most discrimination against LGBT people was declining – the fight had been won.

Because of this, my research to date, has been predominantly heterosexual, and thus (I now know) heterosexist. By doing fairly “mainstream” research, I was happily advancing my career. My identity did bump into my work occasionally, such as when I had to come out to my students to point out their own homophobia, but other than that, it did not matter that much. My journey to ending up getting messy with queer theory started with a surprise finding about non-straight people from a project I was doing. Even dealing with that, working out what it meant, and deciding to publicise, left me feeling a little uncomfortable.

The other day I was reading Michael Warner’s introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) where he writes: "Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in finding ways of being queer. (Alternatively many people invest the better parts of their lives to avoid such a self-understanding and the social reflection it would imply.)" The bit in parentheses really resonated with me – this was what I was doing.

In doing my current research project on LGBT+ housing and homelessness I’ve had to confront queerness. On the one hand, I knew I had to engage with lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory, to understand how other people have understood queer lives. Also, I have had to read transcripts from people who have experienced horrible things, including homophobic and transphobic abuse. That was a wake-up call to the amount of work we still have to do to progress equality, and also drove me on to make sure my research helped make the lives of LGBT+ people better.

And that introduction to queer theory has been immensely eye-opening, particularly the concept of heteronormativity – as I suggested when I over-analysed my own nuptials. As ever, with critical theory, as an applied researcher it does leave me in the position of: it’s great to deconstruct society, but how do we reconstruct it again? One of the main recommendations from my research – the routine collection of sexual and gender identity data – is problematic on this score. It is suggesting the imposition of essentialist criteria, created by a homophobic world, onto a queer world. However, here I side with Kath Browne that it’s better to know so we can do something (especially about things such as hate crimes) than to not know at all.

So now, I would say I am a queer scholar. The question which emerges is how much will this impact on my research going forward? Will I queer my wider research programme on broader aspects of inequality? Will I do more research with the LGBT+ community? Will I do simple things like being more out when I present my research or making sure I use pronoun introductions? I need answers to these questions because it’s something I accuse policy studies of not doing enough of in my most recent paper!

To conclude, I am now definitely out of the closet. And I'm happy to be accused of homonormativity. 

What do we actually do when we do impact?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (well, when we had a UK Government that was thinking about localism and “The Big Society”) the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme funded three projects, along with the UK Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), to see how the research the programme had invested in so far could help policy. Skip forward a year and the teams involved in doing these reviews concluded that they had not, exactly, gone to plan. So, I ended up joining them on a project called Translation Across Borders to try and find out why.

Well, I have a paper out based on this project in Evidence & Policy. I’ll attempt to summarise it here.

Now, there is absolutely oodles of research out there, across numerous disciplines, on how and why policy-makers use evidence in their decisions, and the barriers to this. The unique value-added of this project was that it was co-produced with a civil servant who was actually involved in policy-making. Our co-author, Robert Rutherfoord, is a Principal Social Research at DCLG, and did fieldwork with me.

My role was to interview all the academics who had participated in producing the original policy reviews, with Robert, and find out what they had done and the barriers they found in taking their evidence into a policy-making environment. Our literature review found that doing this is remarkably rare – us academics seem to love asking policy-makers what they think the barriers are, and how they use evidence, but we don’t ask us academics what we think the barriers are. This is all the more surprising given all the wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Research Excellence Framework’s measurement of socio-economic impact since 2013.

What did we find? In the interpretive approach we took to analysing the data, three things stood out. Firstly, as academics, we construct our identities as biographies (like everyone else on the planet). These are key meaning-making devices for us and help situate us, and our practices in the here-and-now. Secondly, these biographies are strongly linked to disciplinary identities. Unsurprisingly, some disciplines – like policy studies – more commonly do work with policy-makers, or attempt to affect change in policy, than other disciplines. This is a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” finding, but surprisingly it is not dealt with a lot in the literature, perhaps because the need for diverse disciplines to affect policy-making has only emerged in the last decade and they are only just beginning to self-reflect. On this count, I find the delightfully naïve debates in mainstream political science interesting when you compare them to policy studies, who have been concerning themselves with this issue for the last 70 years. The final insight was that institutional pressures, particularly the demand to produce 4* journal articles for the REF means that the sorts of activities that are recognised to help deliver “impact” – developing working relationships with policy-makers and networks of influence – are not prioritised or encouraged within internal performance management systems.

