public services

Austerity and Food Poverty: the vicious circle of obesity, ill-health and deprivation

abuaro01

In today’s post Hillary Shaw and Julia Shaw consider the links between poverty, poor diet and ill health.  In the UK, escalating food, fuel and housing costs, stagnating incomes and poor employment prospects have realised a fateful and catastrophic convergence of problems, which all serve to compound and amplify each other. Increasing social inequalities have, in turn, evidenced the rising incidence of obesity and diabetes, fuelled by nutritional poverty. In the broader context of austerity and welfare reforms, it is suggested that the urban food question – specifically in relation to accessing foods essential to a healthy diet – becomes a priority on the political agenda. The authors describe the particular challenges this poses, and argue that more comprehensive policy solutions that go beyond focussing on individual behaviour, to include regulating industry as well as creating positive food environments, are necessary.

When Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister 1979-1990, advocated a return to ‘Victorian values’; she probably did not mean the return of ‘Victorian’ diseases we are now seeing, such as gout and rickets which are closely linked to diet. Gout is caused by excess consumption of fatty food and alcohol; rickets is caused by lack of vitamin D which we get from sunlight and from oily foods, eggs and fortified breakfast cereals. Today, children in deprived areas are going to school without having had breakfast; some even return home to no supper. They may even arrive at school with lunchboxes containing cold chicken nuggets, stale toast, or last night’s leftover chips, so that in deprived areas (e.g., Lanarkshire, Scotland) there is a need for programmes such as ‘Food-365’, an initiative to provide school lunches all year round to alleviate ‘holiday hunger’ amongst the most vulnerable. The ‘health premium’ – the excess cost of eating well either in terms of money, time or knowledge acquisition – has never gone away, and rising inequality in the early 21st century has brought back the old 19th century diseases of dietary poverty. However hunger, poverty and poor diet are now commonly associated with carrying excess weight rather than being underweight.

Once the poor and malnourished were thinner than the rich; yet in modern times, uniquely, they are heavier and more likely to be obese. At age 11, the poorest British children are, on average, 2 kg heavier than those of the wealthiest families, which is the exact opposite of the figures in 1946. At the extremes of obesity the gap is even larger, with the most obese 10% from the poor weighing 4.6 kg more, on average, than the 10% most obese from the wealthy. The same reversal has occurred in developing countries. In Brazil low-income women in 1997 were 40% more likely to be obese than underweight, whereas in 1975 they were four times more likely to be underweight than obese. Once, you had to be wealthy to afford to be obese; now we have an abundance of sugary junk foods and cheap fatty meat, and you increasingly need to be wealthy to be slim.

In Victorian Britain, poor people did die of starvation. At best, undernourished children would suffer physical stunting and mental retardation. So, has the situation improved now the poor are over-consuming calories rather than under-consuming them? Perhaps not, for four reasons. Firstly, obesity stigmatises the poor whereas the sight of a starving person, especially a child, excites sympathy, provokes action and public philanthropy. Our mental attitude has not caught up with our modern socio-economic food situation, and we tend to associate obesity with self-indulgence and laziness. Secondly, obesity is harder to reverse than emaciation; our calorie-hoarding biology, inherited from prehistoric days when food could be scarce for long periods, means we are very efficient at gaining weight and strongly biologically resistant to losing it. Thirdly, obesity creates long-term health problems which cascade on from one another. Excess weight precipitates cardiovascular problems and arthritis; fat can promote cancer, and above all, type 2 diabetes is a major cause of blindness and amputations. These are all chronic and expensive conditions, and may lead to the poor being accused of consuming excess health resources and money, as if they wanted to be obese and ill, and it is their fault they are not eating healthily. Naturally the concept of the health premium is seldom mentioned here. Fourthly, obesity keeps poor people poor. Obese adults are “less likely to be hired, are lower paid, have fewer opportunities and are often outright bullied in the workplace”. This especially applies to women, who already suffer the consequences of the gender pay gap, and who also have higher expectations of ‘appearance’ placed upon them by society. Accordingly, this adds multiple reinforcing layers of prejudice and discrimination to the poverty and obesity issue.

The ‘obesity prejudice’ begins early in life, with overweight children being bullied and achieving less at school; again this may mean they attain lower qualifications and, as adults,  earn less and remain poor. In turn, the cycle of poverty means they tend to produce poor children who similarly eat unhealthily and gain excess weight. This is one crucial way in which poverty can transmit itself down the generations. Obesity also propagates poverty through sleep apnoea, causing daytime exhaustion and lower productivity. Obese schoolchildren often miss lessons as they take time off for associated medical conditions such as intensive dental treatment, and obese adults miss work days for a range of illnesses associated with poor nutrition, as noted above.

