Making peace with Cambridge

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

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

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

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

Cambridge is really weird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social class and Cambridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the Improvement Service is wrong on this one

This morning the Improvement Service, the organisation that is “Supporting Scottish Local Government and its partners to deliver better outcomes for communities” has a lot of coverage in Holyrood magazine for some research it has done looking at the “outcomes” in the most deprived 330 datazones in Scotland, the middle 330 datazones, and the least deprived 330 datazones, according to SIMD.

This has got me extremely riled and angry, but I am going to try and remain reasonably calm as I argue my case. The head of the Improvement Service, Colin Mair, is quoted as saying:

“The relationships examined represent neighbourhoods rather than individuals or households, which raises another significant observation: people born into a deprived neighbourhood in Scotland have a higher chance of being income deprived, of needing emergency hospitalisation, being a victim of crime, and achieving poorly in education. In this respect, the neighbourhood in which you live can have a substantial impact on your future experiences and outcomes.”

Now, essentially, this boils down to the Improvement Service proving that margarine causes people to get divorced. I cannot easily find the full report of the IS’s research to see if these points are addressed in it, but here’s the reasons why the reporting of this report, and seemingly its interpretation, are wrong.

Firstly, the SIMD is an index of measures of things like income deprivation, emergency hospitalisation, crime victimisation and educational attainment. If lots of people do badly in these indicators in a neighbourhood, then it will be low down in the index. That is what the index measures. Basically, all they are reporting is auto-correlation – that something is correlated to itself. If every single person in Scotland had the same outcomes, there would still be a “most deprived” and “least deprived” neighbourhoods in Scotland due to natural variation, it’s just the differences between them would be very slight and down to natural variation.

Secondly, Colin Mair speaks of people “born into” deprived neighbourhoods. The only longitudinal measure – i.e. a measure of the same thing over different points in time – that the SIMD includes is the datazone boundaries themselves. We can say nothing about the individuals within it. Between any two data points of the SIMD, the population of the neighbourhood might have completely changed. We can see this happening as the most deprived neighbourhoods slowly depopulate – by the 2013 SIMD they had about 14% of the population, as opposed to 15% if the population was randomly distributed – and the least deprived neighbourhoods increase in population. In the most recent SIMD the least deprived neighbourhood – Meggetland in Edinburgh – had a population 800 people too high. The Scottish Government know this and are thinking of redrawing the datazone boundaries, the trouble is if you do that the data is no longer comparable over time.

Thirdly, the SIMD is a relative measure of deprivation. This means two things that weaken this study. It cannot measure “affluence”; the indicators chosen mean that once you get into the top of the index it becomes pointless, as all the measures are focused on characteristics of deprivation. You cannot meaningfully say there is something different between a neighbourhood with one unemployed person and a neighbourhood with two unemployed people. Secondly, the datazone rankings move around a lot because neighbourhoods change. The most succinct way of summing this up is the knowledge of the residents of Ferguslie Park that there neighbourhood “became” the most deprived in Scotland not because it got any worse, but because places that were more deprived in Glasgow were demolished and the populations dispersed.

All we can say is that a third of all Scotland’s socially rented housing is in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland making up two-thirds of the housing in these neighbourhoods, and house prices are substantially lower. Subsequently it is housing allocations, spatial planning and housing markets that create deprived communities. Basically, we have historically put all our social housing in large estates; now it is people in greatest need who need social housing, so these neighbourhoods become concentrations of need and deprivation.

If people “born into” these neighbourhoods had worse outcomes, then we would be talking about neighbourhood effects existing – that is, an effect on life chances from living in a neighbourhood, that is over-and-above the effects of poverty, unemployment and other factors on the individual. And it’s fair to say that the evidence for the existence of neighbourhood effects in Scotland is mixed. A few years back Atkinson and Kintrea(£) identified very small effects on education and health, but nothing to justify the sort of language used by Colin Mair. More recently, van Ham and Manley (£) used actual longitudinal data from the Scottish Census, via the Scottish Longitudinal Survey, to look at whether neighbourhood had any impact on the chances of being employed on individuals. They found no evidence for a neighbourhood effect – the higher concentration of poor employment outcomes (i.e. being unemployed) was simply down to people having to access housing in these neighbourhoods.

