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.

Futures of Social Policy

Playing around with teaching, last year I delivered a lecture without PowerPoint, with an actual written lecture on 'Futures of Social Policy'. I made the essay available to my students and also on here.

The feedback on the lack of PowerPoint was interesting - the students who commented said it made them concentrate more in the lecture, but it wasn't very good when they were revising from the recorded lecture on Listen Again(st). The students used the slides as bookmarks in the video to get to exactly the point they wanted to listen to again. I had no idea students even used Listen Again(st) in this way - I thought they just used it when they'd slept-in until 4pm and missed the lecture. So that was useful to know.

Anyway, I've done the same again this year - download it and have a look yourself here. It's not journal-submission quality; it's like a #longread blog post really where I pontificate on where we are and what we might be doing. A big shout out to Peter Taylor-Goodby who's excellent paper on the welfare state heavily inspired this lecture, as you'll see. His paper is part of the illustrious company our own paper on Bourdieu and the Big Society keeps in the latest Policy and Politics.

I'm also making this lecture a wee bit whizz-bang with some PowerPoint idiocy. You can vote on whether I should broadcast it on Periscope via this tweet.

If you like this, then I'm thinking of making SPCU913 an online module over the next two years with most of the material delivered through a WordPress site. So you too can learn my somewhat idiosyncratic take on social policy.

Why Gideon Osborne is a genius

When Gideon Osborne became Chancellor of the Exchequer back in 2010 I thought the coalition were being stupid. Vince Cable had shone through in the general election campaign as being a sensible thinker on fiscal policy – don’t cut for ideological reasons, and invest to maintain growth. As far as I was concerned, Gideon was a posh, out-of-touch idiot who knew nothing about economics. The “Pasty Tax” seemed to be typical.

But since May I’ve come to realise Gideon is an incredibly intelligent politician. I shall use two examples: austerity and the fiscal charter (with the resulting political fun on Monday/Tuesday) and the austerity discourse; and the devolution of taxation powers to Scotland.

Austerity

Now, Gideon is an austerity chancellor. He has cut public expenditure enormously, although I was interested to note a fortnight ago that Dennis Healey’s cuts in 1976 were greater. As I ruminated with Alex Marsh on teh Twitterz, we are seeing the results of this in the fraying civility of our urban landscapes – the vandalism left unrepaired, waste not collected or swept. And as Julian Le Grand showed in the 1980s, as this is a Tory government elected by people who use schools and hospitals, the cuts are mainly on services Labour voters (or non-voters) use: the benefits system and the nice fluffy extra stuff like urban regeneration and community development that local authorities used to be able to afford.

But he has, quite obviously, not cut the deficit. As many economic commentators and people on the left highlight, he spectacularly missed his own spending targets and has borrowed a quite staggering amount and continues to do so. This borrowing is paying for tax cuts for the rich – cutting the top rate of tax and inheritance tax. But as this excellent blog post highlights, these are just the sort of tax cuts floating voters like as they aspire to be higher-rate taxpayers and think they’ll die with a house worth a £1 million because they “work hard and do the right thing” (to quoth Gideon).

So, I want to suggest that “tackling the deficit” and “austerity” have become entirely symbolic. To throw myself into French post-structuralism, they are now empty signifiers. We all laughed at the “long term economic plan” nervous tick the Tories had during the election campaign, but over the many weeks it stuck like an earworm. If you listen to how David Cameron responded to Jeremy Corbyn’s questions from the British public at Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday, it’s a classic example. The attacks on tax credits were very powerful, but the response was “we have a long term economic plan to tackle the deficit and get Britain working”. It’s a sentence that, literally, has no meaning in reality. But it cannot be argued against.

Using all the powers of rational argument we have, we can fill-in that: the deficit has not been cut; that promising to always run a budget surplus will suck money out of the economy stymieing private enterprise; that tax credits cuts are hitting hard-working families the most. But no one will listen, because all they hear and know about is that the government has “a long term economic plan to tackle the deficit and get Britain working”. Unfortunately we have to play that game now. Whether Labour supports or doesn't support the Fiscal Charter doesn't matter. Gideon doesn't support the Fiscal Charter, as people have kept pointing out, he pilloried Labour's suggestion to do the same in 2010. But the Fiscal Charter is a "long term economic plan to tackle the deficit and get Britain working". It's symbolic policy can be used over-and-over again. 