Society tends to put the burden of reversing obesity largely back on the individual; exercise more, get fitness apps, learn cooking skills, read the food labels. There is no current policy initiative aimed at stopping supermarkets from selling unhealthy foods. A sugar tax has been recently imposed, which raises costs to the consumer, but the government is not using this tax revenue to reduce the costs of healthy foods; for example, a negative VAT rate on fresh produce. Schools have restarted cookery lessons, but there is no educational provision for adults with advice on easy, cheap and healthy eating at the places where they can be easily accessed, for instance, jobcentres, food banks, citizens’ advice bureaux, housing associations or GP surgeries in deprived areas. There is also a tendency to promote a revolutionary rather than evolutionary approach to diet, as typified by Jamie Oliver’s initiative in Rotherham, straight from ‘Turkey Twizzlers’ to gourmet vegetables. This may be interesting, and even informative, for more affluent families who can afford to experiment, waste food, spend time on learning new cooking techniques, and drive to shops which sell these novel foods.

For less wealthy families, and certainly the poorest, a gradualist approach may be preferable; by, for example, introducing leafy green vegetables into ready meals, making healthier sandwiches, adding fresh fruit to processed puddings, and replacing fizzy drinks with fruit juices. A major problem is that truly breaking the vicious circle of obesity, ill-health and deprivation takes far longer than the customary five-year lifetime of a government. A climate of austerity and squeezing the already poor creates financial returns much faster. Although entrenched vicious circles such as the seemingly never-ending cycle of poverty are hard to break, and even though social returns often only materialise –as Ivan Illich almost said – ‘at the speed of a bicycle’, nevertheless social returns bring true longer-lasting benefits for all.

Julia J.A. Shaw is Professor of Social Justice and Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, as well as a member of CURA at De Montfort University.

Hillary J. Shaw is the author of many journal articles, book chapters and commissioned reports in the general areas of economics, geography, politics and the sociology of food consumption and obesity – particularly in relation to the dynamics and evolution of the food desert phenomenon within the wider context of austerity. His book The Consuming Geographies of Food: Diet, Food Deserts and Obesity (Routledge, 2014) explicates the development of the current global food system and explores how sustainable and accessible political and economic structures for feeding the future global population of ten billion can be achieved. He is currently completing a further monograph, Corporate Social Responsibility and the Global Food Chain (Routledge, forthcoming 2019) which explores corporate social responsibility in relation to government policy and the food retailing industry.

 

Time exchange and reciprocity in the co-production of public services

abuaro01

In today’s blog, Daniel Durrant discusses a paper based on research conducted as part of an evaluation of the Cambridgeshire Time Credits Project which the Cambridge Centre for Planning and Housing Research were commissioned to do. Time Credits are a form of community currency. The particular model discussed in the paper was promoted widely by Spice – an entrepreneurial and rapidly expanding social enterprise.

Time Credits were developed in South Wales having attracted considerable support from the Welsh Assembly and nationally from the Department of Health. The model stresses its origins in the work of Kennedy era policy adviser, Edgar Cahn on Time Banking, with volunteers able to earn a credit for an hour’s voluntary work which they can either exchange for an hour’s reciprocal work or as is more common for an hour’s worth of services from a ‘corporate spend partner’ usually a local gym or cinema.

Cambridgeshire County Council has commissioned Spice to roll out their Time Credits programme in the county with initial trials in Wisbech. A geographically isolated and relatively deprived corner of an otherwise affluent County with an economy focused on agricultural production and the low skilled, insecure and often migrant labour associated with it. The Council’s commitment to the programme and the notions of reciprocity and ‘co-production’ imbedded within the model is both ideological and explicitly financial given the 60 percent reduction in budget they face in the decade 2010-2020. It is the tensions between the rhetoric and reality of co-production identified through the ethnographic component of the evaluation that this paper explores.

Academic interest in reciprocal exchange has a long heritage in the social sciences going back to Marcel Mauss’ work of gift exchange. David Graeber (2001) contrasts this ‘open’ reciprocity, implying a relationship of permanent mutual commitment, to the ‘closed’ balancing of accounts that occurs within a money transaction. It has also been identified as one of the internal logics of co-production in its current form in UK policy making (Glynos and Speed, 2012) seen in recent Coalition policy such as the Big Society. The concept, as applied to UK policy, is a fuzzy one containing a whole range of aspirations from the ‘transformational’ alternative forms of economic activity and democratic renewal to the more prosaic service improvement through dialogue with users.

Our findings were that on a personal level, for many the experience did indeed have a transformational element with considerable success in attracting what we describe as ‘non-traditional’ volunteers. Furthermore, we found clear evidence that the physical and mental health benefits associated with volunteering were present and that the programme was giving people and crucially families on low incomes access to physical and leisure activities often denied them by a punitive welfare regime.

The concept of co-production promoted by Spice, however, had very little resonance amongst the volunteers or the community organisations administering the programme. First, for volunteers there was very little reciprocal exchange with Time Credits generally spent with the corporate spend partners and valued as such. These interactions were much closer to closed monetary exchanges. Second, in terms of shifting the balance of power between the recipients and providers of welfare services, there was some evidence that Time Credits were a useful tool for skilled community workers. Yet with austerity reducing the number of these workers and increasing the workloads of the remainder there is little evidence that volunteers, earning Time Credits, can replace this capacity.