Now, a lot of this will come as no surprise to many academics. Indeed it didn’t necessarily come as a surprise to us. What did come as a surprise to us, and why this research is important, was that this our civil servants we were co-producing with did not know about much of this, particularly things like the impact of the REF on behaviour and incentive structures. Therefore, our recommendation as to what should be done better is a bit different to most other similar projects. Whereas a lot of “toolkits” and other training focused on getting academic evidence into policy-making focuses on “knowing your audience”, from a variety of different perspectives, we instead focused on the need for academics to know themselves better. Because, basically, academics are weird. We behave in a lot of ways that are completely alien to those outwith academia. And we need to pause and think about this every now and then. And also, policy-makers who want to work with academics would do well just to spend a short amount of time learning about what makes them tick, and understanding that there is diversity in what academics do, and how they do it.

To this end we did create some tools from this project to try and make this process a bit easier. One of these is some fun “academic archetype” cards that can be used to prompt reflection, and also help policy-makers understand academics a bit better. If you want to use these, please drop me an email, and this can be arranged. I’ll be presenting them at a “Research Bite” seminar in the University of Stirling Library Enterprise Zone on 2 August at 12:30. I’ll also probably bring them out at a session at the Australian National University on 11 October at 13:00, and possibly when I’m at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford from the 13 November for a week.

We’re just organising Gold OA or Green OA for the paper, but in the meantime drop me an email if you want a copy and you don’t subscribe to E&P.

Is the Scottish Government suffering from a severe case of initiativitis?

“We must do something now!” the cry of many a politician. There’s a famous scene in The Thick of It where the Minister is on their way to a press conference and due to unfolding events they have to announce a policy to “do something”. The Minister’s car drives round a roundabout repeatedly while the Minister and her advisors come up with something suitable. Has this approach to policy-making cursed the Scottish Government?

Back in the day, the old Scottish Executives between 1999-2007 were criticised by the opposition and external critics for having a severe case of initiativitis. Because of the limited powers of the devolution settlement, a fairly easy way for the Executive to be seen to be doing something was to ring-fence a small pot of money and send it the way of the problem or group demanding attention. We can interpret this using bog-standard, Dahl-esque, pluralism – various interests would coalesce around Ministers and the resources would be dished-out accordingly.

The way the Scottish Executive’s budget grew during the period helped this along. Because UK departments that had been devolved were getting the lions-share*of the increases in public expenditure between 1999 and 2008, the devolved budgets grew at a faster rate than the equivalent entire budget of the UK Government. This meant, once extra allocations to health and education to match Westminster had been dished out, the extra could be spent on the pet initiatives. My own area of doctoral research – the Community Regeneration Fund (CRF) (and its precursor the Better Neighbourhood Services Fund) – were classic examples of this. Labour MSPs felt pressure from constituents living in deprived neighbourhoods to “do something” about the problems in the neighbourhoods, so set aside an impressive-sounding £354 million to be spent over three years. Alas, that was actually just a third of one per cent of the Scottish Executive’s annual budget of over £30 billion, so it didn’t amount to much at all.

As my colleague Paul Cairney highlights, the reason for the SNP’s electoral success, especially in 2011, was they were seen as very competent in government. One of the earliest policy decisions (that made my doctoral research rather interesting as I was in the field as it happened) was to roll-back many of the initiatives of the previous Scottish Executive (including the CRF). Sectors of the public services were given un-ringfenced budgets in return for meeting certain outcomes and also output targets (1,000 extra police officers, class sizes, free schools meals etc.). This enabled the Scottish Government to take credit for when things went well, and “devolve” blame when things went wrong – a cunning example of the difficulties of accountability in complex governance.