Devolved taxation

At the SNP conference today, Finance Secretary John Swinney is announcing that local authorities will be able to reduce Non-Domestic Rates. This is almost exactly the same as the announcement from Gideon at the Conservative Party conference. As my colleague Paul Cairney points out, this is a classic example of the SNP Scottish Government being socially democratic in social policy, and fiscally neoliberal in financial policy.

However, John Swinney has also announced he’s not going to use the new tax-varying powers that the Scottish Parliament has from this year thanks to the Scotland Act 2012. I want to hark right back though, to the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax. Now, under the 2012 Scotland Act the Scottish Parliament had Stamp Duty devolved to it. The Scottish Government pointed out that the flat rate on transactions over £250,000 was stupid and regressive. They worked out a revenue-neutral, banded scheme instead. The Scottish Conservative in the Parliament realised that this would hammer home owners in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow who fell into the properties over £125,000 band who would suddenly have to pay.

Now, I’d be interested to know how much exchange went on between the Scottish Conservative and Gideon at the Treasury on this. Basically, five months after the LBTT was announced, Gideon announced he was reforming Stamp Duty to make it more progressive and banded, but that it would kick in at a higher level and overall it would reduce the amount of money raised by the tax. John Swinney was then forced to quickly change the LBTT bands to match the English ones, leaving a £50 million hole in the Scottish Government’s finances.

Now, why do I think this is an example of Gideon’s political acumen? Well, basically, it looks like with this, and the Non-Domestic Rates policies, Gideon is forcing the Scottish Government to match the UK’s taxation policies. Much as it might proclaim a distaste for austerity and a desire to increase public expenditure, ultimately the Scottish Government seems to end up being boxed into a corner. It will be interesting to see if Gideon reduces the basic rate of Income Tax to 19% and whether the Scottish Government would then follow.

There’s also a lot of political acumen from the Scottish Government here. At the moment they have the get-out-of-jail free card that a lot of these tax powers are unusable because the increased revenue is offset by decreased block grant. But, if the Scottish Government did ever start using them to lead to fiscal divergence from England, and it did result in economic success and increased revenues and better public services, then they would walk into the anti-independence argument of “well, it’s working ok for you now, why do you need any more powers?”

So, I utterly loathe Gideon. But over the past couple of weeks I’ve begun to realise what a political genius he is. I should also add, the Non-Domestic Rates thing is particularly clever as everyone is clueless as it’s such as esoteric tax. It sounds brilliant, but it is horrendous for local authorities and will massively increase (listening to the leader of Nottingham Council utterly fail to explain this fairly simple fact on BBC PM). I really hope Gideon isn’t the next Conservative leader, because then we have definitely got a Tory government until 2025. That is, unless the long memories of those middling voters who have been hammered by the cuts to tax credits do come to haunt him. 

The social attitudes of my students

Every autumn semester I run a gigantic second year module called SPCU913 Understanding Social Policy. In the first lecture I get them to answer a selection of questions from the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. In the second lecture I then compare the class responses to the Scottish data. I'm a bit naughty in that I remove the "don't know" or "neither" categories for my students to force them to answer.

I thought I'd share the data here in these slides. It's always very interesting. My students, by their nature, are incredibly different from the rest of Scotland's population - on average much younger, more affluent and more educated. Yet their social attitudes are incredibly similar. Just like Scotland, they're actually very centrist in their political views - if I were a stats whizz I'd calculate some confidence intervals around the questions on benefits as it does seem my students are marginally more left-wing than the rest of Scotland. But, as I've commented on before, it's remarkable for the political discourse, how right-of-centre some political views are in Scotland, and so are my students. The vast majority of people in Scotland think most benefits are claimed falsely, as do the majority of my students. 

The real divergences really only emerge on touchstone issues, like university tuition fees. For a policy that is so totemic of progressive politics in Scotland, free university tuition has remarkably low support (26% in 2013). Yet among my students, unsurprisingly, 70% are in favour of free university tuition. However, I wonder if this is down to the way the question is asked. I wonder which option would be most popular out of these?

