Ring of steel in Trafalgar Square
As I type there is an occupation of exclusive offices just off Haymarket in central London. Apparently there’s a ‘small’ kettle too. This morning, at 10 am a handful of people people, that news media have associated with the strikes have been arrested, were arrested for breach of the peace offences in east London.
But the march through central London was peaceful, calm and good humoured. I marched the whole route starting practically at the Euston Road and finishing on the Victoria Embankment. I didn’t see a hint, not a sniff, not even a hint of a sniff of trouble. And yet, there was a figurative ‘ring of steel’ at the west end of Fleet Street and an actual ring of steel on Trafalgar Square (pictured below). If you know me, you know I have no truck with violent protest. Some of the scenes we’ve witnessed earlier in the year have saddened me. But there was none of that today.
But the police – provocatively in my view – close off half of Trafalgar Square and with it, access to the seat of our Government (Whitehall, leading to parliament) and access to the seat of our head of state (The Mall, leading to Buckingham Palace), with an actual steel fence. This makes me very very queasy. Policing happens by consent, when did we consent to such a curtailment of our right to peaceful protest. I don’t remember these tactics being debated or justified.
I haven’t seen or heard the police’s justification for this tactic today. But the last time I saw the police erect a physical barrier like this, I was working in Belfast for the 2001 marching season. And certainly visually, I would equate the use of something like this very much more with persistent violent action. Not to control striking teachers and civil servants.
I’ll reserve final judgement until I can find out how the police justified this. But visually, to me, there is something profoundly undemocratic about its use.
Dear Eds, show us your Balls and back the strikes
Tomorrow about 2 million public sector workers will go on strike. The disruption will could mean real difficulty for working parents, out patients, people trying to return to the country and more. I myself have an outpatient appointment that was booked weeks ago and I don’t yet know if it will be affected. But it’s a small price to pay compared to the recklessness that this government is treating the pension schemes of millions of public sector workers.
The rhetoric since the weekend from the government has been provocative and agreesive. Gove branding teachers militant is just one example of many. They simply aren’t prepared to talk reasonably any more. And when communications break down workers are left with little option but to strike.
But their arguemnts about pension reform are as spurious as their unwarranted attacks on teachers. Taking the pension scheme I know most about the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), the government’s case for reform simply doesn’t stack up.
The LGPS is managed locally by pension committees at Local Councils. The only people who qualify for pensions payments from Camden’s scheme are Camden’s former employees. Elected represetatives of each authority with expert advisers manage very large sums of money to ensure the current and future viability of the schemes for its members. The LGPS is stable now and for the future.
Over three years though the government wants to increase staff contributions from 6.6% to 9.8% for every employee. There are no plans for the extra revenue raised to be invested in the future viability of the scheme. This increase amounts to nothing more than an additional tax of hundreds of pounds per year for local government officers up and down the country. Many of whom fall in to the lowest paid workers in the country.
The increase in contributions runs the real risk of mass opt outs from the scheme. The cross party, but Tory controlled Local Government Association agrees. They believe that the risk of opt outs could undermine the future viability of the scheme – the less people are paying in, the less affordable future pensions payments are. Such a reckless approach runs the very real risk of greater demands on taxpayers in future of bailing out a failing pension fund because the very actions this government is taking will destabilise it so much.
Viewed through that lens it starts to look less like a move aimed at affordability and sustainability or even deficit reduction and more like an ideologically driven move to undermine the attractiveness of the public sector as an employer. We’ve been here before of course. The Thatcher and Major governments chipped away at terms and conditions of public sector employees to deter people going in to public service as a career. When Labour won the 1997 general election schools and hospitals and local councils were on their knees. This attack on public sector pensions is just one part of what is becoming a sustained assault on the public sector.
The attacks are sustained and thorough because the Tories don’t believe in state provided public services and much less any semblance of universality. David Cameron has said so. Repeatedly. The Lib Dems are powerless to stop them.
Supporting the strikes isn’t just about a fight for low paid workers to keep hold of more of their salary or a reaction to the appalling way the government has handled what it laughably calls negotiation.
