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.

Social class in Britain

So after two days the Great British Class Survey is still the most visited page on the BBC News website. And to think, we’re a society not interested in class. When I first did the test I misread the income question and put my pre-tax household income in and came out as Elite. Now I’ve adjusted this I’m now Established Middle Class. And you all know how much I like the middle classes.

It would be rude of me not to comment on this given our work on the middle classes. I’ve also recently finished reading Mike Savage’s book Identities and Social Change in Britain Since 1940 so I have a good idea where the analysis of the GBCS is coming from. So, in this post I just want to briefly comment on the GBCS and link it to our own work on the middle classes and then do a mini review of Identities and Social Change.

The response to the GBCS on twitter was bemusement followed by many questions that sociologists of social class ponder about a lot: does one’s social class change over time? What does social class mean? Is it linked to occupation? Or is it all about social status. And then there were the Marxists pointing out there are two classes – the exploited and the exploiters. If you haven’t, I’d recommend reading the article in Sociology that supports the news coverage – it’s a good run-through of the theoretical presumptions behind the study and answers most of these questions.

As a tangential point – I think this is a really excellent example of open-access done well and sensibly. There will be thousands of people who want to read this article because of its news coverage; it’s written in a very accessible way; and no one will have to pay $30.

One of the very telling things in the article is how vastly skewed the self-selected sample in the first, BBC run, Great British Class Survey compared to the population of the UK. People who read the BBC news are wealthier and in higher-status occupations than the general population. This is self-selection seems to be repeating itself in the people who are now seeing if they’re “Established Middle Class” or not and then moaning about it. Given the emphasis in the research on cultural capital, the irony cannot be lost.

So, how does this align with our own work on class. One of the questions we always get asked is “what do you mean by the middle class”. At the stage our research is at (a review of existing evidence) we can get away with saying “it’s what the studies defined it as” but it is something that troubles us. The Bourdieuan perspective of Savage’s work really helps us though in thinking through what our definition of middle class might be. In particular, our evidence shows that is the cultural capital of the middle classes, but even more importantly the alignment of cultural capital between service users and service deliverers that means the middle classes benefit disproportionately from the state’s services. In Savage et.al.’s new framework, this is the established middle class talking to the established middle class.

A lot of the comments on Twitter around the GBCS on Wednesday morning focused the methodology. And this brings me onto Identities and Social Change and my mini-review. I’ll start with a nice anecdote. I studied A’ Level sociology and I’m very glad I did – I have a working knowledge of the various main theories and methods of sociology that have stood me in very good stead indeed. In the bit of the course on stratification we studied Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s famous Luton study of the Affluent Worker. When I came to study history at university I did a course (I initially was going to refer to this as a “paper” to reveal my elite education) on modern British socio-economic history and studied the Affluent Worker as a historical text. This amused me quite a lot and I Yahoo’d (those were the days) John Goldthorpe and discovered his email address at Nuffield College Oxford and dropped him an email explaining all this. Amazingly in about two hours I got a very nice reply, which I included as an appendix to my essay. He commented that this was a sad indictment of the state of British sociology and made some cutting remarks about Fiona Devine’s study of Luton.

Anyhow, when I launched into Identities and Social Class I immediately fell in love with it as it’s not a book on sociological methods, it’s a history of sociological methods and a historiography of sociological methods. As a historian I was quite shocked to be faced with my presumption that the sociological method had been “always there”. The novelty of the large social survey was something I’d never really considered before. And the story of how the qualitative interview came to dominate sociology in Britain was compelling and made me understand all the more why my dissertation students are ready to run out and do a handful of interviews, of dubious merit and quality, at the drop of a hat.

So, if you really want to understand the GBCS I really would recommend reading Identities and Social Change. However, it does end on an interesting note, that even three years later is beginning to be dated. Savage points out that in the World of Big Data companies like Tesco and Experian have more data on our society than a sociologist can ever hope to capture. With the rise of Google even the Tesco Clubcard database is surely paling into insignificance. And that’s what I wonder about the GBCS – Sian Campbell, in a somewhat light-hearted discussion on twitter, commented:

@siancampbell1 @urbaneprofessor @mcnurse Isn't this just a rubbish version of Mosaic?
— GoldilocksZone (@SianCampbell1) April 3, 2013

And I think that’s quite a telling critique. In inductive class surveys you can use whatever data you want and chop it up using advanced statistical methods to divide society into classes. I actually think the methodology of GBCS was more nuanced than the likes of MOSAIC particularly because it brings in social capital. For me, this is where the Marxist and deductive class theorists are possibly right as what matters for me isn’t so much what class distinctions there are, but recognising that there are class distinctions and this has a major impact on people’s lives around things like the delivery of public services.

More thoughts on the Bedroom Tax

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or am I being too cynical?

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.