• Pay fees from a loan and receive a means-tested grant of up to £5,000 a year
• Pay no fees but receive all your living costs as a loan of up to £9,000 a year

I asked my students these questions on the 18 September last year (2014) and yesterday (17 September) 2015. What I think is most striking is the data on party affiliation. On the day of voting in the Independence Referendum last year support for the SNP among my students was very low, just 26% compared to 40% support for Labour. Yet now the stats have more than reversed, with 59% supporting the SNP and only 19% of Labour. Very clearly, among this demographic, the SNP and the Yes campaign lost the referendum, but in the year since, have won the political argument. 

Is the right-to-buy a bad thing?

The housing world is frothing with vituperative arguments - and quite rightly so - at the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto today and the pledge to extend the right-to-buy to housing association homes. Now, we all know that the original right-to-buy was a Bad Thing. I don't disagree with this assessment that wildly: it reduced the supply of affordable rented homes; it led to the residualisation of social housing as a tenure of last resort; and it led to spatial segregation as the best housing was bought at substantial discount and was now out-of-reach of many lower income households. Finally, and for me most problematically, it left local authorities with an enormous burden of historic debt and no income stream to pay it off. I'm on the board of a housing association with properties with the preserved right-to-buy and I see the impact of this once-in-a-while when one of these properties is purchased and our balance sheet takes a small hit. The mess that local authority housing revenue accounts were left in by the right-to-buy doesn't bear thinking about.

But, was the right-to-buy a Bad Thing in its entirety? I'd say we need some caution and nuance here - and we can end up with a much more radical policy. First of all, to be clear, the right-to-buy was not an invention of the Thatcher government. Local authorities since the 1950s had been building homes for purchase. In Tucker's cracking book Honourable Estates he gives the example of local authorities where you knew the Conservatives, or "Progressives" had won the local election because the "To Let" signs on the shiny new homes they'd built were replaced by "For Sale" signs. My uncle and aunt bought such a property, built by the LCC with a cheap mortgage through the Public Works Loan Board, in Harold Wood in Essex in the 1960s. Further, I can't put my finger on a source for this just right now, but as I understand it the right-to-buy in this format was extended in the 1970s. But the key here is an implementation detail - under these schemes the debt that the local authority had incurred through the construction was paid off by the purchaser. The discounts that have left local authorities strapped for cash since 1981 were not in place.

Further, in my research, and I've spoken to others who have found the same, in deprived neighbourhoods the right-to-buy is actually quite important for long-term residents in two ways. Firstly, it means that if their family wish to remain close by, but become homeowners, they can purchase property, often resold RTB properties. Secondly, for many long-term, committed residents people exercising the RTB is a very positive symbol - it means that their neighbourhood is now good enough that people are willing to invest a substantial amount of their money in property. Of course, the stigma towards such neighbourhoods should not be there in the first place and is exacerbated by the RTB and associated residualisation, but this is where we are and I cannot discount the evidence from the interviewees in my research. Also, that the RTB is being scrapped in Scotland has led to a surge in people taking advantage of it does suggest it's still a popular policy with individual tenants.

So, if we dare to say the RTB is not necessarily a Bad Thing what do we do about it? Well, from a more radical but pragmatic standpoint, I'd say we should do two things: firstly, the discount should be properly calculated as that bit of debt remaining, once maintenance costs have been factored in through depreciation, that the housing authority still has. This might actually mean the RTB is removed from some properties as this is incalculable. Secondly, if individuals can have the right to take property of one institution, then they should have the right to take it off all institutions - that is the RTB should be extended to the tenants in all private property. As the infamous (on twitter) loveandgarbage pointed out, the only person to do this was a (very) Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland in 1997.

This, for me, is the more radical way to deal with the RTB and would also open up new, exciting forms of property ownership in a collective way if tenants in blocks of flats could collectively exercise the RTB. But, of course, as Alex Marsh has excellently exposed, the Conservative policy for the RTB is not thought-free. It is radical, but it is radical in terms of an attack on the neediest in society. It is a radical attack on the state and the idea that some people might be dependent on others for help. It is not a radical way to change housing policy or delivering new social housing. But then, that is also why the Conservatives are proposing to change inheritance tax making wealth even more poorly taxed in the UK. But that's a whole other blog post.

How do we pay for our cities?