This led us to the conclusion that the form of co-production was what Glynos and Speed describe as ‘additive’ in that the users of a service are clearly involved in the delivery of a model that supplements existing provision. In this case the addition is set against the withdrawal of services and resources. We believe this calls into question the rhetoric of reciprocity within the entrepreneurial, contract driven model of time exchange pursued by Spice. It may fit neatly with local government priorities to reduce welfare expenditure, yet we found very little evidence of the more ‘transformative’ aspects of co-production. This suggests that in the absence of wider economic shifts there are limits to the extent to which the model can fill the gap in services left by austerity policies or on its own address the deed rooted problems faced by communities in places such as Wisbech.

Daniel Durrant is now a Lecturer in Infrastructure Planning at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning where he takes (and encourages students to take) a broad view of infrastructure, that includes physical infrastructures, emerging technologies on the way to becoming infrastructures and institutional and includes ethical frameworks as infrastructures. The paper discussed in this blog draws on research into civil society and the infrastructures it produces. It was conducted whilst he was working at The Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research with former colleague Dr Gemma Burgess who is a Senior Researcher there.

Communities first? Hybridity helps understand governing neighbourhoods under austerity

abuaro01

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Madeleine Pill and Valeria Guarneros-Mesa report on their research into hybridity and city governance in Cardiff, which was recently published in Policy and Politics.

Welsh Government is phasing out its (former flagship) Communities First tackling poverty programme from 2017/18.  The Bevan Foundation, a think tank, has stressed that subsequent local action should be led by ‘community anchors’ – community-based organisations with a good track-record and strong community engagement.  Our research using the conceptual framework of hybridity – conducted as part of the Transgob project in Cardiff, Wales – supports this recommendation, and highlights the need for local government to relinquish its former levels of control to give these organisations space to develop approaches which work for their communities.

The research explored what austerity means for participation in city governance.  The optimistic view is that making governance more participatory can help overcome the hurdles of bureaucracy, with government ceding control to enable capacity to address complex problems.  The pessimistic view is that city governance remains dominated by state elites, with third sector and community partners co-opted to compensate for the decline in state provision, compromising their ability to advocate for and ensure that communities get decent services.  In Cardiff we uncovered attitudes and practices somewhere in between these two views.

We found that austerity had accelerated the city council’s use of its city governance structure, the Cardiff Partnership, to share the risk and responsibility of service delivery with other public organisations, but also with third sector organisations and neighbourhood-level community groups.  Communities were certainly having to take more responsibility for delivering their own (formerly public) services, such as play and youth services and the maintenance of parks, sports grounds and streets.  Those at the neighbourhood frontline faced tensions and power conflicts in trying to develop workable practice.  But we did find that community-based organisations had some room for manoeuvre in developing forms of co-production that were rooted in communities as well as responding to the strictures of funding cuts.  One example was time-banking, championed by a deprived community-based organisation in south Cardiff.  The approach means that volunteers can exchange equivalent hours of providing a service such as kids’ school holiday activities for other services.  The scheme was underpinned by the council offering access to facilities such as swimming pools, but the opportunities to spend credits earned within the community were expanding, indicating potential for it to become self-sustaining (and thus definitively community-led).  But it was too early in our research to tell whether attempts to replicate it will be successful.

The city council was also seeking to transfer assets such as libraries and community centres to communities.  The frustrations of this process – such as the need for willing community groups to become formalised organisations – showed the need for change in the council’s attitudes to risk.  In the words of a Welsh Government officer, government needs to ‘recognise that the cheapest and best way to achieve real things is to spot what people are doing for themselves and support them’.

When the Communities First programme was reshaped in 2011, Cardiff Council innovated by contracting community-based organisations to manage the four deprived neighbourhood ‘clusters’ eligible for programme support. In so doing, the council downloaded risk and offloaded staff costs as the organisations took on responsibility for finance, HR and evaluation – thus becoming hybrid third-public sector organisations.  Their staff had to navigate the tensions and dilemmas of implementing a (national) programme, engaging in the (city-wide) strategy overseen by the Cardiff Partnership, and the needs and demands of their communities.  Doing this aligned with the demands of austerity, enrolling these community organisations into service delivery in ways that included voluntarism, thus increasing community self-reliance.  But we also found, to an extent, that community organisation staff were able to innovate (such as with timebanking) – and in ways that maintained their community-focused mission.

Therefore our Cardiff research shows how the ‘devolution, decentralisation and downloading’ of Peck’s (2012) ‘austerity urbanism’ encourages hybridity at a scalar, organisational and individual level.  But our research also reinforces the need to understand local practices to provide insight beyond the dualism of empowerment or incorporation.  The Cardiff experience of participatory governance demonstrates the potential for transformative alternatives in the everyday and the small-scale – and also highlights the need for state supports rather than constraints in these processes.   In the case of Wales, the need to sustain the work of community anchors should be a priority.

The ‘Transgob’ project analysed the discourse and practice of participatory urban governance under austerity in two British (Cardiff and Leicester) and four Spanish cities.  It was funded by the Spanish government’s National Research and Development Plan (reference CSO2012-32817).

