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.

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.

via GIPHY

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.

via GIPHY

With thanks to the Taylor Swift Open Data Institute.

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.

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. 

Community empowerment - optimism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— scotgovfairer (@scotgovfairer) August 6, 2015

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

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

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

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

Queer-ying gentrification

18 months ago my colleague Dr Kirsten Besemer blogged on here about a surprise finding from some work we had done for the EHRC in Scotland – that a disproportionate number of non-heterosexual people lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland. We’ve since written this up as a journal article now published in Housing Theory and Society.

In writing up the paper we set the findings in the broader gentrification literature. As Kirsten wrote about back in 2012, this was because the narrative of LGBT households as gentrification pioneers is dominant. Growing up, one of the formative events in my emerging sexuality was watching the Channel 4 drama Queer as Folk. Aiden Gillen’s character Stuart typified this narrative – he lived in a swanky loft apartment in central Manchester, in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, paid for through his successful career, despite the homophobia he had experienced in his life. Similarly, in a lot of American scholarship on the creative class, LGBT households are synonymous with the creative class. If you’re a gay man, you’re rich and live in a loft apartment.

Reading through the literature on gentrification and LGBT residential location choice that I did for this paper, it was surprising how much this narrative has not been troubled – even though Loretta Lees in this article from 2000(£) argued that gentrification scholarship needed a much greater focus on issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual identity as well as class. Apologies if I did miss out on particular literature, but the stuff that came up in my literature search was predominantly accepting of the gay gentrification narrative.

There are two issues with this. Firstly, it does smack of a growing heteronormativity that has been particularly noticeable in the debates around equal marriage. Gay men are now just seen as men, in fact they’re almost seen as uber-men as they aren’t burdened with childcare, and just want to settle down with their husband in a very tastefully decorated house. This ignores the “little things” that Panti Bliss talks so evocatively about that frame how non-heterosexual people experience the world. Yes, we have seen the declining significance of homophobia in our society, but as a non-heterosexual you still find yourself censoring your behaviour; or feel that lump of fear in your throat when you reveal the gender of your partner to a relative stranger. To presume that non-straight households are always gentrification pioneers, or increasingly second-wave gentrifiers, is to ignore diversity within the non-straight population, and impose a heteronormativity upon non-heterosexual people. If data on sexual orientation at a neighbourhood level is available for other countries, I would strongly encourage others to repeat our analysis to see if this is a Scottish phenomenon, or a broader one.

The second issue is one of the policy implications of recognising that the lives of non-heterosexual people might be difficult and therefore they find themselves living in socially-rented housing in deprived neighbourhoods. As we stated in our original Hard to Reach report it is all too easy to presume Scotland’s deprived neighbourhoods are homogenous, white, heterosexual working class areas. We have shown they are not. Our finding might be a geographic fluke because the non-heterosexual population is so small, although tests of statistical significance show it is not. That this non-straight population living in deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland is comparatively older, does give credence to the description an older LGBT-identifying friend described, of lots of older non-straight people who had pretty difficult lives, living in social housing in the west of Scotland. If we accept this, then we need to consider whether services for non-heterosexual people need to move out of inner-city locations, or that mainstream services in deprived neighbourhoods need greater skills and training around helping a non-heterosexual population that might have multiple problems. 

It’s not what you know but how you know it

I’ve (literally) just finished* my evidence review for the JRF on poverty and social networks that I’ve blogged about here, here and here and sent it off for their feedback (which I’ve just received some of, all generally quite positive *phew*). Because it’s still drafty, I’m not going to release it to the world for a while yet, but I did want to blog about the methodological thoughts it’s led me to have, and this links to the title of the post. The phrase “it’s not what you know but who you know” really demonstrates the “folk” interest in the links between social networks and socio-economic mobility. However, now I’ve read a load of this evidence, methodologically, it actually seems to be more about how you know about these social networks. This is for two specific reasons: methodology, methods and disciplinary contexts; and bigger epistemological experiences about experience and how this is “collected” by the research process.