I’m going to start this post with a story which points to many of the problems I want to briefly discuss. My swimming training takes place in the pool of a local school that my coaches hire out. Just before Christmas the boiler broke down so the pool was closed down. We rolled our eyes because if a swimming pool boiler breaks down then invariably it’s not easy to fix. When the kids returned to the school for their prelim exams in January the boiler was still not fixed. For two weeks kids sat freezing in classrooms, struggling to write their exams because their hands were so cold, and collapsing in class due to the fumes from the emergency gas heaters that had been dragged in. Eventually this lurid story hit the local press and the school was eventually closed, the boiler repaired (temporarily) and the school and pool reopened. During this enforced break from swimming I eventually lost patience and went to the Royal Commonwealth Pool for a swim. As I got out to get changed, I noticed the lockers had ESPC adverts on the end of them. I’ll be honest, as a subject of global neoliberalism, my immediate thought was “ooh, good idea. Why aren’t there more adverts around here to keep prices down and keep the place open? Rebranding it “The Speedo Royal Commonwealth Pool” would probably pay to keep it open for a couple of days”.

I know as a good left-winger I should have been shocked and appalled by this creeping privatisation of “public space” but I wasn’t really. But this concern – that we’re selling our cities to private companies – is becoming much more part of public debate in Edinburgh, and Scotland as a whole. The examples we are getting are not quite as egregious as some of the stories you hear from London, or the infamous cases of Liverpool One and Cabot’s Circus in Bristol, where entire city centre blocks have been sold to private developers, but we are getting smaller examples, such as "Edinburgh's Winter Festivals" (courtesy of Underbelly).

The stories seem to be particularly emerging in Edinburgh because the cut-and-thrust of this sort of capitalism rubs up against heritage, particularly in the New Town (never mind that the New Town was a speculatively built development, and when the banking crash of 1825-6 happened it was partly driven by this speculative development and stalled the Scottish economy for decades, as you can see on Claremont Street [thanks Eleanor!]). Local hyper-local the Broughton Spurtle has been doing it’s usually stirring raising quite a few concerns about how the Business Improvement District Essential Edinburgh have been using Saint Andrews Square and how the Council more broadly are using the city centre to lever in more resources – the latest being the proposal to wrap our shiny new trams in advertising. 

Now, much as I didn’t bat an eyelid about ESPC advertising to me in my swimming trunks, some of these changes do concern me – I’m not such a pragmatist that I’d be that right-wing. However, there’s two ways, as I see it, of unpacking this. Firstly, that this is just part of global trends of city competitiveness, and this quite rightly should be resisted. However, in the case of Edinburgh and most other cities in the UK, I do think we have to have an honest discussion about how we pay for our cities.

It’s easy to presume in Scotland that cuts to local government are something that England has to deal with – the Scottish Government has fully-funded the Council Tax freeze, hasn’t it? The reality is quite grim, as the Accounts Commission report into Edinburgh Council and reporting of recent cuts has made clear. The City of Edinburgh Council itself has to lose 1,500 staff. If you played around with the council's online budget calculator, the one thing you had to do was cut services somewhere and somehow. I have my differences with the Scottish Improvement Service for local government, but last week they posted this very impressive bit of work demonstrating how local authorities in Scotland are meeting the challenge of the “scissors of doom” – declining budgets and rising demand for services. But there's only so much of that sort of stuff local councils can do before services start to suffer.

If a local authority, like Edinburgh, has to cut over 10 per cent of its budget, while in real terms costs are increasing, then it needs to find some way of funding very expensive services like a city centres. Put simply, the grass in Saint Andrews’ Square is not going to mow itself (unless we invest in a city centre flock of sheep). This is related to the general mess of local government finance in Scotland and the fact that the Council Tax freeze has left local authorities completely powerless to do anything – on this I could not agree with Ken Gibb more. But it also raises a much simpler question – if the people of Edinburgh, or any other city, want a nice city centre, without private sector investment in the form of advertising and things, then we will have to pay for it through higher taxation. And, as with all tax/spend political debates, this is a debate we’re utterly unwilling to have. We’ll happily rail against the commercialisation of city centres without suggesting an alternative of how else the services that keep it going can be paid for. And unless we do consider coughing up more money in tax, then this creeping commercialisation will happen. Either that or our city centres will end up looking like the worst American downtown, and then we'll really be complaining. So, to go back to my swimming pool - what would I rather have, a closed broken pool, or some adverts?