This strategy has generally worked very well. Until recently, it seems. Scotland is suffering substantial reductions in public expenditure like the rest of the UK. As in England, these are being made even worse by the increases in expenditure on the health, leaving other services increasingly stretched. Of course, demographic challenges mean health needs more than the increases it is getting anyway. These problems need sorting. But the Scottish Government no longer has the ever-increasing pot of money from Westminster coming its way. So we see the return of initiatives, some big ones like the Scottish Attainment Challenge Fund (£750 million over five years; approx. 0.005 per cent of the Scottish Government DEL over the period – based on £30 billion p.a. DEL)  and also small, odd ones that could have been delivered by reconfiguring existing services: £4.2 million for a mental health intervention; £2 million on participatory budgeting (the oxymoron being here that PB should negate the need for initiative funding); £200,000 to help get disabled people into politics – a laudable aim, but the right way to achieve it?; £70,000 for a violence reduction project at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. And these are mainly just the ones that have been announced since 1 July. This doesn’t include all the agreements signed, and new strategies launched on rather small matters.

What drew my attention to this issue, and why I write this post, is today’s announcement of the First Minister’s Reading Challenge. I was initially intrigued by the name – it seemed very odd to name a policy in such a way. I joked on Twitter that we might now expect “Theresa May’s Mathematics Fun Day”. Slightly more seriously, the Literacy Hour in English schools, launched in 1997, was not known as Tony Blair’s Literary Hour probably because, as a friend suggested, it “sounds like some kind of dystopian nightmare”.

Education is currently a weak spot for the Scottish Government. Educational attainment across Scotland is slipping on most international measures. The gap between attainment at schools in the most deprived and least deprived neighbourhoods is growing in Scotland, yet it is falling in England. Arguably this matters in Scotland because of national pride – the reason Scotland is listed separately in OECD education league tables is because of the different educational system, but also because Scotland used to outperform England by some margin. So Something Must Be Done.

And the Reading Challenge has all the hallmarks of something. Pause now and have a look at the Scottish Book Trust’s web page for it. It seems the challenge was announced back in March by the First Minister. An advisory group was set up and has met twice in April and May this year (minutes available on the website). The April minutes make for interesting reading for two reasons – a minor reason was that the group seemed to want the initiative to be seen to be independent of government (making the name choice even odder). Secondly, the initiative seems to include a competition, even though the minutes state that “The Group recommended that if possible these elements of the Challenge be removed”.

The plot thickens, slightly, reading the BBC news coverage. It states:

“The Scottish government said its list of 100 books had been selected by a panel of academics, experts and teachers.

It includes Ms Sturgeon's favourite childhood book - Five On A Treasure Island - from Enid Blyton's Famous Five series.”

Whereas the Scottish Book Trust website suggests that the list is still under development. This really does look like policy for the sake of doing something, that has been implemented, even at a basic level, pretty poorly.

Now, you might say this doesn’t matter – we’re not talking about wasting billions of pounds of budget like the much more shocking case of the UK Government’s Troubled Families project. But it is still a waste of resources, and policy attention, towards something that will probably make no difference to the appalling under-performance of children from the poorest households in Scotland’s schools.

* apologies for the clichés, I don’t know what’s come over me.

Universalism or targeted services?

I was at a couple of really interesting seminars today in my Faculty (of Social Sciences). The morning one was by Naomi Eisenstadt, Anti-Poverty Adviser to the Scottish Government, with a very impressive CV of involvement in a number of UK policy initiatives. At lunchtime I listened to Prof Anna Vignole discuss her research on graduate outcomes. Both have had widespread news coverage, for very different reasons (see here and here). What linked them both was an interest in how inequalities are replicated and what we can do about them.

I want to particularly focus on Ms Eisenstadt’s talk because of the questions she raised, and has raised to the Scottish Government, regarding universalism vs. targeting of services. On the Left, we’re supposed to hate targeted services for a number of reasons. As my mum was taught on her Social Administration degree in the 1960s, services for the poor are poor services; middle class service-users drive up the general quality of services.* Also, targeted services tend to be stigmatising, such as being “on benefits”.