Madeleine Pill is Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Sydney, and Valeria Guarneros-Mesa is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University, as well as a core member of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity

 

Austerity and welfare cuts

abuaro01

6449741467_dc1a81af70_bIn today’s post, Ines Newman discusses the implications of current and future welfare reforms, including the cuts planned for April. She argues that this will lead to increasing inequality and poverty, rising household debt levels with higher levels of rent and council tax arrears and that we are witnessing increased levels of maladministration by the Department of Work and Pensions.

In the first budget of this Parliament, George Osborne put in place £12b welfare cuts which came on top of the cuts in the previous Parliament. But with his departure following the Brexit vote and the worrying policies of Donald Trump, the impact of these cuts on families in the UK has slipped out of the limelight. They are however substantial and the Resolution Foundation has recently argued that they will result in ‘falling living standards for almost the entire bottom half of the working-age income distribution between this year and 2020-21’.

In April 2016, working age benefits, tax credits and the Local Housing Allowance were all frozen for four years. For example, Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) for a single unemployed person over 25 stood at £73.10. In 2009, it was already being argued that JSA was not sufficient for the essentials of life, such as food, bills and travel, and was inconsistent with a minimum standard. The real value had not changed for at least 30 years while per capita household consumption had doubled over this period. In relative terms the value had therefore halved. Now, as post Brexit inflation gathers pace, the real value of working age benefits will fall sharply, generating acute poverty.

Those with disabilities have traditionally been slightly protected through the higher Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and through Disability Living Allowance (DLA). However in 2015, the DWP started to contact anyone getting DLA and asking them to make a new claim for a Personal Independence Payment (PIP). The Government estimates https://fullfact.org/economy/personal-independence-payment-who-are-winners-and-losers/    that out of 1.75 million DLA reassessments, 510,000 will have a reduced payment and 450,000 will have their payments removed altogether.

All those with disabilities have to go through an assessment process which is as inadequate as the Work Capability Assessment for ESA. The PIP assessment is run by ATOS who finally bowed out of the contract on the Work Capability Assessment after receiving massive bad publicity. Meanwhile as Ken Loach’s recent film ‘I, Daniel Blake’ made clear, the new contractors, Maximus, for the work capability assessment, are no better than ATOS. Finally, from April 2017, new claimants who have a recognised disability on the work related assessment but are deemed to be capable for work will see the removal of work related activity components for ESA. It will mean those receiving the benefit will see their weekly payments cut from £103 to £73 a week. Far from protecting ‘vulnerable’ households the Government is pushing more disabled households into poverty. Half of those people living in poverty are now either themselves disabled or are living with a disabled person in their household, when the higher costs they face are taken into account.

Because successive governments have failed to deal with the housing crisis, rising rents combined with the bedroom tax, council tax benefit reductions, the cap on the local housing allowance and the total benefit cap are forcing low income households into poverty and debt. Sometimes they are forced to move into poorer areas, disrupting their children’s schooling and losing the support of families and friends. In December, the New Policy Institute https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/monitoring-poverty-and-social-exclusion-2016   reported that the number of private renters in poverty has doubled over the last decade and homelessness and temporary housing has increased five years in a row. In the London Borough of Camden where I live, we know that the lower benefit cap of £23,000 is affecting 1,110 children in 383 families. While some of these are being protected by discretionary housing payments (DHP) it is unclear for how long they can be supported and we are expecting a cut in DHP in April. A household caring for a disabled child over 18 who are not able to work because of their caring responsibilities will almost inevitably be hit by the benefit cap, as will a lone parent with several small children.

Meanwhile Universal Credit (UC) is gradually being rolled out. Using the language of giving more responsibility to the claimant, UC includes housing benefit (rather than this benefit being paid direct to the landlord) and is paid monthly in arrears. The result has been a massive increase in council rent arrears (85% of those on UC in Camden), partly as a result of delays and miscalculations in the housing element and by an understaffed DWP. From 11 April 2016, the rules on UC work allowances were changed to make them far less generous in a number of cases. The work allowance is the amount an individual or family can earn before their maximum UC award starts to be reduced. The reductions to the UC work allowances announced in the Summer Budget will ultimately have a similar impact to the changes to tax credits which were fought off by various lobby groups at the time of Osborne’s budget. Other changes in UC are significant too. From April 2017, young people aged between 18 and 21 claiming universal credit will not be eligible for housing benefit and will be expected to take part in a Youth Obligation for the first six months and then apply for an apprenticeship or trainee-ship, gain work-based skills or go on mandatory work placement. This is coming in despite the Government having to scrap the previous Mandatory Work Activity programme in 2015 when many charities boycotted it and research showed it was ineffective and merely punitive. Households will not receive Universal Credit for any children born after April 2017, when they already have two children. A lone parent with no child under 3 will be expected to look for work to claim any benefit after April this year. How such parents can then provide the type of parental support that numerous studies have shown is invaluable seems not to be a consideration for this so-called ‘family orientated’ government.

The Resolution Foundation concludes:  ‘the result is that the parliament from 2015-16 to 2020-21 is on course to be the worst on record for income growth in the bottom half of the working age income distribution. At the same time, we project the biggest rise in inequality since the 1980s, with inequality after housing costs reaching record highs by 2020-21.  This will be the legacy of austerity.