On the first point, the review was the first time in a while to read a good chunk of North American social science. I’ve read about the “methods wars” between qualitative and quantitative social science in America, and the feeling that the latter had won; I’d also listened to American delegates at the International Interpretive Policy Analysis conference bemoan the dominance of the rational actor model and quantitative methods. But I’d really not realised how dominant quants where. Successive were based on big datasets, with endless methodology sections explaining how survey instruments were used, with big scary equations that, as a qualitative researcher, I didn’t have a clue about. What struck me about them was they usually ended with, firstly, a lot of uncertainty about their findings and secondly a lot of unanswered questions. So, for example, some regression models would support theories, others would contradict them; when you controlled for different factors the overall conclusion was “meh”. And the unanswered questions didn’t help – invariably there would be the conclusion “but we cannot understand causation here”.

Which brings me to one of my favourite methodology books I’ve read for a long time, Mike Savage’s Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940. It’s essentially a history of social science methods in the UK from 1940 and it’s the historical approach that I love. To go back to the title of this whole blog – urbanity and history – that I chose three years ago, it’s always struck me how social scientists don’t get history, or even have much of a sensitivity to time. Savage sort of makes this point – the technocratic sociology that emerged in the 1950s was a study of the now. I often find it funny – and I’m guilty of doing this myself – how the strictures of social science writing mean that people will present evidence that is decades old in such a way as to suggest its contemporary, without any reflection on how the social world might have changed since then, and reflexively, how that knowledge has since changed the world that is now the object of study. The presumption is the knowledge is scientific and presented in the linear, “standing on the shoulder of giants” way. What I love about Savage’s book is it highlights the social context where the methods of modern British sociology/social science, particularly the survey and semi-structured interview, emerged from.

So, why does this all matter, well for me it brings us onto the second bigger epistemological question. The best way to talk about this is how it emerged in the evidence review itself. In terms of that folk idea of “it’s not what you know, but who you know” is the idea that if poorer people know wealthier people then they will do better in life. It also leads to the more negative idea, which I’m deeply uncomfortable with for its use in “underclass” discourses, of “cultures” of poverty – that experiencing poverty around others in the same situation lessens your chances of leaving poverty because you behave like them and this excludes you from wider society and opportunities. A lot of this sort of theorisation lies behind the “neighbourhood effects” literature I read for the evidence review; I discussed the problems with this in this blog post. However, I want to go back to a striking theme running through the neighbourhood effects literature: basically, most quantitative studies that try and find a neighbourhood effect either find a very small impact, or none at all, or the data is too messy to form consistent conclusions. Qualitative studies tend to find there is an impact, people recognise it when they work or live in the neighbourhoods. This is a contrast discussed in a very well-title article by Atkinson and Kintrea – Opportunity and despair it’s all in there (£) – and in the critique of neighbourhood effects by Tom Slater (who critiques the distance of the quants researchers from their research subjects).

In this quants study of neighbourhood effects in Scotland, van Ham and Manley suggest that it might be down to the geography that we measure neighbourhood effects on. Usually we have to do statistical analysis at the level of census super outputs areas or datazones, or similar administrative boundaries that have quite large populations (1000+). Like any “contagion”, if neighbourhood effects are diluted among a large population then they will have less of an impact. Van Ham and Manley suggest that we might need geographies of just a few hundred people to find a neighbourhood effect. However, this leads me to question (prompted by a point someone made at a Poverty Alliance panel in Glasgow on Friday 28 February) whether this then is a neighbourhood effect – surely if the geography becomes really small then we’re talking about a sociological or socio-psychological impact; residence is just by-the-by as the social network could be anywhere? All points raised in the quants neighbourhood effects literature.

However, I think we are talking about a bigger epistemological point here that we need to recognise fully and debate and play with. For example, this study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found no quantitative neighbourhood effect on young people’s employment opportunities from postcode discrimination, a neighbourhood effect, whereas this qualitative study also for the JRF, found that young people who live in deprived neighbourhoods that are distant from local labour markets and geographically isolated have reduced geographical horizons for their job search strategies, a neighbourhood effect. These different findings, I think, can only be explained by differences is how we know, no what we know. These are different experiences of young people in deprived neighbourhoods understood in different ways.