However, Ms Eisenstadt argued that, given the specific challenges many people face, we do need targeted services. She used the example of Sure Start, which she was heavily involved in. One of the critiques of Sure Start was it was used by middle-class parents, so it failed as it was not targeted enough. Ms Eisenstadt turned this on its head by pointing out its massive success was a policy targeted at the poorest was so successful it attracted the richest.

In my own field, this is sort of how I’d envisage a successful neighbourhoods policy (as I argue in a roundabout way in this article). We would still have concentrations of social housing in specific neighbourhoods, but all the ancillary services would be so good and so tailored that people either wouldn’t think the neighbourhoods were any different, or would actually aspire to live in them.

The trouble is with this, and a point Ms Eisenstadt made very well, is that the sort of progressive expenditure needed to deliver this change is politically very difficult to achieve (as she found in her dealings with the Scottish Government). It’s far easier for politicians to blame poor people and seek behavioural solutions. In the case of neighbourhoods policy for me, it’s blaming poor people for being untidy, rather than actually providing a street-sweeping service that is adequate.

The other problem, that was equally well put, was that policies to change behaviour are very difficult to implement and expensive - it's very hard to tell someone to be a better parent. Policies to redistribute income work and are quite easy to do. I'd add that policies such as better street sweeping, or more teachers in schools and more spending per-pupil in deprived areas, is also a lot easier to do.

This fitted quite well into what Prof Vignoles was saying over lunchtime because of the universalism of higher education provision in Scotland. This is lauded as a great “progressive” policy in Scotland, even though the evidence is fairly consistent that Scotland is not doing as well in getting pupils from schools in deprived neighbourhoods into university, and that the policy disproportionately benefits the wealthier end of the middle classes.

The research raises further questions that need to be considered in Scottish policy debate. As the BBC fairly accurately summarised, the research shows that if you’ve done an arts degree your earning potential is low. If you’ve studied economics you’ll be minted. Higher education seems very bad at closing gaps between people however, so if you’re poor and do economics, you’ll become better-off, but not as well off as someone who was wealthy. In Scotland, if we want higher education to maximise economic growth, and individual outcomes, then we should probably spend a lot more SFC grant on economics and leave the arts to wrack and ruin. The trouble is, students really want to do arts subjects. So, if we did alter investment in subjects in this way, arts subjects could end up with ludicrously high entry requirements (high demand for places, few places to be had) and economics could end up welcoming all-comers for the opposite reason.

Both presentations left with a sense of our failure to discuss – or as academics to enable a discussion – as to what sort of outcomes we want our public services to deliver and how. We have our national outcomes in Scotland like “We have tackled the significant inequalities in Scottish society” but we’ve not said what a more equal society would look like, or more importantly the shape of public services to deliver that. 

* on this point,Ms Eisenstadt made a wonderfully well observed point that when people experiencing poverty get a good service that helps them, they are eternally grateful. The middle classes don't think twice about it as they feel entitled to good services.

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. 

Policy Making in Scotland

Very kindly, Derek Grieve, Head of the Active Scotland Division of the Scottish Government came to speak to my students on Friday morning about how a Minister might use evidence to make decisions. It was a good talk and I thought I'd summarise a couple of insights here for everyone's benefit, and also as an example of blogging for my students who have less than a week to complete a blog post for an assignment.

The first thing I noted was what he spoke about, effectively in the frame of the "ROAMEF" of "rational" policy cycle the policy "problem" and how it was defined. He spoke about the Commonwealth Games and I couldn't help but note that the "policy" of the Commonwealth Games was framed as solving the "problem" of the legacy of such mega-events. The aim was to use the policy to maximise benefits, particularly the economic and health benefits, for all of Scotland and the rest of the UK. Some of my colleagues have been quite critical(£) of how this was done, but this was the way this policy was framed by this civil servant.