Ines Newman is a visiting senior research fellow at CURA, a trustee of Paddington Development Trust and does social policy research on a voluntary basis for Citizens Advice Camden.

The Vulnerabilities of Local Government Liveability Services

abuaro01

In today’s post, Paul O’Brien reports on the findings of recent research that highlights the dangers posed by changes in local government for the sustainability of basic ‘liveability’ services.

The past month has been a tumultuous one for British politics. Following the referendum result in favour of Brexit, we have a new government, led by Theresa May, who has set the need to tackle the problem of inequality and to develop an inclusive economy at the forefront of her policy agenda.

A crucial aspect of this will be to tackle a looming problem that the previous government’s fiscal policy set in motion regarding neighbourhood level ‘liveability’ services. Much of the previous government’s attention was focussed upon avoiding the ‘jaws of doom’ scenario, of rising demand and underfunding of health and social care. The recent 2% health and social care precept has eased some of the pain. However less than 5% of our local population will experience social care, compared to the vast majority of local residents that rely upon on our neighbourhood level ‘liveability’ services.

On a daily basis virtually all citizens will walk in a well-lit local street. Many will drive on local roads, take their children to play in a local park, or go for a swim in a council-run pool. Local businesses benefit from public realm within local high streets. Residents will experience refuse and recycling collections provided directly to their own homes.

It is the sheer volume of these liveability services, and how they impact on the lives of our local residents, that prompted APSE with the New Policy Institute (NPI) to explore the funding vulnerabilities of these services, when compared to the priority necessarily given to social care. Our research, published in May 2016, ‘Sustainable local government finance and liveable local areas: Can we survive to 2020?’ led by Dr Peter Kenway of NPI, makes for grim reading.

Whilst the headline figures suggest cuts of 0.5% for English authorities following the budget this is skewed when financial changes are factored into the equation. Despite the 2% adult social care precept, the impact of withdrawing revenue support grant, making councils reliant upon council tax and business rates for the near totality of their funding, opens up new questions as to how liveability services can be sustained in the longer term. Some may face a further 20% of cuts on top of those already made.

Our research found that there is now a clear and compelling case for local government to campaign openly for liveability and public realm services. It also raised the issue of council tax increases and begs the question ‘is it now time for council tax reform’? We also recognised that many local councils have taken an entrepreneurial approach in supporting liveability services through better use of income generation strategies. Many sell street-scene services, for example to retail developments. Others have cultivate strategies for income in parks from rock concerts to cafes to renewable energy. Many are engaging with residents to plug the gaps left in funding – but this will only go so far.

If we allow our neighbourhood based services to decline we will force up ancillary demand on other services. There is a net contribution from good neighbourhoods. As we battle declining public health we can ill-afford to lose the services which anchor good neighbourhoods, support the wellbeing of citizens, reduce crime and make our local areas better places to do business.

Tackling this looming crisis in liveability services should take centre stage if Theresa May’s government is going to follow through on delivering a more inclusive economy that works for all.

Paul O’Brien is chief executive of the Association for Public Service Excellence, a core member of CURA and a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and Public Policy at De Montfort University

Austerity and Human Rights in Leicester

abuaro01

Following the UN’s condemnation of UK austerity policies, Adrian Bua reports on the impact of that these are having in Leicester, based on exploratory research carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project.

A recent report by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has argued that the UK government may be failing to meet its international human rights obligations.  A range of concerns were raised, ranging from the limits imposed by the Trade Union Act (2016) on industrial action to lack of corporate regulation. However, notably for us, most of the challenges levelled at the UK government pivoted around austerity policies, and their disproportionate and discriminatory impact on the most disadvantaged. Specifically,  the UN investigative committee is expressed serious concern “about the disproportionate adverse impact that austerity measures, introduced since 2010, are having on the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights by disadvantaged and marginalised individuals and groups” and reminded the UK government that austerity measures “must be temporary, necessary, proportionate, and not discriminatory.”

The UN is especially concerned about changes to the welfare system and the possible violation of social rights through cuts introduced by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. This is a topic we researched in Leicester as part of the exploratory phase of our project ‘collaborative governance under austerity’. The report highlights a series of issues that resonate with our analysis in Leicester.

First, it highlights sanctions in relation to benefit fraud with the absence of due process. National changes to welfare have bought in a regime that regulates, disciplines and punishes – what academics call “workfare”.  We know anecdotally that sanctions are leading some people to fall “off grid” and disappear from official records. Agencies agencies from the statutory and voluntary sectors aim to pick up the pieces, but their capacity to do so is being decimated by austerity.

Second, the report highlights employment practices including a rise in zero hour contracts and precarious employment. In terms of employment, our research and review of case literature suggests that poor working conditions have increased in the textile trade [link to report] and especially the hidden and ‘informal’ economy. However, some respondents argued that the local authority was hesitant to do anything about this because it might put off investors – a key way in which Leicester aims to overcome austerity. If the issue as to be highlighted, Leicester might be tainted by association with the “sweatshop economy”.