No, supporting the strikes should be essential as a signal that we, the whole Labour movement, continue to support strong, high quality public services delivered on the basis of need, not ability to pay.
In memoria: the bendy 29
It is no more. Variously monickered the free bus, the party bus and the death bus, the number 29 from Wood Green to Trafalgar Sq is no longer a bendy bus.
I have mixed feelings about bendy buses. Back in the days when I was a very regular cyclist I used to hate them. People argue over whether they are impirically dangerous but certainly, along side them at the lights, you’re heading straight on, they want to hang a left, you feel very very vulnerable.
The 29 has been a regular feature of my nearly 15 years in London. I’ve lived on it’s route in Camden, worked on it’s route in Wood Green and regularly use it to get to Arsenal.
One of the reasons it was picked for a bendy route, was that it was so chronically overcrowded as a double decker. Drivers would regularly have to curtail their route dumping people at, most frequently Warren Street, to turn round to try to ferry people in. The was particularly the case in rush hour. And, if you’d embarked in Wood Green, Green Lanes or Finsbury Park the route would often only be changed at Camden Town.
The impact of this is two fold. Firstly many many people from Finsbury park onwards (and sometimes earlier in the route) in the mornings, simply had to wait an age for a bus they could physically fit on and then their route would, without warning change – meaning people heading for more central destinations would have to take a second bus or face a much longer walk.
There’s a socio-economic indicator about bus use. Particularly for commuting. The less you’re paid the more likely you are to get the bus.
Many of the bendy bus routes served London’s poorest communities. The 29, the 38, the 73 (I’m a north London woman, I can’t be expected to list south London routes). If the scrapping of the bendy bus leads to longer waits to get on a bus in the first place and higher levels of disruption to the routes, it’s the poorest workers who’ll suffer most. While it was crowd pleasing politics for some in the last mayoral election the impact will be felt most by those, already cash poor, who may end up more time poor as a result of the change.
Of course it may not happen. Habits may have changed. But on Saturday, a day after the bendy 29 was scrapped, after the Arsenal Fulham game, I got on a double decker 29 to head back to Camden.
It was only going as far as Warren Street.
Equality doesn’t happen by accident
A day late, for which I apologised profusely to Labour List Editor for. But here’s this week’s column.
At last night’s GC we had a contested election for our vice chair campaigns (I know, but stay with me). Two bright, able and keen women stood for the position that had become vacant following a by-election win for the previous incumbent back in September.
It’s significant because the previous month for various reasons only a man had stood, potentially upsetting the gender balance of our EC. An argument was made that women do well in our GC and locally. They’re right too. 14 of our 30 councillors are women and half our Cabinet are too. The previous incumbent was a woman who succeeded me as the post holder. So why bother?
Dogged on this issue I stuck with the fight – which wasn’t universally popular – and ensured that the party took it’s responsibility to equality seriously.
The point of recounting this is not to criticise my local comrades. There is a legitimate view that in our local area people come through the party from a variety of different backgrounds and are successful. And that can be demonstrated by the people who hold positions in the party and on the council.
But I firmly believe that complacency is an enemy of equality. When there were no all women shortlists in 2001 the number of women MPs fell. Women and ethnic minorities are less likely to be elected as both councillors and MPs. Bringing people through the party’s structure will help develop more viable candidates.
If we as a local area are good at this, we should take more responsibility and we can’t rest on our laurels – as the 2001 parliamentary experience demonstrates. It also shows with a bit of extra effort, asking around, and encouragement people will come forward – and that’s the point. Achieving proper representation at a local and national level doesn’t happen by accident we have to work at it and we have to take responsibility for delivering it. All of us.
£400m is just not enough
I welcome any investment in housing. At every step on the ladder in Camden there simply isn’t enough housing. Whether your low paid work means you need an offordable tenure type, or your a new graduate on your first job, a new family, or established family, housing is just too pricy because there isn’t enough of it.
So I should welcome today’s £400m announcement to boost house building and mortgage lending. And yet I can’t really because I don’t think it’s enough to have an impact.