As a qualitative researcher I use my research to illuminate how socio-structural factors – particularly socio-economic inequality and status – have an impact on people’s lives. However, a problem for me is that a broader focus on “lived experience” of conditions such as poverty can easily lapse into the personal and focus on individual deficiencies or strengths, effectively blaming the poor, rather than emphasising the socio-structural forces that limit people’s opportunities and psychological reactions in any given context. This is a criticism that is levelled quite often at neighbourhood effects researchers, but most I know put the socio-structural first and want to understand neighbourhood effects as something that makes the situation that much worse. At its most problematic though, this individualising of experience and “witnessing” of negative experiences does lead into the sort of nonsense the Centre for Social Justice come up with – the production of ignorance – and deflects us from an emphasis on socio-structural causes. This is very apparent with the recent debate in the UK on changing the definition of child poverty and the conflation of cause and impact in the proposed measure (as well as initially coming up with something that is unmeasurable). I'm also always left with a nagging feeling that without the devolution of taxation and welfare matters to the Scottish Parliament and Government, policy-makers up here falls way to easily onto person-blaming, behavioural policy answers in areas like public health and social work, rather than the more obvious fact that if a few people had a lot less income and wealth and a lot of people had a little more, then a lot of problems we have would be far less severe. We get away with this victim-blaming because we can frame it in our lovely, fluffly, Scottish social democratic discourse. 

And I’ve just realised I’ve written myself into a corner. What am I saying? It seems that a lot of methodological choices in the social sciences are actually deeply circumscribed by the disciplinary and cultural context you find yourself in. If I was in the US my career would’ve probably have done nowhere because of my aversion and inability to wrangle big datasets and produce equations that are penis extensions. However, in the UK, with a methodological pluralism that welcomes qualitative research at the ethnographic end, I need to be careful that my research does highlight the structural, and doesn’t presume that cultural changes are all that are needed in society to produce more positive outcomes. 

* I finished the review on Thursday 27th, started writing this on Friday 28th and then got way-laid by a gin and tonic. I have now finished writing it.

I DID attend a consultation event

This morning I was right riled up by ever excellent reporting by Greener Leith to do a big ranty pro-cycling, cycling infrastructure blog post about the state of Leith Walk. After all, the day of the Ghost Bike protest at the Scottish Parliament, cyclist deaths on Scotland's roads were very sadly increased to the same number as last year, and we still have five months to go. And the BBC (and other media) still use shorthand headlines like "Cyclist dies in collision with car" - those amazing driverless cars we have in Scotland now. No, the cyclist died being hit by a driver. Leith Walk at the moment is so bad it's a road I never cycle down. It's not just bad at the moment for cyclist. On buses, the road is so potholed it actually hurts to be a passenger. On the pavement, loads of flagstones are loose and many have been replaced with awful looking bits of tarmac.

Anyhow, instead of ranting into my blog, I decided to attend a consultation event run by the Council this evening at a local library. I was actually really impressed. First of all, it has to be said, the plans are in no way perfect, but they are a massive improvement on how the road is or has been. The other really good thing was chatting to the officers they were also massively ambitious and open to new ideas. They genuinely wanted to co-produce a fantastic new space in the city.

Specific very positive things for me were:

• Zebra crossings! Lots of them! I presumed roads engineers in the UK had forgotten how to paint black and white lines on roads that make cars go slow.
• Some good cycling provision, including a long section of grade-separated path.

Things I had question marks about were firstly planting - the plans did not fully detail what planting would be (re)introduced (the trees they ripped up for the trams were getting to a nice stage of maturity. It was explained that there would be trees where there could be, but because of the utility diversion work because of the tram (which is why we're in this mess) there is limited space for planting. However, they are keen to put flower beds along the road and to have these as community-managed space, hopefully like London's new edible bus stops and I had a great conversation with one of the officers about the possibility of retro-fitting sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDs) during the renovation, like Portland has done so fantastically well. 