The other thing that was quite notable was how the "Scottish Approach" to policy-making shone through. Early on in the talk he stated how the Scottish Government was becoming more and more open to working with communities. Civil servants are now expected to leave their offices and talk to local communities. At the end in the Q&A I asked him what policy levers he had in a devolved polity and the response was that he has a networked polity of actors who the government worked with in partnership to deliver aims. Importantly, and this was emphasised, the focus on outcomes and use of the language of outcomes was seen to enable this. I've been critical of the "outcome focus" in Scotland myself because, as far as I was concerned, what matters is how you reach outcomes, not that you reach them. But, the point was, the Government sees itself as doing policy through others. 

However, one of my students astutely asked whether a Minister might use narrative, or "anecdotal" evidence from a community group or voluntary sector organisation to make a decision, and my colleague Prof. Paul Cairney asked which evidence is higher in the hierarchy when making decisions. The discussion around these question showed that Government still privileges professionally-produced numerical data, even though it might be more open to engagement with communities now. 

Athena SWAN, academic practices and regimes of audit

As I’ve previously blogged about, I’m involved in the Athena SWAN process. I’m co-leading the process at my School and I’ve now been a panellist assessing departmental Athena SWAN submissions. Both activities are a lot of hard work (and not quite fully acknowledged in workload allocations) but excellent, interesting and rewarding. It has made me consider my own practices as an academic in a different light and also made me quite angry at a lot of the unquestioned practices and behaviours in academic practice.

I’ve begun to talk about academic practice and practices a lot. It started from my work on the AHRC Connected Communities project Connecting Epistemologies where I worked with an artist for the summer who would discuss their arts practice. I understand academic practices to be things like: lecturing, supervision, facilitating group discussion, marking, various writing practices, resource coordination and management etc.

One thing I like about thinking through academic work as practices in this way is it helps me focus on what it is in a particular context that means that a practice is carried out in a certain way, and whether that is a question of individual agency, or a wider structural issue. For example, when I think through academic practices (such as the list above) I’m always amazed at how many you can be trained to do better, but how rarely that training is systematically offered to academics. Take lecturing (I now disownthis blog post to an extent): it takes certain skills to talk persuasively through a topic for a set period of time and engage an audience. There are some pretty basic skills here: breathing techniques; ensuring your voice is well-supported by your diaphragm; using modulation and pauses to keep the audience engaged. An actor would expect this as part of this training. If we are lecturing to large classes, we should be given this training (luckily I did get it, from the Edinburgh Beltane).

Athena SWAN focuses me on the wider structural issues. For example, producing papers for academic journals is one of the key academic practices. In the social sciences, single-authored pieces are seen to be more likely to be highly-ranked in the Research Excellence Framework. There is subsequently, among some bits of social science, to push early-career researchers to get individual fellowships, to build up this REF-worthy track record. This particularly negatively impacts on women: they are more likely to take career breaks at this stage of their career for maternity leave and caring, so group projects might make more sense; across many fellowship schemes they are also less likely to be awarded the fellowships.

Another example comes from my role as an editor and peer-review. An academic practice is citation, we are expected to cite the latest literature in support of an argument we are making. This is a shared cultural practice. Yet, it is often quite striking that due to global structural barriers, many scholars in the majority world simply cannot access these resources.

Athena SWAN is interesting because it puts a lot of these practices to work to a positive end – challenging gender divides within academia and encouraging women’s progression. Specifically it uses the skills that academics and associated professionals have in making complex judgement based on set criteria, and also peer review. These were the skills I used when I assessed applications and that were used in the Athena SWAN panel I was a member of.

These academic practices take place in contexts with specific incentive structures. I’ve already mentioned the REF and this is probably one of the key incentive structures: it shapes the ways universities are organised and their strategic priorities; it affects the way academics adjust their communication practices to deliver “impact” – more prosaically, to get their research findings understood and used by a wider audience. They mean our writing practices are focused at the four 4* papers. Like Athena SWAN, the REF uses academic practices, particularly peer review.

Athena SWAN has also benefited from similar incentive mechanisms. Recognising the widespread problems that women faced in STEM subjects, the research councils adjusted their criteria to be more favourable to departments that had Athena SWAN awards – the award stopped being something that a few forward-thinking departments had, to something all departments worked positively towards.