From this though, I do not want to say that the neighbourhood does not matter at all. It just does not matter in the way the Improvement Service argue. Services should be targeted at deprived neighbourhoods, but not because if we “fix” these neighbourhoods we suddenly will solve the problems of inequality – we will not as the majority of people experiencing poverty do not live in the most deprived neighbourhoods. But you can make specific useful interventions: there is evidence that targeting employment initiatives at people living in deprived neighbourhoods gets you a bit more “bang for your buck”; the concentration of socially rented housing in these neighbourhoods means a third of all disabled people in Scotland live in these neighbourhoods, so you’d disproportionately help those people. Also, we do need to recognise because of the specific concentration of poverty and deprivation in these neighbourhoods they do need greater investment in basic services like environmental services (street cleaning etc.). The inverse care law is still in place.

What worries me is that the language used by the Improvement Service does two very bad things. Firstly, as I’ve argued here, it continues the pathologising of deprived neighbourhoods – blaming them for the problems that other people have lumped on them, without recognising the broader structural causes, especially the operation of housing allocations and markets. Secondly, it feeds into the deeply problematic “early intervention” agenda that has been the rage since the “cycles of poverty” literature of the 1960s, and as I highlighted last week was utterly demolished in the 1970s. Like the idea that there are “families with three generations of people who are workless” this idea that if the all-powerful bureaucrat sails into households and communities and tells them to pull up their socks and behave in a good, middle-class way, then they won’t be deprived keeps coming back again and again. To borrow a phrase used to described intergenerational worklessness myth, it’s like shooting zombies(£). But it’s a zombie I’ll keep shooting. As I argue here, yes we need a focus on place in Scottish social policy, but we cannot pretend this is going to solve wider structural problems in our whole society regarding wealth and income inequality, poor public services and entrenched spatial inequality as a result of historic planning decisions.

Finally, if we were serious about changing outcomes in neighbourhoods in Scotland then we would stop focusing on the bottom and focus at the top – demolish Morningside and Milngavie and turn them into mixed communities.

I’ve included a lot of links to paywalled academic papers in here – do get in touch if you want copies. 

And I’ve written this in a rage and quite quickly, so apologies for any egregious errors; as I say I could not easily access the Improvement Service’s actual report, so this is more of a reflection on the way it was interpreted by Holyrood Magazine.

Why I'm not a planner, nor proud of planning

I'm having second thoughts about writing and posting this because of the terrible events at the Glasgow School of Art this afternoon.

But, I feel I should. There's been a wee bit of a hoo-ha in planning circles, much of which I agree with. A group called NOVUS/Public Planners has developed, and you can read their manifesto here. On a mailing list of a progressive planning network I'm a member of - Planners Network UK - we were discussing how we might make links with them. If you want to join the list you can quite easily through the JISC service. I chipped into this debate saying that the Public Planners was an excellent development, and it's something that I've seen in my own students as they question why planning has to be in constant hock to development interests and solely about enabling development, no matter how bad it is, or "sustainable economic growth".

The rest of this post is going to be a blogpost I put on the virtual learning environment for one of the courses I teach. I didn't make it more public as I didn't want to incur the wrath of the Royal Town Planning Institute. I'm now minded to post it here, firstly because of Public Planners raising the profile of progressive planning; secondly because I have now resigned from the RTPI myself. And lastly, because I received an anonymous email alleging that the RTPI had investigated a member for breach of the code of conduct because they were involved in activism around progressive planning. This final alleged incident makes me ashamed I was ever even a member of the RTPI, and make me very angry at their "proud of planning, proud of planners" nonsense.