Third, changes to social benefits including the reduction of the household benefit cap, the four-year freeze on certain benefits and the reduction in child tax credits are also criticised. In Leicester housing was an important issue, where the council used a strategy of amelioration through using discretionary funds to ensure that those most at risk maintained a roof over their heads.

Dr Adrian Bua is Research Assistant at the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, and Researcher at the New Economics Foundation

Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on Cities in Europe: Chapter on the Social Investment Market

abuaro01

CURA Researcher Robert Ogman has published a chapter on the social investment market in a recently published book on Urban Austerity in Europe.

Robert’s chapter discusses the relationship between austerity policies and the social investment market, showing government’s turn towards Social Impact Bonds in the hope of offsetting public sector budget cuts by attracting private investment to social service provision. He first explains the historical emergence of SIBs in the financial crisis of 2007/8, and SIBs’ narrative of cost-savings, before turning to their implementation in a concrete case, where the city of Peterborough hoped to use investor dollars to fund probationary services to reduce prisoner reoffending. He identifies a set of contradictions between the promises of SIBs as a cost-cutting mechanism and the resulting expansion of public expenditure, challenging the idea that this new public-private partnership may provide an easy solution to social and fiscal problems created by austerity. This chapter is part of Robert’s doctoral research on SIBs and the social investment market as part of a “social neoliberal” strategy to manage the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. His analysis of the Peterborough SIB is part of an international comparison between SIB development in the US and UK.

You can buy the book either directly from the publishing house (http://www.theaterderzeit.de/buch/urban_austerity/) or, of course, at your favorite book store. An e-book will soon be available as well.

Description and details are below:

Schönig, Barbara; Schipper, Sebastian (Hg.) (2016): Urban Austerity: Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on Cities in Europe. Berlin: Theater der Zeit. 296 pages. ISBN 978-3-95749-083-4. 22€

What started as a mortgage crisis in 2007 and became a global financial and economic crisis in 2008 has been transformed into a sovereign debt crisis since 2010. In all of these interwoven phases, cities have been, in multiple ways, at the heart of the turmoil as indebted home-owner have been evicted, masses of people impoverished, public budgets squeezed, municipal infrastructures privatized, public services downsized, and, above all, austerity measures implemented. In view of the above, this book puts an issue into the center that affects most people living in urban regions across Europe – the idea that fiscal austerity is an unavoidable necessity that politics cannot escape no matter how harsh the consequences might be. To bring the effects of austerity politics at the forefront, contributors to this book expose actual urban problems in their spatiotemporal dimensions, discuss regulatory restructurings under a new regime of austerity urbanism, and reflect on the role of urban social movements struggling for progressive alternatives. We hope that this collection of counter-hegemonic narratives to neoliberal policies can make a small contribution to inspire critical urban scholars, political activists, and social movements in their struggle for progressive social change in Europe and elsewhere.

Taking Power Back: Response by Simon Parker

abuaro01

This post is the latest in the series debating Simon Parker’s recent book ‘Taking Power Back‘. The debate began with an outline by Simon of the main argument of his book, followed by a response by Jonathan Davies and Adrian Bua from CURA. In this post Simon highlights areas where our thoughts overlap and diverge. If you are interested in contributing to the debate further please email adrian.bua@dmu.ac.uk.

The striking thing about Jonathan and Adrian’s article is how much we agree on the fundamentals. We are clear that Britain’s mix of the big central state and free market economics has not delivered on its promises. And I think we broadly agree that a politics of commonism – the creation of a vastly expanded realm of self-help, mutual aid and social enterprise – represents a credible and desirable way to secure social progress in new times.

The challenge I have been posed is less about the ‘what’ and more about the ‘how’. Jonathan and Adrian are right to ask how we get from a world where power and assets are overwhelmingly enclosed by the state and market, to one in which commoning becomes, well, commonplace. They argue that far from encouraging mutual aid, the British state is more often engaged in expanding the reach of profitable activity while simultaneously choking off the social sector through austerity. Is my vision of the creative commons not pure idealism without some sort of struggle against the power of capital?

One of the challenges I face in answering this is that I am deeply suspicious of top down, structural change. I do not have some kind of Marxian revolution in my back pocket. They tend to end badly. Instead, I think commonism will emerge from decentralised trial and error in the real world. But I accept the charge that my bottom-up approach runs slap bang into some very big and ugly vested interests in both the state and the business world. The commons is not the strongest force in society, but where I differ from Jonathan and Adrian is that I think this might already be starting to change.

My first reason for hope is that commoning is already starting to grow in the midst of the very neoliberalism Jonathan and Adrian decry. Take, for instance, the 25% boom in the number of co-ops over the three years from 2010, or the 10% growth in community businesses over 2015. These organisations are generally not old-school charities funded by grants, but organisations which use their community roots and freedom from shareholder demands to develop innovative business models in response to local needs and demands.

My second reason for optimism is the fact that the economy is starting to change in ways which might favour commoning. I am hardly the first person to point to the rise of automation, which has the potential to destroy a vast number of jobs without replacing all of them. This reduction in paid labour is a horror for the old Labour movement, but when you think about it a world with fewer of what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’ is hardly a bad thing.  Imagine more people, with more free time and vastly cheaper goods and services, searching for more meaning in their lives.