As a concluding statement, I just want to reflect on who pays. One thing that concerns me at the moment is that even anti-austerians on the left don’t really push at who is paying tax. Increasingly the tax base is being shifted to labour; in the UK through income tax, national insurance and VAT. Tax on capital (particularly Corporation Tax) is falling. This is in a world where the returns to labour (wages) are falling, whereas the returns to capital (profits) are rising. This is why I’m against a basic income – capital deserves to pay labour a good return for its labour through wages, and a basic income paid for through taxes on labour completely fails to do this. How does this link to my city centre services? Well, if you thought Council Tax was a complete mess, don’t look at Business Rates, possibly the biggest example of an utterly disastrous tax in the UK.* The vast majority of it is paid to central government and then redistributed to local councils. This was done in the 1980s to stop Militant councils using increases in Business Rates to pay for improved services. So, if we were to increase Council Tax, or another local tax on labour, to pay for city centres then effectively it would be yet another redistribution of the profits of labour to capital. So, while the voluntary payment by businesses of improvements to city centres – through BIDs, sponsorship etc. – might not be ideal, at least it’s not a tax on labour.

* honestly, the more I hear about Business Rates, the more I just end up thinking "what?", "eh?", "really?", "why on Earth?" etc. etc.

Top five posts of 2014

So, I'm watching Mary Poppins on the telly so I thought I'd jump on a bandwagon and do a quick post of my most popular posts of 2014. In fact the top two for 2014 are the number two and three for most hits this blog has received ever. My rant about the sheer stupidity of 2013's Niceway Code 'I am not a horse' still holds the record for most hits at 1664, although my top post of 2014 (see below) overtook it briefly in November.

Anyway, in reverse order we have:
5. Why the Improvement Service is Wrong on This One - where yet again, I felt I had to make some pretty basic statements about how to interpret indices of multiple deprivation.

4. Why I am not a Planner nor Proud of Planning - where I gave up on the planning profession because the outcomes I see in terms of development are just so poor and decision-making is just dominated by a desire to see development happen no matter what the cost.

3. Making Peace with Cambridge - a very personal post, reflecting on student mental health, social class, and my own experience of attending an elite university. 

2. Why I'm a Swithering Yes Voter - where I outlined some of the reasons why I voted Yes in the referendum for Scottish Independence.

1. Scotland Decides - where, two months later, after I'd voted Yes, I eventually got sick of the nationalist campaign and ranted about how ridiculous the whole thing was. I now wish I'd voted no (and really want to know how many people there are out there like me). I'm very glad this has managed to get (substantially) more hits than my Yes post. 

Suffice to say that this blog gets most traffic when I don't blog about my research. The only reason why the fifth most popular post got so many hits was because it was responding to a piece in Holyrood magazine and the journalist was kind enough to retweet it and engage me in twitter chat about it. At this rate I might as well give up on here and stick to A Lidl Bit of Middle Class Pleasure.

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.

We are all complainers now

I'm quite interested in those little, boring bits of policy and governance that often go overlooked in the big stories of the day - like my interest in Community Planning in Scotland. One aspect of this is the public service reform agenda in Scotland. Public sector managers are all over it, but I think outside of their bubble, even politicians aren't that up to speed with it. This includes big things like the creation of the Police Scotland, where it looks like, just as the critics said, the service is being cut and standardised across Scotland. 

As aspect of this I've bumped into is the Public Service Reform (Scotland) Act 2010 (stay with me here, it will get marginally more interesting). This was mainly to do with the creation of Creative Scotland and getting rid of another few commissions. It also gave Scottish Ministers rather sweeping powers to create or destroy various public services in Scotland, but that was kept a bit quiet at the time. However, Part 8 of the Act is now coming home to roost - Scrutiny and Complaints. As you'll guess I'll be focusing on the latter bit.

I first came across this when the the housing association I am on the management committee of had to change its complaints handling procedure. Why did we have to do this. Well, if you scroll down to section 119 you'll discover that the act gives the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman power to create "Complaint Handling Procedures" for services which then have to be adopted. Last year the SPSO "consulted" with housing associations on this. By consulted, I mean they told us this was the procedure we must have. The higher education sector is now waking up to the fact the SPSO have done the same for us and so I spent 45 minutes this morning being told about it.