So, here goes. Here's the post I wrote for my students. Quite a number of them came up to me in the weeks after posting it to say thank you to me for writing it, and saying they wholly agreed with what I was saying. So thank you to those students.

"I've mainly used the blog [on the VLE] as a bit of a one-way street - just to get information out to you all in a way that isn't announcement. However, if you've bumped into my personal blog you will have seen that ordinarily my blogging is more thoughtful and reflexive. So, this is time for that sort of blog post on here.

Yesterday I emailed the Royal Town Planning Institute to resign as a licentiate member and cancelled my direct debt. I am no longer a planner. I was very struck by the comment in the stop-start-continue of "what are the links between this and planning" and that, for me, is why I'm no longer a planner. I veered away from land-use planning during my PhD which focused on community planning as the spatial coordination of all public services and if you look at my publications list you'll see that my focus has been predominantly on policy analysis, housing and public policy. 

But as I've drifted away from planning in my research interest, I feel planning has drifted away from me. It now seems entirely about delivering development, no matter what the environmental or social cost. There are political, contextual drivers for this. In England planning is under assault from a neoliberal government that wishes to see it end. Neighbourhood planning is actually about disempowering people. In Scotland, the desire for "sustainable economic growth" (North Sea Oil and wind turbines) drives everything. Mention those three words and anything gets built. PLanning has been left to become a "yes man" to new development, with a vague inclination to "good" design, which increasingly just means making photocopy places that look a little bit less bad than they used to.

I've mentioned in class, if you studied planning in Scotland ten or 20 years ago, it would have been all about the sort of stuff you've learnt in Social Sustainability. The massive urban regeneration programme New Life for Urban Scotland sought to transform disadvantaged communities and was driven by people from a planning background. Even when I studied at Heriot-Watt in 2005-6 I specialised in Urban Regeneration which was all about the social side of planning and ensuring we didn't forget the needs of the worst-off and deprived communities when we delivered new development. For me, now, regeneration is just about putting shopping centres next to peripheral housing estates and using city centre sites to drive gentrification and prettify the urban environment by forcibly excluding those we don't like (the poor) through forcible eviction or creating homes and places solely for the wealthy.

A chink of light for me is the Scottish RTPI's best places competition. When this was launched, I rolled my eyes and suspected it would consist of "places" like Polnoon, or The Drum in Bo'ness basically glorified lollipop stick housing estates with funky Scandinavian housing. However, I was really impressed that East Kilbride made the final list. East Kilbride was designated a new town in 1947 and nearly 70 years later it is now Scotland's sixth largest settlement and a successful place where people want to live. It's a diverse town too. They weren't just planning a nice housing estate, they were planning an entire community, with everything it needed.

That we can still recognise the great work these planners did fills me with hope that we can rediscover the social purpose of planning. That the RTPI officials feel the "viability of development" must be the most important thing planners focus on fills me with disenchantment and despondency. 

If you want to focus on the social side of planning, and you are going to be a planner in the UK, I really would recommend membership of the TCPA which lives on the fulfill the dreams Ebenezer Howard hard over a century ago (and who's journal is a superb resource) and get involved in Planners Network UK."

Plus ca change?

Just re-read Gilding the Ghetto, the angry critical report of the Community Development Projects published in 1977. Far too much of it rings true today (click the links for contemporary policy in Scotland):

"Despite being urged to 'cover new ground' the various projects embody the now very familiar thinking: self-help, participation, surveys of needs, mechanisms for reducing dependence on the welfare services, assistance to socially handicapped families, pre-school compensatory education and coordination of services".

Community planning in action - Leith Community Conference

So, I took this afternoon off as annual leave and went to our local neighbourhood partnership community conference as it was in the church hall across the road and there are quite a lot of issues in Leith, that are basic service-level issues, that need attention and can be solved fairly easily. These are the sort of things a good neighbourhood plan (NB. COMPLETELY different from an English neighbourhood plan – this has nothing to do with land-use planning). I went to the event very sceptical given the my experiences of community planning during my doctoral research – I always use my mum’s aphorism to describe these: “councillor, where do you stand on dog shit”, “I don’t stand on it, I slide in it”. Also because I generally think community planning has a long way to go before it is effective in doing what it says on the tin – see here and here.