Secondly, I do think that non-motorised transport should be prioritised right down the road. That means in the narrow bits not ditching the segregated cycle paths, but ditching the road space and making cars wait - like they do in the Netherlands. When I asked about this, the reason given for not doing this is they don't want to make it so difficult to drive down that Bonnington Road and Easter Road end up overwhelmed, and they don't want a modal shift away from buses if they become too slow. I can see why they have these concerns - Leith Walk is a major bus route to the north of the city and also a major distributor in the road hierarchy. But why be so cautious? Why not just prioritise pedestrians and cyclists over other modes and see what happens? If surrounding roads get too busy, then invest in them in the next wave of road improvements. The Netherlands and Denmark (see slides in particular) got their cycling infrastructure N.B. the tense. It didn't magically appear overnight. It took decades of investment and improvement and they continue this improvement today. Making Leith Walk a truly road for pedestrians and cyclists would be a fantastic start to making Edinburgh a city designed for sustainable transport.

Thirdly, the top and bottom of Leith Walk at the moment are just blank spaces. At the southern end (the top) the proposed (or even better, the more improved) cycle paths do need to be linked up to decent east-west grade-separated cycle paths across the city centre. Hopefully the plans for the city centre will go some way towards that. At the Foot of the Walk the Council need to stick to their guns and go for a proper shared space to improve the town centre. The traffic will already be slowed greatly by the plans as they stand. There is no reason why they can't go for a really nicely designed shared space.

Finally, the other constraint that was raised was, of course, money. I don't get this fully myself. Even the basic plans mean basically digging up the entire road and relaying it - surely relaying the pavements slightly bigger or smaller and painting markings a bit differently on the road can't cost that much more? Also, as I mentioned to an officer as I left, perhaps they could ask the Scottish Government to spend some of the £400k that's being pointlessly wasted on the utterly non-evidence based "Mutual Respect" campaign? Or even some of the £3bn making us more car dependent dualing the A9?

It was striking cycling in Germany on a very recent holiday. The Germans do have good cycling infrastructure and some absolutely superb shared spaces (including 10km/h zones). But the cycling infrastructure in particular is not up to Dutch or Danish standards - it's much more pragmatic. The German's will happily send you off on a slightly round-about trip down a quiet suburban road to keep you away from a main road. But they still work because of simple things - they're very well signposted and joined-up; you're not dumped at the end of one wondering what to do, they'll be a very clear white a green signpost telling you your various options. It's even the simple things like this we get so wrong in the UK.

I want to end on another positive point. I was very impressed by the consultation event - it is clear Edinburgh Council are keen to engage and want to get people's views. It wasn't perfect community engagement by any means, but they are trying. And just like the plans themselves, this is a massive improvement on what's happened before.

I just wanted to add another point to this that I couldn't do last night because my interwebs stopped working. My mum, aged 65, learnt to ride a bike this year. She sent me a wonderful photo of her wobbling down a path in a park helped by her instructor. She's not a confident cyclist and could never go out on Britain's roads at the moment. What struck me in Germany was that in all the small Bavarian towns we passed through it was exactly people like my mum who used the bike - because it was cheap and convenient for short journeys. People exactly like my mum, and even older, would happily cycle along a mandatory cycle lane, shove their hand out left, wobble a lot and then veer across the road in front of the traffic to turn without a care in the World. Coming back from holiday, I thought I'd use my fitness to cycle into work (at the moment I take the train in, because it's uphill all the way). Even as a very confident vehicular cyclist the main thing that stops me now is the knowledge of all the dangerous right hand turns I would have to do to get from Leith, through the city centre to Dalry. 

Getting off the train at Edinburgh Park to come out to the Riccarton Campus here I can use off-road cycle path just about all the way. It is very striking that in the opposite direction, every day, I'm passed by about ten other cyclists happily and confidently cycling to work in Edinburgh Park and South Gyle. This is the difference that safe cycling infrastructure.

I want people like my mum to be cycling in Edinburgh. I want a mother of a four-year-old who goes to Lorne Primary to feel confident she can cycle up Leith Walk with her kid on a wee bike tootling behind her. The proposals for Leith Walk are an improvement, but they can be so much better.