My third reason for hope is that I can already see some of the institutional changes that might help to unlock a world of commonism. The first plank in my agenda is a universal basic income, both to manage the economic consequences of automation and to liberate people to pursue more meaning free from the demands of paid labour. This is the key policy change which would turn a dystopian world of mass unemployment into a world where work became more like play (and the commons is the perfect space to play in).

I think we need a new public service architecture which actively encourages commoning. This means city-level social investment funds which can support the early stages of commons-based organisations, governed by the public, private and commons sectors to ensure that the money flows towards their shared priorities. Local authorities and others need to direct their commissioning to spotting and scaling up the parts of the commons that work best.

My response to the question of how we grow the strength of the commons is to transform the role of government into growing and protecting the realm of mutual aid. This will help to grow a strong and independent domain of community ownership. My answer to austerity is that a smaller state might be a good thing as long as we also have a smaller private sector and much more social activity in-between them. Commonism is not a utopian project, but a practical route through which ordinary people can adapt their lives to a changing economic context.

Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network and a leading expert in public policy, public services and government.

Reclaiming Local Democracy: Ines Newman

abuaro01

In this post Ines Newman describes the argument of her recent book “Reclaiming local democracy: a progressive future for local government“. Ines argues against the market fundamentalism informing the changes in British local government since the 1980’s, outlines an ethical framework to guide decision making by local politicians and argues for a vibrant, and genuine, participatory democracy.

Local government has become increasingly dominated by what George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz and others have called ‘market fundamentalism’. It was Nicholas Ridley (then Environment Secretary with responsibility for local government) who proposed in 1988 that the local state should be an ‘enabler’. Councillors should meet once a year to hand out contracts to the private sector. New Labour furthered this approach, suggesting that ‘community leadership’ and ‘place-shaping’ were the new roles and local authorities should not get distracted by service delivery. This could be left to managers with pressure to perform to targets set by central government. Finally, the Coalition Government has argued that local government should not deliver any services directly but should ‘be excellent and open commissioners of those services which cannot be devolved to individuals and communities.’

In my book, Reclaiming Local Democracy: A progressive future for local government, I argue that the impact of all this has been negative in three ways.   Firstly there is a confused focus on ‘what works’, with limited consideration of the question ‘works for whom?’ The focus is usually on symptoms rather than causes and decision-making is technocratic, concentrating on efficiency and cost.

Secondly, there has been increased marketisation of public services. Michael Sandel has argued that in the USA you can currently buy most things, from prison-cell upgrades to your doctor’s mobile phone number. Market values have come to play a greater and greater role in social life, corroding the way we value public goods, and increasing inequality.

These consequences lead to the third problem:  a growing lack of trust in representative democracy. If decision-making is technocratic and public goods no different from private goods, what is the role of the councillor? ‘Politics’ becomes a dirty word. Instead we are taught to value ‘hard working’ individuals or volunteers, ‘ordinary people’ who do not need public services.

To turn this around, I have argued that local government needs to reignite an interest in political and ethical questions and support participative democracy.

In the book, I draw on political philosophy to argue that local authorities have an obligation to tackle injustice. I develop an ethical framework in the form of a set of eight principles that can be used to interrogate a policy to see if it would shift society from’ how things are ‘to how they ought to be’. The book contains many examples- from fairness commissions to support for new universal free school meals- showing the way local authorities can operationalise these principles.

Localism is a hollow concept. You will always need strong central government to tackle inequality. So the issue is not about devolving minor powers with limited funding. It is about opening up central government to the influence of joint campaigns run by local councillors with their constituents. This would help to reclaim democracy. It requires councillors to promote active citizens and participative democracy and, with their communities, to seek to influence the national agenda, so as to achieve progressive change.

These are profoundly different approaches to local government and have many implications which are discussed further in the book. The enabling council sees its role as ‘smart commissioning’ and reducing cost and in this process undermines an understanding of public goods, community and democracy. The ethical and democratic local authority is focussed outwards, listening to the voices of those who are usually not heard and discussing with their constituents how to make a better world. These processes cement an understanding of citizenship and the common good and make it possible to start to struggle to reclaim local democracy.

Ines Newman is an Honorary Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Department for Politics and Public Policy at DMU and a core member of the CURA team. Ines is a leading expert in local government and public policy and a trustee of the Paddington Development Trust. 

Book Review: What a Waste – Outsourcing and how it Goes Wrong

abuaro01

In this book review, CURAs Dr. Heather Connolly shares her thoughts on the recent book by Researchers at Manchester Capitalism “What a Waste”. This blog was originally published on the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute’s website.

With increasing numbers of failures and fiascos of outsourced contracts hitting the headlines, the question ‘when will governments ever learn?’ springs readily to mind.  A hard-hitting new book, by researchers at CRESC/Manchester Capitalism, entitled What a Waste: Outsourcing and how it goes wrong have criticised the ‘disastrous’ practice of UK government outsourcing, but argue that the failures and fiascos are effectively pre-designed.  The authors state that ‘there is an overall logic to the process which costs citizens because outsourcing is what happens at the intersection between the political convenience of the (central state) and the opportunism of outsourcing companies and investors’. Outsourcing allows the shift of blame to private sector providers, and government abdicates responsibility for providing underfunded services and ‘toxic activities’ (border control, for example) in favour of private firms with poor management control.