Basically, this complaints handling procedure is three stage - level 1 deal with it there and then; level 2 escalation to management, level 3 ombudsman. At all levels complaints have to be recorded and then reported. Where this gets interesting is the SPSO's attitude. They've been saying that they expect a lot more level 1 complaints and a lot more complaints ending up with them because of the simplified procedures. This is what a lot of people struggle to understand, but what I find particularly interesting.

The beguiling management logic behind this is the view that "complaints are the best thing we get" which I've heard said by quite a few managers in the private sector and public sector. The logic is that, if we get complaints, we know where our processes and service are not right, so we can improve it. In their attitude to the new complaints procedure the SPSO are applying this to all public services in Scotland. We are all now expected to identify and record level 1 complaints, and the SPSO will be all over us if our reporting levels are low. That their website is valuingcomplaints.org.uk says everything you need to know. As such it's another governance tool being applied in a managerial way; another facet of that suite of targets, outcomes, that are meant to make us all pull our socks up and deliver a better service. The trouble is, the SPSO does not seem to have realised the immense administrative burden on organisations, reeling from staff cuts, that this will cause.

The other interesting aspect of this is what it does to citizenship. The SPSO also expect public services to publicise our complaints procedure, using their standardised wording, and enable complaints to be taken. The three-stage procedure also short-cuts many traditional governance institutions within organisations that had a role intervening in complaints - the Council or a committee; management board; University Court etc. Complaints are now a matter of business administration to be adjudicated by the ombudsman. This is creating us a citizen-complainers. We are all expected to read our standardised complaints leaflets and immediately leap to the nearest person and complain heartily. And you'll no doubt guess what my feelings are about this. 

Beyond those questions of equity though, there is a bigger point about governance in the Foucauldian sense. Now, the SPSO are very clear on what is not a complaint - for example matters of academic judgement are not a complaint, although there may be elements of complaint in, say, a student's appeal. Fair enough. But their definition of a complaint is staggeringly broad:

'An expression of dissatisfaction by one or more individuals about the standard of service, action or lack of action by or on behalf of the Institution'

As with my views on the outcomes focus in the National Performance Framework, I do worry that this is depoliticising what should be political decision-making. The standard of service may be a political decision and to not offer it may be a political decision with implications for equity and outcomes. Reducing these to managerial procedures and processes is very dangerous. Yes, an organisation should listen to the views of service users, but our citizenship should not be based on whether we complain about something.

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?

Democracy and policy decisions – are the people always right?

I started my full-on teaching semester this Monday just gone with my first classes in Social Sustainability and Urban Infrastructure and Resource Management. On the former, I get the students to come up with their own definitions of social sustainability and then email/tweet or text me them and I make them into a wordle:


I then shamelessly copy the format of Michael Sandel’s public philosophy lectures to start getting the students to realise it’s never as easy as “just” balancing the environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainability – even within social sustainability you have to make impossibly difficult decisions. The “switch problem” and the “footbridge problem” that Sandel uses are excellent ways to get students to understand the qualitative difference many people feel in making different decisions even though the outcomes are the same link. I present different theories of how to make a “good” decision, including of course utilitarianism, to which the students readily realise majoritarianism mean utilitarianism is not always a good thing, especially when you’re talking about issues of equity, equality and prejudice.

And lo and behold, yesterday, planning a democracy were in the news rather a lot. Down in England, the planning minister revealed that he had once been a NIMBY resisting new housing development, and re-announced the New Homes Bonus to “bribe” local communities to accept new housing. Implicit in this, and made more clear in the Tories “Open Source Planning” document, was the view if you left new planning to communities nothing would get built, so you have to bribe them.

Closer to home, Glasgow City Council want to remodel the civic square, George Square - well, actually businesses surrounding the square want to and seemed to have the council over a barrel. Just like similar proposals for Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen, there is now call for a “vote” although want they actually seem to want is an online poll – as a social media researcher the thought of this fills me with horror. The Union Terrace Gardens proposal ended up going to referendum and it’s still stuck in a quagmire of controversy.