Last year the Government cut almost all the grant available to developers for them to include affordable housing in new developments and since the credit crunch tightened the availability of mortages more than three years ago people, in otherwise well paid jobs, are struggling to get mortgages. This has disasterous knock on consequences for the economy in terms of spending on big tickets items for new homes like sofas and washing machines.
Granted, £400m sounds like a lot of money, but to give you an idea, Camden’s repairs backlog for it’s current affordable housing stock is in excess of £100m.
We could spend a quarter of the government’s new fund simply bringing homes up to scratch. Not a single new tenant or home owner would receive keys to their new home and we, a single London borough could spend a quarter of this new fund over night.
Add this to the fact that the Government cut billions from house building last year, and you can see clearly, £400m probably isn’t going to scratch the surface of our housing supply problems or have more than a very marginal effect on the economy.
The forgotten battle on Housing Benefit
Here’s my latest Labour List column on housing benefit. as ever pasted below if clicking is too much hassle http://labourlist.org/2011/11/the-forgotten-battle-on-housing-benefit/
Well perhaps forgotten is a bit much. But the national focus has slipped. While MPs and Campaigners are continuing to plug away, the changes to Housing Benefit have slipped from the lime light of cuts that have a pernicious impact on people. So I thought I’d use this week’s blog to update you on Camden’s situation.
Remember that the housing benefit caps were bought in under the guise of forcing landlords to reduce rents. The Government’s argument went: An inflated private rented sector, across the land was solely down to the public purse’s willingness to fund an unlimited life of luxury for benefit scroungers who were living in Hampstead palaces while the rest of us could barely afford Doncaster (I have absolutely nothing against Doncaster by the way – it’s just cheaper to live in than Camden).
The housing benefit bill and rising rental costs were nothing to do with the chronic lack of housing supply in parts of the country. Particularly the severe shortfall between supply and demand at every level of the housing market in the south east. And there was certainly no concept that housing benefit is paid in London to a large number of employed people who simply wouldn’t work here in low paid jobs if they didn’t get it.
The housing benefit cap for a three bed in central London is the same as the IPSA cap for MPs allowances for a one bed in central London. Because housing is just bloody expensive here.
We have the same requirements for lower skilled employees as every other part of the country, our schools still need cleaning, we have an insatiable demand for coffee and sandwiches, and pubs, and for our train tickets to be sold to us over very long ticket office opening hours. You get the picture.
So here’s where we are in Camden. As at the 1st of October (the latest available figures):
We have 3471 housing benefit claimants. More than half are affected by the cap – at total 1814 claimants will have to renegotiate their rent or move.
401 claimants or 22% will lose less than £10 per week. This equates to just over £43 per calendar month. Depending on the size of the property and the proportion of a landlords income this represents we can be hopeful that a good number of these people will be able to simply renegotiate. But it won’t be all. Landlords will be letting at rates based on both the market and their outgoings. Rents in London are going up scarily fast.
Then we get to the rest.
The average loss over the entire pool of losing claimants is £40.55 per week. Or in excess of £175 per calendar month. Not often one to champion the cause of private landlords, would you give up this level of income in a month? Landlords good or bad and whether they own just one or two properties or a whole street, operate in a competitive and rising market. This is London. This is Camden. From my own experience not a week goes by when I don’t get a letter from either a lettings agent or a big financial institution offering me silly money for my flat in, let’s face it, not the nicest bit of Kentish Town (not the worst bit either and I love it, before my neighbours or ward councillors go spare).
The losers in Camden include 142 pensioners, 431 people aged 25 to 35 (as the single persons age limit is raised forcing more people in to bedsits) and 721 families that are responsible for 1359 children.
There are also nearly 300 working claimants.
It doesn’t matter which group you look at, pensioners, forced to leave their social and support networks, uprooted from places where they may be long established. Or forced to worse housing, more poorly insulated and more costly to heat. Young people trying to find their way in life forced to live in bedsit accommodation for longer. 1359 Children who face living in increasing overcrowding or major disruption to their education. And of course people in work for whom housing benefit is a subsidy for wages that fail to reflect the cost of living in London who may be forced to leave their job and claim even more benefits or to a lengthy commute adding to their costs.