‘The franchise state which exists to award and monitor contracts at the same time strips itself of institutional resources and intelligence previously used to deliver goods and services.  As outsourcing proceeds, the (central and local) state is increasingly disabled in that it no longer has the capability to deliver public services.’

This situation means that giant contractors and the state become bound together in a form of co-dependence and when it goes wrong the blame can easily be laid on outsourcing contractors or the individual public servants who wrote the contract, rather than the government.  Contracts typically cover mundane activities which too often allow profit taking at the expense of the tax payer and the workforce by outsourcers who do not make capital investment or take market risk.

In the last few months there have been a number of failures and fiascos in public sector outsourcing contracts.  In December 2015 a £160m contract between Cornwall County Council and corporate giant BT was scrapped following a High Court ruling.  The 10-year deal, signed in March 2013, was for BT to run IT, human resources and other services for the council. BT tried to fight the Council’s decision to end the contract after only two years but a ruling was made against them stating BT did not provide ‘the service it had promised to the standard it had promised’.  Again in December 2015 an £800million older people’s care contract in Cambridgeshire ended after just eight months because it was ‘no longer financially sustainable’.  These are some of the more ‘mundane’ failures that tend to slip under the radar, not to mention some of the more controversial outsourcing fiascos such as the recent G4S ‘red doors’ for refugees in Middlesbrough or the Clearsprings ‘coloured bands’ for asylum seekers in Cardiff.

What a Waste points out that there have been various experiments around outsourcing in local councils, notably in Birmingham and Barnet.  Barnet was labelled ‘easyCouncil’ by critics that complained services resembled low-cost, no frills airlines such as easyJet.  Other councils, such as Essex, Southampton City, Suffolk and Staffordshire have also taken up the outsourcing model.  However, as they allude to in the book, Northampton County Council (NCC) is taking the process a step further by transferring 3,850 of its 4,000 employees to 4 new dividend-paying service providers which would deliver all the council’s services, including social care for the elderly.  The Chief Executive is pushing through with plans to begin outsourcing the services in a move which he says will make a £148m saving by 2020, though some fear the plan is a step towards privatisation.  Under EU Procurement Law these contracts will have to go out to tender after 3 years, so fears of effective privatisation are well-founded.

The ‘commission-only’ model being adopted by NCC is likely to be increasingly replicated in Conservative-controlled shires and urban areas.  The fact that there is no real reflection as to how these activities will function under this ‘next generation’ council model is evidence to support many of the arguments in What a Waste.

‘The democratic tragedy of the franchise state is that today’s mainstream politicians are not protesting (or even examining) the outcomes of outsourcing but are planning to grant ever more local monopolies from which organised money can take profits (in many cases without the capital investment or revenue risk which legitimate capitalist profit)’.

In a context of austerity, TINA (There Is No Alternative) is brought to the fore in discussions around the need for cuts to local services, and therefore resistance feels muted.  The authors argue that there is an urgent need for resistance around outsourcing as it is spreading though to sectors which should remain under some form of state control:

‘the failure of politicians and policy makers to protest outsourcing has become an urgent matter because the state has outsourced or is now outsourcing services which are part of what we call the ‘foundational economy’ in health, adult care, welfare and security.  Many of these services are or will be used by most families or individuals because the foundational economy is the basis of material security and the infrastructure of civilised life for the whole population’.

The authors of What a Waste argue that government outsourcing should be curbed by politically agreed prohibitions on outsourcing which is not in the public interest.  In an interview for the book one of the authors, Professor Karel Williams, put forward three principles for public sector outsourcing: firstly, no large scale outsourcing in local government where officers and members do not have the expertise to negotiate contracts; secondly, no outsourcing of ‘politically toxic’ services like border controls because government should take responsibility for what it does; and thirdly, no total outsourcing of any important service like provision of care homes because the public sector needs its own expertise.  It seems unlikely that the current government will take heed of any of these principles.

What this book does not offer is a comprehensive strategy for resistance and the ways in which organised groups against outsourcing can fight the plans.  Past experience shows that even where campaigns have had wide levels of support and have made small gains, they have not been sufficient to block major outsourcing plans from going ahead.  A strategy of resistance needs a co-ordinated approach involving multiple groups which means drawing on the different sources of power both in and outside workplaces, organising in the community and through media campaigning and political lobbying.  Two key challenges for building resistance are first, the willingness to act, particularly among local government workers, where a culture of fear may be developed around whose job is ‘at risk’ as a result of outsourcing.  Second, with such campaigns comes the question about the alternatives to outsourcing.  Labour branded its approach to running Lambeth as the ‘John Lewis’ council operating on the basis of mutual and co-operative values. Is this the ‘least worst’ alternative that could be fought for at a local level?

Dr Heather Connolly is Senior Lecturer at the Leicester Business School at DMU, and a core member of the CURA team.