Being a planner

If you're a practicing planner, or a planning academic, reading this blog you've probably realised I have quite a broad definition of what "planning" is or might be. For me it's an amalgam of US-style policy-planning and European spatial planning. So I feel that I am a planner and wanted to be able to call myself a planner. I have an RTPI accredited degree so I applied to become a chartered member through the Assessment of Professional Competence.

I got the results back last Friday and was unsuccessful on all criteria and all three parts of the APC. I'm very angry about this and, based on a lot of feedback I'm appealing. I'll do a longer blog post once that process has been gone through (possibly like Kean Birch has done with his rejected papers here) so other academics who have similarly had the temerity to think they're good enough to be called "planners" have an idea of what they might do (given the RTPI gave me no help or advice whatsoever despite me asking). In the mean time, I want to thank Kelvin MacDonald, Alister Scott, Caroline Brown, Rob Daley, Alasdair Rae, Alex Nurse, Andreas SchulzeBäing, Angela Hull and John McCarthy for all their help and kind words and practical support. Apologies in advance if I've missed anyone out.

The Big Society and housing development: empowering middle class NIMBYs?

I'm taking part in the ESRC Housing and the Big Society seminar series, kicking off in Sheffield next week. I've done a blogpost previewing my paper, which I'm also posting here. 

 
This spring has seen town planning hit our TV screens in the fly-on-the-wall documentary The Planners. And very popular it is proving too, with 1.58 million people tuning in and the Guardian describing it as “interesting”. Every episode begins with a portentous voiceover describing how “the government” want to see a lot more development on greenfield sites. And on every episode there is at least one housing development where the local community get very irate and organise a campaign to try and halt it, with varying amounts of success.

The UK Government’s planning reforms – part of their Big Society agenda implemented through the Localism Act – were meant to unleash enterprise within communities and replace “top-down” housing targets with incentives for local communities with housing need to deliver higher levels of development. Yet, as Shelter highlight, new home completions are continuing to fall, reaching a record low and the government is now back-tracking on early commitments to empowerment.

In this blog post we describe why this outcome should have been expected because of inherent inequalities in the way citizens interact with public services – in this case the planning system.

The middle classes and the delivery of housing

In our research we carried out the first ever review of literature on middle-class community activism (Matthews and Hastings, 2013). This review of 69 studies across public services in the UK, USA and Scandinavian nations, found strong evidence that the middle-classes, or more socio-economically affluent groups, are favoured in the provision of public services. The review used a realist synthesis methodology ordinarily applied to policy analysis and evaluation. This aims to produce a mid-range causal theory that explains what works, in what contexts and how (for more detail on this methodology see Pawson et al. 2005).

Two of these causal theories that are particularly pertinent to planning for housing are:

The middle classes and interest groups
The middle classes are more likely to join groups, form groups, and these groups are more important in policy-making (e.g. School Governing Boards)

The middle classes as individual consumers/activists with public services
The middle classes are more likely to complain about public services. When they do so they are more likely to get a positive response and produce a virtuous circle.

We argue that these causal theories largely predict the sort of NIMBY (not in my back yard) behaviour that is portrayed as a key barrier to housing delivery in the UK planning system.  The UK coalition government’s planning reforms contained in the Localism Act specifically sought to break the mechanism by incentivising NIMBYs who would have ordinarily resisted housing developments with financial benefits. If communities accepted new housing then they would receive greater investment through a reformed Community Infrastructure Levy (Roof Tax on new housing developments) and a New Homes Bonus where the increased tax base would be matched by an extra contribution from central government for five years. Unpacking the logic of this from the open source planning documents the outcome of low housing delivery is seen as a product of a mechanism of community resistance, but the logic lying behind this is that the new housing puts a strain on local services that is unwelcome. If this can be turned into an economic incentive, delivering benefits to local communities, then the outcome would be more housing – a causal mechanism of basic economic incentives.  However, the evidence from the review of middle class service provision suggests they have misunderstood the way that resistance to new develop comes about and why, and ultimately predicts that the Localism Act is unlikely to be successful in overcoming NIMBY pressures against new housing.

Public engagement in the planning system has been a concern since the late 1960s and the publication of the Skeffington report (Hague, 1971). Importantly, under land-use planning legislation in the England the lowest level of local government – parish councils – are a statutory consultee that local planning authorities must engage with when drafting a development plan or deciding on a planning application. Parish councils, particularly in rural villages, are dominated by middle class, older men, often with professional backgrounds. From the earliest reforms to increase public participation in land-use planning that this may empower those most able and vocal, such as middle class civic amenity groups, has been recognised.

Linking this to the second causal theory above, the highly technical system land-use planning also supports the accumulation and use of cultural capital. To engage successfully with the planning system requires knowledge of technical planning language, complex technical terms such as what constitutes a “material consideration”, and knowledge of the system itself and when it is most effective to engage. The studies of rural affordable housing provision demonstrate that middle class parish council members are much more likely to have this knowledge and be able to apply it. The technical nature of planning processes enables the accumulation of this cultural capital as well. The evidence around this NIMBYist attitude was made even stronger by findings that many developers of controversial developments – such as wind energy – presumed that the public were vocal, lobbying and would resist all development.