For the children there’s an added risk, churn through the school system, particularly increased in year movements, makes place planning unpredictable. This can be a nightmare for parents trying desperately to get their kids in to school. Perhaps in the hope that they will be more successful and less reliant on the state. But worse, for those children who are known to social services or are at risk, a forced and completely unnecessary move makes them more vulnerable because even if everything goes smoothly new relationships will need to be built with a new social worker and new teachers.
We’re doing targeted work with our claimants to help them understand and deal with the changes, and with our in work claimants we’ve funded a project aimed at helping them increase their income to lessen the likelihood they have to move by ensuring they can afford a bit more rent. But we can’t help everyone.
It’s worth highlighting again because this is having a slow impact on thousands of people, particularly in the south east. It’s become less visible because the date for the changes to take effect is the anniversary of the claim, so there isn’t a mass migration of people from inner London to outer or from better housing to poorer. There is a slow and malevolent change in thousands of people lives. When universal credit takes effect it will get far far worse.
Anything but misadventure.
Whenever I hear that an inquest deems a cause of death to be misadventure, an immediate image of a young man (always a man), dressed head to toe in North Face (or if you’re on a budget like me Quechua) slipping off a glacier. It’s someone having fun, doing something they loved, but that ultimately, tragically goes horibbly wrong. But at least we can comfort ourselves by knowing they died happy.
When that verdict was given by the coroner for Amy Winehouse’s death earlier today, I couldn’t help but cry inside.
What actually happened goes something like this: Amy Winehouse, an outrageously talented young women, took to drink and drugs like she took to music. Notoriously associated with the Camden music scene and successful enough to be wealthy enough to afford most things she presumably found it pretty easy to come by both drink and drugs.
She developed an addiction to both. Outwardly I suspect she often seemed like she was having fun to her friends, groupies, fans. I only saw her once in a Camden Town pub. Playing pool in The Mixer. She seemed to me to be having fun. But addiction is an illness. It’s diagnosable and treatable.
She’d kicked drugs. And, by reports to the coroner today, hadn’t drunk for three weeks before the day she died. But she fell off the wagon. Which apparently had been her pattern – sober for days or weeks followed by a bender. She died, as has been the headline since the verdict was given, five times over the drink drive limit.
She died alone. Poisoned by a substance she couldn’t find a way to live without.
Does that sound like misadventure?
Camden has one of the highest levels of mental health and addiction incidents in the country. There will be many reasons for this. Probably because we’re a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow (or at least glitzy central London at the end of several railway lines). Probably because our vibrant music scene has the seedy underbelly, and drinking and live music go hand in hand wherever you are in the world. Probably because we have very high levels of poverty and housing overcrowding and worklessness. Probably because we have high numbers of high flyers in very high pressured jobs.
And probably because sometimes life can be harsh and London can be cruel.
There are things we can and do do. We can provide needle exchange and access to other services via it. We can fund help to get mental health patients back on the right track, in to work or training. We can provide treatment services for the many different addictions and mental health problems. Sometimes services help fully, sometimes they help partly, sometimes people can’t find the right kind of help at the right time. Sometimes the help isn’t there. Sometimes the help is pushed away.
There’s never enough to go round though. And many mental health campaigners, possibly with some justification will tell you these services are an easy target for cuts.
I suspect one of the reasons for this is that we never really know how many people die from their illness or with their illness as a contributory factor because unless it’s suicide it’s never recorded on a death certificate.
Like Amy, people who die from their illness do so by accident or misadventure – that’s what the coroners will say, so after the fact it becomes a hidden statistic. And it takes a high profile case like this one, to remind us that all around there are people suffering from illnesses that are diagnosable and treatable that don’t get the help they really need when they need it.
I wish Amy’s family all the luck in the world with their charity because there are many people (and their families and loved ones) who need the help.
Here’s my labourlist column. My first since the sight was revamped. And quite amazing it is too. Text below if you’re too lazy to click the link.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.
While other commentators pick apart what last night’s rebellion means for the Conservatives, we also need to ask what it means for Clegg, the Coaltion and ultimately for Labour. Because, while the vote itself might be small fry, the consequences could be rather more for reaching.