Which has got me thinking… Planning theory talks to community engagement in policy a lot and in a very informed way. The debates between the collaborative planners and the agonist planners really get into the heart of the matter in a way missed by a lot of policy and politics literature I’ve read that presumes community engagement is always a good thing. As I’ve expressed on here quite often, I’m sceptical about community engagement. In particular, I think it is used by the powerful to maintain their benefits; and I also think it is used by public agencies to avoid doing what just needs doing (you can’t eat community engagement). Ruminating on this yesterday, I suggested to Sarah Payne the following scenario: when we look at our towns and cities, the massive amount of housebuilding from 1945 to the mid-1970s is staggering – particularly the new towns programme. It’s easy to dismiss this by focusing on the high-rise blocks and say it was all a “catastrophe” – but most of that housing, the sort that Albert Finney looked to settle down in at the end of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, or that Bob and Thelma lived in in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, planned housing, is still there. I suggested that perhaps this expansion, produced by the immediate development plans created by the 1947 planning system, was allowed because people did not yet know how they could use the planning system to restrict development.

Which brings me to two issues – leadership in decision-making and the role of technical knowledge. On the latter, the New Deal for Communities evaluation has produced some interesting findings on this, with a recent article in Planning Theory and Practice(£) stating that:
“there was a consistent tendency for [residents] to overstress problems of crime, combined with an under-emphasis of educational and health standards. Furthermore, [residents] sought to address these ills through orthodox interventions…”
This was something I also found in my research on regeneration in Scotland. Previous initiative meant more to communities because the housing improvements were such obvious improvements to their lives; however over the long term they did not deliver socio-economic improvements. 

On the former issue, this article(£) on the siting decision for homeless hostels in Rotterdam presents a very interesting case study indeed. Essentially, the populist mayor realised that no one would want a homeless hostel in their back yard so essentially kept the siting decision secret, presented it as a fait d’accompli, and then defended his decision. A classic “decide and defend” decision we’re supposed to rubbish, but one that got essential infrastructure for a marginalised group constructed, and not just in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Rotterdam.

So where does this leave democracy and development decisions? As I’ve theorised myself, the richness and experience of the built environment needed for communicative action around development decisions is very difficult to get in a short period of community engagement. In the case of my doctoral case studies it seemed to have taken the community activists about 15 years to come to the conclusion that some of the physical development was good. And still, the discussion about many of the developments continued. Essentially, consensus needed the longue duree or was unachievable. And I’m not sure how we can square this with democratic processes as we have them, except to say that planning is democratic in that decisions are made by elected planning authorities and can be revisited over time. For all its faults, it’s better than a non-democratic, or market-led process.

And yesterday’s and today’s Herald also highlighted what happens when democracy goes wrong – with the shocking revelations that NHS Lothian were putting through decisions on waiting lists at confidential meetings and then trying to restrict the access Audit Scotland had to these papers. It’s not clear yet whether the papers should have gone to a public meeting, but either way, it’s a shocking indictment of an organisation that somehow thinks it is above public scrutiny and everything it does is right. From my limited experience as a committee clerk in local government, is it exactly this sort of behaviour that the light of democratic scrutiny stops – it would be almost impossible for that to happen at a Scottish local authority, unless Councillors, Officers and Committee Clerks going right up to the top of the organisation were complicit in the activity. I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen, but that it is much less likely to happen. This is why I’m never convinced by the beguiling niceties spoken of about Community Planning Partnerships in Scotland as a form of community accountability – just who are they actually accountable too? And could the Edinburgh Partnership ever stop NHS Lothian carrying out behaviour like this? 

As ever, if you want pay-walled content, contact by Twitter or email. And I had a thought on that yesterday - given the publishers make all their money from institutional libraries, why don't the do a reverse pay-wall where you only pay for articles if you're accessing from a university IP address. It's not as if they can make any moneyfrom the individual payments?

Is Leith a gentrified neighbourhood and does it matter?

This is the second of my posts for the Greener Leith blog, where I ponder my role as a gentrifier...
 
Gentrification is a very ominous word. It is also a very contentious issue and an area with a wide amount of scholarship and research.

It is generally understood to be the process by which a less advantaged neighbourhood that has experienced local house price drops, shops closing down and industrial vacancies becomes a much more advantaged neighbourhood, with sky-rocketing house prices and young professionals moving into the now fashionable small homes.