In our review the evidence that the pre-2010 planning system in England favoured the middle classes was strong. To turn now and look at how planning is being reformed under the localism reforms, our causal theories suggest that the middle classes will continue to be favoured. As part of the Localism Act neighbourhood planning proposals have empowered local groups to produce their own plan which will be accepted as the key planning document for a locality so long as it is in line with national planning guidance, the local plan produced by the local planning authority and agreed at a local referendum. Although the UK Government has attempted to incentivise new development, the weight of evidence from our review of the planning system suggests that the neighbourhood planning proposals are a policy mechanism that is particularly susceptible to causal theories of middle class activism.

The reforms introduced by the Localism Act could have reversed the previous inequality in the land use planning system if they placed less affluent communities on an equal footing and provided them with the means to resist bad neighbour developments such as incinerators and heavy industry and create the types of development they wanted to see. The proposals set out in Open Source Planning that are being implemented as set out in the Localism Act suggest this will not happen. Most of the initial 17 neighbourhood planning pilots were in rural villages, and of those in urban centres arguably only Balsall Heath in Birmingham, Bermondsey in London, and North Shields Fish Quay in North Tyneside could be described as diverse or not affluent.

The implementation of the reforms has actually produced barriers that are likely to support, rather than challenge, the existing bias towards the middle class in the planning system. For example, although any group can come forward to develop a neighbourhood plan, they need to secure a majority vote in a referendum for any plan. This has raised fears that the proposals will allow developers to lead a neighbourhood planning process and impose development on less affluent communities as the latter would not have the resources, either in terms of time and money or cultural capital and knowledge of the planning system to come forward with their own proposals. The plans must also be in line with local, national and European policy and statute, for example requiring a strategic environmental assessment. Local authorities are meant to support local communities in developing the plans, however as they lose staff it is likely this will not be forthcoming. The neighbourhood planning proposals therefore benefit those communities that can organise most successfully and those that can draw on their own expertise and cultural capital.

The public debates about the planning reforms, and particularly surrounding the new single National Planning Policy Framework and its presumption in favour of sustainable development, led many to see neighbourhood planning as a NIMBYs charter. Campaign groups such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England arguing for protection of the green belt around major conurbations, were pitted against a coalition of business and housing and homelessness organisations fighting for strategic land release for development. These debates reflect on a national scale the same causal theories that our review identified as operating at a local level.

Our evidence suggests that the previous “top-down” housing targets of regional spatial strategies in England disrupted, momentarily, two of the key ways in which middle class, affluent groups could manage the planning system to their benefit. Without this, the fact that the reformed planning system has not unleashed a wave of development does not come as that great a surprise. The economic incentives of the new homes bonus are insufficient to overcome these causal mechanisms by which middle class residents can resist development.

Policy discourses...

Many moons ago, when I was putting together my slides for a class where I introduce my students to critical narrative approaches to policy analysis, I came up with the following. I think it's quite clever and amusing, even looking back on it, so I thought I'd reproduce it here.

In the spirit of Deborah Stone's causal stories I tell my students a story, with a beginning...

"Once upon a time there was a village called Ricarston. All the villagers lived peacefully, growing crops to eat and working very hard in the local University. But, on a hill above the village was a cave and in the cave lived an evil dragon called Napier. Mayor Matthews, who ruled Ricarston benevolently, was scared of the dragon..."

A middle...

"...one dark and stormy night Napier swooped down from his cave and breathed fire throughout Ricarston. The poor villagers fought the fires on their thatched roofs. At number three Hermiston Walk, poor Mrs Chapman, the widower who took in orphans, burnt to death along with three-year-old Tommy..."

An elaboration:

"...Napier also swooped over the fields, scorching the earth and burning all the villagers’ crops. It was too late in the year for the seeds to be sown again so the villagers only had the food that could be saved from their stores. By the end of semester two they were so hungry they failed their exams..."

And an end:

"...The villagers were very angry. Just when they were going to give up and move to Edinborough, the great and fearless knight Sir Gov Ernment rode into town swinging his battleaxe with great big knobs on. He led the villagers on a charge up the mountain to Napier’s cave. After a short skirmish Napier was captured and imprisoned. He spent the rest of his live providing sustainable heating to the village of Ricarston by breathing fire."

I ask my students to identify who the story positions as the victim, who is to blame and who was the hero.

I then present an entirely different story, taking from the mythical policy document: Together, Forever: A Policy on Dragon-Village Relations in Edinshire

"Under the Universal Dragon Rights Directive, all dragons have a right to reside where they settle without interference from local communities. There should be an expectation on local communities to reinforce their dwellings from fire using steel sheeting and asbestos. Communities near a dragon nesting site should also take necessary action to ensure a secure supply of food in case of fire-based communication breakdowns..."

To demonstrate how causal stories can be hidden in technical language but still apportion blame and heroic status. So, do you support dragon rights?