I’m a bit of an evangelist for Athena SWAN – I know it’s not perfect, but it’s certainly better than nothing, and when it’s done properly (as my main experience has been) it does lead to dramatic change. But thinking about it in terms of how I’ve laid out this post before, I could not have ruminate as I was assessing applications: what if Athena SWAN became part of the criteria that were assessed in the REF? I imagine we’d see a lot of change fairly quickly. I imagine the Equality Challenge Unit would be fairly busy in the run-up to 2020 as well. Of course, we’d no doubt end-up with the double-bind that I think Athena SWAN accidentally creates – in trying to do good, it just adds another task to academic’s overflowing to-do lists and puts women under pressure. To anyone pulling together an Athena SWAN application, note that the criteria state that workload models should give a time allocation to being a member of the Self-Assessment Team!

When I mentioned this idea to one of the staff at the ECU they mentioned that HEFCE had done some work, that remains unpublished, that demonstrated that departments with greater collegiality and gender diversity achieved better in research metrics. They added that it would be interesting, also, to see how Athena SWAN also related to this.

There’s a widespread view in academic that metrics and audit are bad things. But from a perspective of policy analysis, and also from my experience governing an organisation, I can also see the positive sides of these regimes: audit is design to make issues transparent and make people accountable. In the case of Athena SWAN it makes institutions accountable for the processes and behaviours that systematically stop women advancing in their academic careers and reaching their potential.

So, to come to some sort of conclusion, the raging resistance to regimes of audit is, I think, sometimes misguided. These processes have the effects (and affects) they do because they are powerful tools. But that means they can be used powerfully to positive ends. This might make me a sell-out to global Neil Librulism. I think it makes me someone who wants to deliver positive change for the marginalised and disadvantaged in society now. 

What am I

I was teaching policy analysis this afternoon and developed a wee activity on "framing" of policy issues. I'll repeat it here - it's just a series of statements about a mythical "something". A smug feeling of satisfaction to the first person who can guess what it is:

• It killed 3,409 people in 2000 and this fell to 1,713 in the UK in 2014
• In 2014 it injured 192,000 people in UK, 22,807 of them seriously
• In 2012-13 there was a 12% increase in the number of the most vulnerable people in the UK killed by this.
• WHO estimates it kills approximately 1.24 million people worldwide a year.
• Not doing this and doing something else can add 3-7 years to your life expectancy.
• Not doing this and doing something else can add six months to your life expectancy.

ABI n* – return of the ABI

I did my doctoral research on area-based initiatives, or ABIs. Even when I was doing the research the writing was on the wall for them – the focus of my research had been the former Scottish Executive Community Regeneration Fund administered through Single Outcome Agreements. This ceased to be just as I was going into the field following the first SNP victory in 2007, so it ended up being about the “ending” of meaningful regeneration for residents. Following the 2010 election and the coalition government it looked like any form of regeneration was off the cards under the excuse of “austerity”. I’ve co-edited a book – After Regeneration­ – that argues this very point. My research had turned to broader questions of inequality in our cities, particularly what the increasing focus on community engagement and involvement in service delivery might mean for inequalities in service delivery.

And then David Cameron goes and announces a new ABI on the Andrew Marr show. Thanks. I’m back in business; or am I? First of all, as many have pointed out, the amount of funding for this ABI is pitifully small. It’s the same as the former Community Regeneration Fund in Scotland spent in one year – and that was in 2006 when the money was worth more and in a country ten times smaller. But it looks like it’s just enough money to prompt a private-sector to “regenerate” some of the neighbourhoods concerned; to remove the risk of having to get rid of pesky tenants or asbestos. This is the continuation of the processes happening in numerous estates in London that do not deserve the title of “regeneration”. It is state-funded removal of low-income households from our cities.