The public academic - some bits and pieces

Well I got back yesterday from my first "keynote" speech - talking about my Hard to Reach research on diversity in deprived neighbourhoods to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission in Wales Equality Exchange conference. 

They asked me to do a two-page summary of my talk and you can download the English version here. For conference participants, an English and Welsh translation will be distributed (so I'm told). And I've also PDFed my PowerPoint for download.

Finally, next week I'm giving evidence to the Local Government and Regeneration Committee of the Scottish Parliament who are doing an inquiry in regeneration in Scotland. You can download my submission here. 

The land question?

I had a bit of a daft day yesterday. Appalling diary management meant I spent most of the time in taxis in the west of Edinburgh between campus and the city centre. I'd been invited in the evening to a "Pride and Belonging" booze and nosh event at the Principal's house. Being a socialist cynic I came into this with the aim to drink the University dry and came out having rather enjoyed myself and being rather proud of the University. Which was nice.

Anyway, that's by the by. In the afternoon I was speaking at the Scottish Cities Knowledge Centre event at the University of Edinburgh's Teviot House. The SCKC is a joint initiative between Saint Andrews Uni and Glasgow Uni. I was speaking on my middle classes and diversity working, applying some of the ideas there to community planning and the Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill proposals. You can download a copy of my slides here.

Mine was a flying visit as I had to be in campus for supervision at lunch and back out for the evening do. I walked into a debate about urban design and poor housing quality in Scotland. I tweeted swiftly that I was already pondering land reform. Why was I pondering land reform?

One of the great things about the planning courses at Heriot-Watt is we make you study real estate development - indeed our undergraduate Urban Planning and Property Development BSc is joint accredited by RICS and RTPI and we also have a jointly accredited MSc Real Estate and Planning (did I mention we're the best planning school in the NSS?) I was similarly subjected to the horror of learning about the bottom line of property development when I was a planning student. And most planning students do find it very difficult - they choose the degree to save the World from evil developers. However and I'm very glad I was taught this; keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

What this taught me is two basic facts about the UK property market that most people do not understand. Firstly land values are derived from the activity that takes place on that land. To put it very simply, if you own an acre of land in the greenbelt (i.e. restricted to agriculture use) it has a negligible value - it's value will be derived from the local agricultural land market and the output and profitability of local agriculture. If you manage to get planning permission for two four-bedroomed houses which sell for £250,000 each, your land value suddenly leaps to the selling price less the development costs (when I was crunching these sorts of numbers for coursework in the heady days of 2006, this was about 25% of the selling price of homes on the land). Once you understand this, why our new build houses are crap starts to make sense. Two actors in the property marking produce said crapness: landowners want maximum uplift in the value of their land; and developers want to make maximum profits. Therefore a landowner will hold off selling their land to a developer until someone promises to build thousands of two-bedroom flats selling for £100k each. The developer will then build the worst properties they can to maximise profits. They'll be thousands of the "Victorialey" faux-mansion flat blocks that they've put all over the country because they can just run the plans off the printer. 

That is a purposefully exaggerated description of how it all works - but if you look at new developments in places like West Lothian and Fife, you'll see it's not that different from the truth. This can lead to good development of planners consider themselves as market actors, shaping markets, as argued by Steve Tiesdell and David Adams in Shaping Places (my review for Housing Theory and Society available here)

And this is why land reform matters and why it does annoy me that planners don't really get into debates about land and land ownership very much. Basically, for all of Maggie's much-vaunted pluralisation of home ownership the majority of land in Scotland and the UK is owned by very few people - a case Andy Wightman makes brilliantly in The Poor Had No Lawyers. Unlike much of continental Europe we did not have a widespread peasant-led revolution leading to distributed land-ownership, except in bizarre cases like the emergence of copyhold as a tenure. So essentially we have an oligopoly land supply facing an oligoponist housing development industry, which in turn is an oligopoly supplier of new housing. Back when I did A Level economics, non-price competition was the key way to identify oligopolistic markets - Green Shield Stamps, Esso wine glasses etc. Frankly, I'm surprised you don't get Tesco Clubcard points with a Barratt Home. 