The usual story of gentrification is that earlier on in the process new people, such as artists, would have moved to the neighbourhood and these “gentrification pioneers” made the neighbourhood attractive to others. Often now the process is so rapid, led by big developers, that this stage barely registers. The term was coined and process first described in the USA in the 1960s, but in places like Islington in London, and closer to home arguably in neighbourhoods like Stockbridge and Newington the same process has happened.

One of the most contentious issues around gentrification is the displacement of previous populations by higher-income new arrivals. I’m not going to talk about this here; what I will discuss is the question of whether Leith is a gentrified or deprived neighbourhood and from my own perspective of research in public service provision, whether this matters.

It is obvious to most people that live in Leith that the neighbourhood has changed and that most of these changes could be characterised as gentrification. The new developments in the Docks were clearly built for people with professional salaries to move into as owner-occupiers. At the same time, general house price inflation across the UK, but particularly in Edinburgh, have meant the traditional tenement properties are increasingly out of the reach of many.

But as was pointed out in my previous post, Leith contains some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. I’d say Leith remains, and will remain a mixed community. Mixed communities have been a political ideal for centuries – going right back to Aneurin Bevan’s post-war dream of the doctor living next to the butcher and the miner.

A common social justice argument about mixed communities and living with different people is that we learn to get along better creating a civic democracy. A more practical argument for mixed communities is that if you have wealthier, or middle-class people living in a neighbourhood they will complain about local public services more and thus the standard of these will improve for everyone.

The evidence on this is mixed. However, it’s also deeply problematic in two other regards. Firstly, it presumes that it is only the more affluent, more vocal and more middle-class people that have the suitable education and civic-mindedness to complain to public services.

The long history of community activism in more deprived communities, such as those in Wester Hailes, Muirhouse and Greater Pilton, and even Leith shows this is just not the case.

More of an issue is whether public services listen to less-advantaged communities in delivering services. The other problem with this model is the behaviour of middle-class people themselves. It’s a very beguiling policy idea because the social stereotype is so strong. There’s a wonderful episode of the 70s sitcom The Good Life where the middle-class neighbour Margot goes to pay her rates at the District Council and refuses to pay some of them because of daft excuses like “the attitude of the bin men”.

The so-called NIMBYs who hold up wind farm developments, are, in many people’s mind middle-class homeowners (and often incomers to the areas they’re trying to protect, at that). And I’m as bad as anyone else middle-class – I was invited to do these two posts because I’m a regular pest with Edinburgh Council about the state of Leith.

But a recent research review a colleague and I carried out shows a more troubling pattern to this stereotype. We looked across a wide-range of evidence, around 69 studies in total, that looked at middle-class interaction with public services.

In this we found four key mechanisms by which middle-class, or more affluent, people and groups have a disproportionate impact on public services: They are more likely to form and join groups and also join groups that matter, like the Community Council or the School Board; They are more likely to complain, and when they do so are more likely to get a positive response and complain again; They, as middle-class professionals are speaking to other middle-class professionals so are more likely to be understood and taken seriously – we refer to this as an alignment of “cultural capital”; Lastly, most policies and the delivery of public services, such as school choice in England, are generally beneficial to the middle classes.

What is more, we found no evidence of “spill-over” effects that other members of the community benefit from the actions of the middle-classes. In fact, what evidence we could find was the very opposite – this was selfish activity that took away resources from those more needy. This is one of the reasons why I’m ambivalent about the current policy agenda for community empowerment – you could end up just empowering the more powerful.

This is a very difficult finding and one us as researchers have struggled with. It also troubles me as a relatively affluent incomer – a gentrifier – in Leith. I want to complain about local anti-social behaviour, the state of the streets, and the other problems that are worse in a more deprived neighbourhood. But I also don’t want to take resources away from, say cleaning out the corridors of Cables Wynd House, just so my street can look a little bit tidier.

The research has made me reflect much more on this. Often when I’m talking about living in Leith I have ended up saying “I am a gentrifier and I’m not ashamed of it”. I say this because it’s true and impossible to deny. However, it also allows me to reflect on my position in a very mixed community and turn what could be a very negative thing, displacing people less advantaged than myself, can become more positive.