Secondly – as any human geographer, economic geographer, planner or policy analyst worth their salt will point out, ABIs don’t work; or at least they’re very bad at doing what David Cameron thinks they are good at. In terms of the causes of neighbourhood deprivation, I can’t bang on about this enough. Saying deprived neighbourhoods cause deprivation is like calling a bucket you have filled with apples an apple tree. Deprived neighbourhoods exist because, either, we put all our social housing in one place (something Scotland is particularly good at doing and is repeating), or wider macro-economic forces mean that a neighbourhood is a risky investment proposition so property values and rents fall, so it becomes somewhere where households with a low income end up living. There is some evidence in some circumstances that “neighbourhood effects” exist – that is, living with lots of other people in poverty decreases your chances of escaping poverty. But that evidence is very scant, and as Tom Slater highlights, it is macro-economic processes, still, that cause the concentrations of deprivation in the first place.

So, ABIs don’t work because they misidentify the policy problem – they look to solve a problem in neighbourhoods that isn’t there. They also don’t work because, well we just know they don’t work. As this blog from the RSA highlights, the biggest ABI ever, the New Deal for Communities, achieved some change in some indicators, and some of this was caused by broader processes of gentrification in London. As a lot of evaluations of ABIs have shown, and was picked up in my own research, ABIs are very good at changing physical things in neighbourhoods – building new housing, refurbishing housing, building new schools, doctors surgeries, libraries etc. But these rarely cause long term change in the outcomes for the residents. That occurs through enhancing services in the neighbourhoods – more resources for schools; public health interventions; employability projects – and the gains from these often leak out of the neighbourhood and cease pretty shortly after the ABI has ended.

But, as has been recognised from the 1990s, politicians like ABIs because it makes it looks like they’re doing something about something. Also, communities often like ABIs and the physical renewal they produce because it makes them feel like something is being done about something. And, much as I criticise ABIs, I do agree with the broader premise of them that if you invest in deprived neighbourhoods they will get better. The trouble with ABIs is the “boot-strap” approach – that this is a one-time fix. It is not, and the investment needs to continue in perpetuity. I would welcome a return to a proper regeneration policy as England had until the Treasury Sub-National Review: prioritised neighbourhood spending delivered through local authorities, nested within city-wide economic policies, nested within regional policies that sought to encourage economic development and rebalance growth. If you slapped a layer of national planning on top of that it would have been grand. You also probably would’ve been called a Communist.

Cameron’s regeneration policy is not this. As a piece coming out in the journal I’m on the editorial team of, Local Government Studies, highlights, the ending of the Revenue Support Grant for local authorities in England is leading us in into terrifying and uncharted territory. Local authorities, or the wider city region authorities being created, will be entirely responsible for raising their own revenue, no matter how flimsy their tax base is. As Michael Lord Heseltine laughably suggested on BBC Radio 4’s PM last October when this was announced, the idea is that if a local authority like Sunderland wants the tax base of Westminster, then it just has to drop its taxes to attract in new business and households. If only urban policy was as simple as it is in Sim City.

Under the guise of localism, this government is locking the UK into a framework of the spatial distribution of economic growth last seen for a brief period in the UK between 1848 and 1870 – when the Corn Laws stopped artificially supporting the agricultural economy of the south and before central government grants to local government started. When central government expenditure does have a spatial impact it is the inverse of what might be considered progressive: the cuts to welfare benefits, as analysed by CRESR which massively effect the north of England, Scotland and Wales; the infrastructure expenditure as analysed by CRESC which massively benefits the south of England and London; the billions cut from the budgets of the most deprived local authorities, as analysed by research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. By 2020, I’d be interested to know if there was any country that did less fiscal work spatially redistributing the benefits of economic development than the UK.

So, David Cameron has launched an ABI. To say he’s launched a regeneration policy is an insult to the thousands of people who have created and implemented regeneration policies since 1968. Given the pitiful sums involved, I doubt we can even call it state-led gentrification. But in broader policy changes this government is creating a tidal wave that will lead to the UK being a massively spatially unequal country. Deprived neighbourhoods will be like baby turtles being tossed around on the massive outflows of capital from towns and regions. This expenditure will distract a shark from eating them for a few seconds; it definitely isn’t a life line.

* I’d give the title a number, but there’s been so many ABIs over the years I couldn’t possibly count them.