So, with this situation in the land markets, it's never a surprise to me that we always struggle to deliver good housing and well designed places. And it's why land reform matters. For example, the new towns could compulsorily purchase land in their area at agricultural value, put in place an effective masterplan (basically telling developers what to do) and make a profit from the uplift in value to support the ongoing development of the town. This is the sort of thing we need to do more of if we're going to deliver good places. Similarly, it's why I am utterly convinced of the need for a land value tax to ensure the most economically efficient use of land.

The state of social housing

There are many things I’d like to blog about at the moment: Donald Trump, how my work-life balance went kaput thanks to the Curse of THE, the City of Edinburgh Local Development Plan… but right now I want to talk about the state of social housing, in Scotland and the UK.

In half an hour I’ll be leaving my office to head to the monthly Committee meeting of Prospect Community Housing Association. I’ve been on the committee since 2008 and we manage around 900 homes, very well, in Wester Hailes in west Edinburgh. I love being on the Committee – it’s one of the most rewarding things I do. But I head off with a heavy-heart because a long standing committee member has resigned citing the fact that they struggled to keep up with the changes buffeting the social housing sector in Scotland and therefore to provide the governance and oversight needed.

So what is happening exactly? Well, we have the good old Bedroom Tax and benefit changes that are going to screw-us all over mightily from April. I note the Scottish Government is now expecting Council and RSLs to absorb the costs of tenants getting into arrears and not evict them. I’m sorry, but if that is going to result in our housing association going bust in a couple of year, it is not going to happen. Yes, we will do everything we can to support tenants and prevent arrears, but we cannot absorb costs.

But the key thing in Scotland does seem to be the massive over-regulation of the sector. To give a bit of background, in 1988 we had the Scottish Special Housing Association and the Housing Corporation in Scotland. In 1989 they became Scottish Homes, the regulator and funder. In 2003 they combined with the regeneration arm of the then Scottish Executive to become Communities Scotland (heady days…). In 2007 as part of their bonfire of the QUANGOs the Scottish Government axed Communities Scotland and brought regulation in house. It then realised you couldn’t have a regulator as part of the Government, so it created a new QUANGO (or possibly an NDPB) the Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR), which is now getting stuck into its job with a zealousness that is quite staggering.

This is going hand-in-hand with the new performance and management regime the “Scottish Housing Charter” with enormous reporting requirements for housing associations and a whole new jargon of “ARCs” and “outcomes” to learn. 
 
We also have:

• Endless consultation documents from the Scottish Government and the SHR on: Right-To-Buy, the Charter, the regulatory standards in the Charter, Stage 3 Adaptations, about four consultations on funding in five years, Wider Role, to name but a few;
• New “incidents” we have to report to the SHR, with guidance so unclear it could include anything from opening and envelope to a house collapsing;
• A new complaints regime from the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman that’s required massive amounts of staff time and investment to create new systems;
• And we have basically no funding for new development (unless you want to be indebted up to your eyeballs and charge non-affordable rents).

As you can probably tell from the tone of this blog post all this tires me out and makes me angry as well. And the real kick in the teeth is when the SHR and bodies like the CIH then have the cheek to turn around to us as voluntary committee members and question our commitment, expertise and abilities. They challenge us that we don’t provide sufficient strategic oversight – is it any wonder when we’re having to fire-fight so many issues just to stand still?

Prospect’s Committee is a truly amazing body of people – I think the regulator would struggle to find fault with us. But I’m realistic and I know some housing associations do not have the same skills or capacity. But really, the regime is awful.

And what makes me really angry is this – as a housing association we moved to component accounting because the regulator made us. This resulted in a material change to our accounting position. This meant the banks are now pulling us up on our loan covenants even though they knew about this, which may mean higher rent increases from our tenants who are being screwed over by the posh t**ts in Westminster. These are the same banks that went spectacularly bust, bringing down the global economy with them because of poor strategic governance and oversight. And it’s the model of big business that the regulator seems to want us to follow.