Actually the event was quite good. So here’s why:

It was organised well and wide range of people attended – with crèche facilities for parents and a free lunch (if I’d known the “refreshments” were going to be that good I’d have been keen to attend!). The only things they could have done better would have been microphones and an induction loop. What’s even better was the extra information and consultation they are going to bring in, including attending the “soup kitchen” at the church on a Sunday morning to hear the views of the people who attend that.

Poverty – obviously this is not a good thing. We were broken up into discussion groups of around eight and we first of all had to see whether we agreed with the list of priorities established from a previous self-selection questionnaire (which I had already completed). From two of these groups, one being the group I was in, came a focus on poverty in the neighbourhood. This continued with the discussion of another group during the next phase where we had to discuss what actions we should do. Now, arguably, at a neighbourhood level there’s little we can do to tackle poverty, and problems such as the Bedroom Tax and benefits sanctions. However, it really impressed me that we were talking about it openly and there was no question that it was a horrendous thing that the foodbank at the church has 1,000 clients and that people have been seen scavenging in bins in desperation for food.

Health services – twice it was pointed out that GPs services are massively overstretched in the neighbourhood with people having to wait three weeks for an appointment. I also added my experience of how overstretched local pharmacy services are, even though we have three within 25 yards of each other at the Foot of the Walk. This is an issue that’s been raised by our regional MSP Sarah Boyack, yet given it’s nearly 35 years since The Inverse Care Law was published I was shocked to hear how overstretched services are, and evidence of inequality compared to less deprived neighbourhoods. However, given how poorly the NHS has engaged with neighbourhood-level community planning structures across Scotland, I do really wonder whether this is something that the neighbourhood partnership can do anything about.

We won! – at the end we had to put sticky dots onto the actions we liked most and two of our group’s suggestions won. This is good because….

Cleaner air – one of the suggestions that got 17 dots was to make the air cleaner in Leith by planting trees and encourage walking by improving the built environment. This was prompted by someone from Greener Leith who have been leading a campaign on the issue. Even they admitted it was a niche issue, but as soon as it was explained people agreed with it. Which was fantastic to see.

Better environmental services – we weren’t the only group to suggest this, but the way we framed it got it the most votes. I drew on the Clean Sweep work the JRF funded to highlight that in a neighbourhood: with the highest population density in Scotland (as per the 2011 census), with a high rate of income poverty (so people can’t afford £20 for a pick-up of rubbish), with massive problems of trade waste, and footfall for an extremely busy town centre; we need very high density good environmental services across the board – bin emptying and barrow beats – to keep the neighbourhood clean and tidy. This also got nods from one of the local councillors. Frustratingly, chatting to council officers they still slipped into negative stigmatising views of residents that completely ignore these massive structural reasons behind the problems of neighbourhood cleanliness.

Community empowerment – another surprising theme that kept coming up in discussion was moving away from community planning as it is, towards community empowerment. Leith neighbourhood partnership does it’s £eith Decides community budgeting event which is very good. However, I suggested, if we’re going to do the sort of fancy coproduced, partnership policy making that cuts through complexity (the sort the Christie Commission dreamed of) we’re going to need more community power over local budgets and local priorities. We’re going to need something that aims to be like what Our Place aims to be. The good news is, it seems in Edinburgh, we need to watch this space. However, depressingly, an idea along these lines from our group got dismissed out of hand. This was the suggestion that the £20 cost for a waste uplift should be removed in deprived neighbourhoods, as it does seem to cause fly-tipping as people cannot afford it. The council then spend more money doing reactive lifts in response to resident complaints. It got dismissed because of the view people would then think they can just throw things out for free. I pointed out that’s what they do at the moment anyway…

My only minor disappointment with the day was the broader way it was organised. The independent facilitator was very good; however it was limited to two hours and was very structured – we had to obey what we were told to do. I think I would have preferred it if it was a longer event with more deliberation allowed. In particular, I have a thing about sticky-dot voting. It’s easy, but it closes down debate and ignores that most people probably agree with all the points. What was telling for me was that as people stuck their dots on and stood back from the flipcharts, they then began to chat in small groups. I could help but think that the officers should have been ear-wigging these conversations to find out even more.

