Futures of Social Policy

I'm sure you all loved reading my 5,000 word essay on Futures of Social Policy. Now enjoy hearing me read it out:

Tackling poverty?

I’m just back from two days spent at the Poverty Alliance fifth Poverty Assembly. It’s far too long since I’ve been at an event like this and I really enjoyed it, although was a bit disappointed how attendance thinned out, especially among the sort of policymakers who could probably learn the most and make a difference.

I want to reflect for a moment on the plenary speeches today by Jackie Killeen, Scotland Director of the Big Lottery Fund and Julia Unwin, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which I thought were very interesting. Jackie highlighted a programme the BLF have been running called Support and Connect which essentially funds projects to alleviate real hardship – foodbanks etc. She explained that she was very surprised they had ended up funding projects like this as it was not something they thought they would end up doing.

Julia Unwin also did something that is very unfashionable and highlighted the massive progress on tackling poverty between until 2010 (and particular from 1992). Particular achievements were the disconnection between older age and poverty. It had been taken for granted that as you grew older you would end up in extreme poverty. We got to the stage where we had almost eradicated that issue before 2010. We had also got to the stage where the connection between poverty and squalor had almost been added – yes people experienced poverty, but they did not also have to live in very poor quality housing. We had also moved on from talking about destitution to talking about relative poverty. We are now back to having to consider helping people with absolutely nothing. The powerful message of this bit of her speech was that we can make decisions to make a big difference to tackle poverty if there is a political will.

She went on to a similar point as Jackie was making – that post 2008 and with austerity, things have changed. We have demographic pressures on services and massive reductions in budgets. During the rest of the two days, I spent a lot of time in a session discussion whether area regeneration can make a difference in tackling poverty. Reflecting on the plenaries, I could not help but think we are at the same place when it comes to regeneration. From 1997 in particular, we were making big strides in renewing housing in deprived neighbourhoods, starting to target services and coproduce services in interesting ways in neighbourhoods (such as the developments after the New Commitment to Neighbourhood Renewal). For all their localist rhetoric, at Westminster policy is tumbling backwards as funding is diverted away from deprived local authorities and as the Communities and Local Government Select Committee said, they don’t even have a regeneration policy.

I’d like to say things are better in Scotland. We do have a regeneration strategy - Achieving a Sustainable Future. However, when a Scottish Government civil servant talked through this I was very troubled by the way the policy problem was framed and therefore the solutions. The contemporary focus on community empowerment in Scotland, although laudable, does easily slip into pathologising discourses, that blame communities for not being empowered enough, completely ignoring the massive inequalities when it comes to empowerment and capability, not to mention the states’ response.

A really interesting point on the civil servants slides was that they wanted to empower communities to “exploit opportunities in communities” based on their essays. I was fascinated by the lack of agency and choice of words. Exploit is a very strong word: capital exploits labour; colonialism exploited slaves; economic growth exploits the planet and its resources. Yet, without agency “exploit” becomes lovely – all communities have assets, we just have to put them to work. But we have to ask who is doing the exploiting? Can the community exploit their own assets and maintain the benefits of this? Are public services exploiting local communities to do things they can no longer afford to do (clean the streets, care for vulnerable children, alleviate poverty)? Are community assets being exploited to make a small cabal of developers a lot of money?

Quite practically, when I look at the delivery of services around me and listen to people in projects, it seems that local authorities in Scotland and other public services are retreating from good work they were doing because of the cuts, be that through the “Strathclydisation” of Police Scotland ending community policing in the Lothians as I used to experience it or through the litter that I wade through on the streets of my local neighbourhood, or the cuts that community projects are facing as local authorities protect core, statutory services.

But, just like with tackling poverty, we can make choices to make more money available for the state as a whole, and for deprived neighbourhoods. On the latter was a nice idea (which I’m sort of editing here) that came out of our group, which is having a much more strategic approach to public sector recruitment to make sure that it benefits deprived neighbourhoods the most. I think this would be a very exciting area for spatial strategy to go into, and there is some good practice I’ve read about already from the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. On the former, today started with a panel of MSPs. I’d recommend going back on the #PovertyAssembly twitter tag and look at some of the tweets from it. Basically, it did end up being rather a Patrick Harvie love-in. But much as almost everyone agreed with his wonderful blend of Green politics and radical economics, this really has not been turned into action. And I’m sorry, I cannot see it being turned into action anytime soon unless our politicians are braver and lead public debate more. We live in a very rich country. We have enough money to pay for a large, supportive state, and to ensure everyone, no matter where they live, has a dignified life. 

More thoughts on the Bedroom Tax

Georgie Porgie’s disgusting comments on the horrendous case of the Philpott’s has caused this blogpost to emerge late at night from my addled brain. I’m not going to talk much about the case itself, but from listening to the fantastic PM on radio 4 earlier, I really would recommend reading Justice Thirlwall’s comments in sentencing. 

The reason the case, and the horrendous Daily Hate Mail front cover, have caused me to blog is for me is represents the utter debasement of the political discourse around benefits in the UK at the moment. And with the bedroom tax, this really scares.