I ended the event chatting to the neighbourhood partnership convener, Councillor Deirdre Brock*and brought to her an idea I’d had at the end. A student at Heriot-Watt did their dissertation on the charetteplus process done by Planning Aid for Scotland. One thing this highlighted was the process mopped up a lot of information of the sort collected here – concerns about local services and problems – which then went nowhere as they were not planning concerns. I suggested that running a charette focused on Leith central and the Foot of the Walk could bring in some really valuable information on making the area better in a place-making way, turning the Foot of the Walk in particular into a place, not a road junction, and also place-keeping, maintaining the neighbourhood as a nice place to live in future. It looked like my idea fell on fertile ground.

Finally, we were asked to write anonymously on flipchart paper what we would do after the event. I wrote that I would keep an eye on how clean the neighbourhood was to see whether we had been listened to. And that is the key thing here – there were very good ideas, and many practical things that the Council and other service providers (the NHS and Police Scotland mainly) can do, with very little expense, to make Leith better. Now we just have to see them do it.

If you want to see a bit more about the event, see the tweets here.

* you might recognise her from her life as an actor.

Tackling poverty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So many cyclists

I've taken to cycling the nine miles uphill, often into a south-westerly headwind, to work to increase my levels of fitness a bit further and because I enjoy it. This morning I got caught in a pelaton going through Fountainbridge. There were four/five of us, and it actually got quite hairy at times, with us jockeying for space in the advanced stop zones, and then weaving in and out of each other based on our different rates of acceleration and then speed, while we all cycled defensively to protect ourselves from cars doing stupid things. And then going along Gorgie Road I ended up bunny-hopping with another cyclist. We ended up nearly crashing as I went to overtake as he was getting ready to turn right. Luckily I realised what was happening and eased back behind him.

Have these near-misses with other cyclists is becoming a bit of an issue in Edinburgh. And it's because of the fantastic news that Edinburgh far surpasses other cities in Scotland with 4.8% of journeys to work being done by bike since 2011.  The constant increases reported by the Spokes traffic count data, and my own anecdotal experience, suggest the numbers cycling have increased massively since 2011 even. I see cyclists during every trip I make across the city, by whatever means, these days.

However, this increase, and the increased risks of collisions between cyclists, and between cyclists and cars is just crying out for us to Go Dutch/Copenhagenize. I'll give the council their due, they are investing record amounts. We are going to get widespread 20mph limits across the city (although they need a complete change in driving culture and attitude to be successful). But we now need to see bold decisions to take space on our roads away from motorised traffic and give it to pedestrians and cyclists. The network of paths on old railway lines in north Edinburgh is great to use at slow speed, and if you need to go to places along them. But I've had too many near-misses with dogs and pedestrians, including one very nasty accident that severely injured me, on shared paths, so I now avoid using them as much as possible. However, it depresses me that I can watch Gorgie Road be resurfaced and returned to exactly how it was - a series of parking bays linked by non-segregated cycle paths - which basically means every journey I have to cycle at 20mph out in the middle of the road. I still have to have three-month battles with the Council to sort out problems like this. The inner tube map of segregated cycle paths basically does not include the city centre as you basically take your life into your own hands traversing roads like the urban motorway that the Council have allowed Queen Street to become. 

We live in a cycling city. Can we have the infrastructure to match it now please?

And in other news, I was nearly knocked down by a car yesterday evening crossing Henderson Street as a pedestrian here, but that's another story.