As I’ve blogged before, I the bedroom tax will be a policy disaster. It’s really good to see commitments by the likes of Edinburgh Council to no-eviction policies, but realistically this cannot be sustained. It is meant to reduce the housing benefit bill. What will actually, probably happen, is, many under-occupying people will get into arrears. Where it is possible, they will be evicted and the costs of their homelessness will fall back onto the state. Where their tenancies can be sustained it will be, firstly, grossly unfair on those tenants who are not in arrears who will have to pay higher rent for the books to balance. The worst case scenario I can foresee is a large number of heavily indebted social housing landlords going bust in spectacular style – regulators are already aware of the stresses on RSL balance sheets that the reforms will cause.

Ages ago, following a conversation with Stuart Wilks-Heeg and Dave O’Brien on Twitter, I read this fantastic book: Failure in British Government. It tells the fantastic story of the Poll Tax where all the failures in the policy that emerged from the moment it was implemented in Scotland were predicted, but the ideological push for the tax meant it got implemented anyway. This is exactly what I see happening with the bedroom tax. It will be a policy failure. RSLs are already seeing record levels of rent arrears.

And this is where the Philpotts, unfortunately, come in. Everybody was affected by the unfairness of the Poll Tax, apart from the mythical asset-rich cash poor, Tory-voting grannies being hammered by Domestic Rates. Very few people, relatively, will be affected by the bedroom tax and the discourse around the Phillpots makes me think no one will care. I thought, and hope, that the failure of major RSLs will make the Government change tack. 

But I had a horrible thought last night about the cynicism of this government. Maybe they want it to be a failure? If it pans out the way it probably will (and Lord Freud supposedly admitted it will) the housing benefit bill will soar as people are forced into the private rented sector. Even major RSLs going bust will just give the hideous capitalists who fund the chumps in charge of this country some nice rich assets with a reasonably stable income stream to invest in, drive down service to tenants, and shove up rents, a la post-Communist Eastern Europe. This will send the housing benefit bill soaring even higher. Which will give the government an even better reason to end housing benefit altogether.

Or am I being too cynical?

Child murder

I've avoided ranting too much about my life as a vulnerable road user - I commute using my bike. Part of this is because I'm scared that the hatred I experience from drivers on the roads will be transferred into trolling on my blog if I'm ever honest about how I feel. When I'm feeling pretty crappy as a road user I basically assume that if I continue to use my bike to commute I will be severely disabled or killed with an "accident" with a car. That my two worst accidents to date have been caused by pedestrians has been fluke.

This post was going around my head on Saturday night as I drifted off to sleep. I was going to avoid writing it today. But this morning the BBC News website posted this map of a decade's worth of road casualties on Britain's roads. Our roads are relatively safe, but still "a total of 36,371 people were killed on Britain's roads between 1999 and 2010". A similar map was posted by the Guardian a month-or-so back. This included the age of the victim as well as what they were doing. It turned out that the slaughter in my neighbourhood of Edinburgh was of elderly women and young people. We regularly allow the most vulnerable in our society to be killed and this is not a national scandal.

The reason I've decided to write this blog post was this story about a seven-year-old in Dalkeith, south of Edinburgh. More of that later.

A wee while back, this Youtube video, on how the Dutch got their bike infrastructure was doing the rounds of the cycling forums and Twitter

The whole video is quite interesting. I'd like to get the inside story from a Dutch transport researcher, but it's an inspiring tale of the campaigning of vulnerable road users creating a very positive outcome for transport policy. What particularly caught my eye was one of the banners a parent is holding a 2'34" "Stop Kinder Moord"; "Stop Child Murder". You can't get much more matter of fact than that?

It's similar to the famous, "Kill Your Speed, Not a Child" road safety adverts in the UK:

Except, it's not. Watching these public information films, if I was a parent I would think "Well, I drive at 35mph to get my child to school on time, so it's not as if I can trust any other driver. I must put my child in the car, so they are safe". Or even, "well, it's the stupid child's fault for running out in the road". So, I don't think these adverts have the right impact. They just make us all scared of the car and run to the car for safety.

It doesn't work for a second reason. "Kill your speed, not a child" avoids blame. I ate a chicken for my dinner yesterday that had to be killed for me to eat it. I didn't kill the chicken. The weasel verb "kill" without a pronoun avoids blame. Anyone/thing can kill by accident. "Stop Child Murder" puts the blame somewhere else - on cars. It is cars that are murdering children. Not their speed. Or an "accident".

And this brings me back to the poor seven-year-old in Dalkeith. The BBC report that he "he ran out in front of a car". If you look at where the accident happened on Google Streetview I don't blame the boy at all. It's a suburban street, surrounded by houses, with a 20mph speed limit, by a bus stop.He was seven. I've seen enough adults walk out in a much busier main road not looking at oncoming traffic, let alone a child who's at the age where if he hit someone so badly they were injured he would find himself in front of a very concerned Children's Panel wondering what had gone wrong with his upbringing. 

Yet it was an "accident". This is what I find inspiring about the Dutch case and the message of "Stop child murder" - it seems to have disrupted and changed the whole discourse around transport policy and stopped it being a car-centric discourse of "accidents" that just happen. No, cars kill people. That's the policy problem we need to solve.

6 December edit:  Well, this is fast becoming my most read post. Thanks all! And do check out David Hembrow's blog and his links in his comment below about the "Stop Child Murder" campaign in the Netherlands.