First up, here’s a few facts from the acres of coverage last night’s rebellion on Europe. It’s the largest post-war Conservative rebellion. Nearly half of all Tory backbenchers defied a three line whip. Nick Robinson hypothesised before the vote that any rebellion of more than 61 means the whips had failed, as more MPs rebelled than originally backed the motion. He put 96 as the meltdown benchmark. 79 is just closer to meltdown than whip failure. Rumour has it that George Osborne was doing desperate last ditch phoning when it became clear that so many were likely to rebel.
The motion and vote was meaningless, in one sense at least. Cameron was never going to lose it, so a lot of rebels will have thought ‘what the hey?’ But for him, the decision to impose a whip, the subsequent failure of party management and the organisation of the rebels should be a worry.
It may be that the Tory right who rebelled last night felt that Cameron had spent so much of the last eighteen months comforting and cajoling Liberal Democrats that they deserved a little bit of the love. (I speculate because I don’t for one second pretend to know the inner workings of the minds of the Tory right.)
The government has a working majority of 83. Only just over a third of this pool of actual or potential malcontents are required to defeat the Government. Put like that it’s not that much.
This presents both an opportunity and a risk for Labour. This Government is pursuing a ruthless right wing agenda and using an economic situation – now very much of it’s own making – as cover for doing it. It could be tempting, and much fun, to laugh at any situation where the government finds itself buffeted from left to right, trying to please everyone to win votes. And it could be tempting to stoke it up.
But, the economic situation is now so perilous, that there could be one thing worse than a well run ruthless right wing government – a badly run one. The impact that the international markets and credit rating agencies have must be taken in to account. And one of the reasons why they view Greece and Italian debt so poorly is the length of time it has taken the EU to act.
Conservatives seem to be little more than commentators
The Conservative conference is over and while as you might expect I didn’t have high hopes from my political perspective even these low expectations were dashed.
Simply put my overwhelming view of those at the top of the Conservative party is that they came across as commentators reflecting events, not analysts understanding events – diagnosing causes of and suggesting solutions for our problems. And they don’t come close to being leaders that are shaping events.
Nowhere is was this more evident than in Cameron’s economic bits of his speech. Which can mostly be boiled down to the observation that Greece is in trouble and the Eurozone countries aren’t doing enough to resolve it. I doubt there’s anyone left in the country that needed the prime minister to tell them that.
It’s a problem that’s been evident in some of areas of Government policy for some time. One of the reasons why Lansley has ended up in so much trouble politically is not just that his reforms are unpopular and viewed as privatisation by large sections of the electorate. It’s that he doesn’t have the usual band of cheerleaders supporting his reform because he’s singularly failed to get across what problem he’s diagnosed that requires the NHS to be subject to the biggest and most costly reorganisation in it’s history. He hasn’t even put it in terms of problems that the public already understand that we need to get to grips with, increasing longevity, obesity and alchol consumption.
While this has been evident in the NHS policy for some time I hadn’t quite realised the depth to which analysis and proposed solutions were missing elsewhere. Collecting all Tory cabinet members together in one places put this in stark relief. People looking for substantive policy announcements had pretty slim pickings from this conference.
It’s possible this lack of understanding and therefore lack of vision accounts for some of the bizarre media handling problems. Not being able to explain ‘credit easing’, an argument about a cat and whether we should indeed all pay off our credit cards in one go. It seems the machine supporting Cameron is either completely incompetent or have no clear direction about what it’s supposed to be doing.
On the economic front, while the problems in the Eurozone and the US aren’t directly ours to solve, our exposure is such that our politicians should really have an idea how we at least weather the storm. This would normally involve diagnosing the problem and proscribing a solution. And ensuring the leadership to make it happen. In fact, because of our electoral cycles, if he wanted to be, David Cameron is actually perfectly placed to provide G8/G20 economic leadership. He’s three and a half years from an election. A luxury Obama, Merkel and Sarkozy don’t have.
Cameron told the country not to be paralysed by fear of the economic situation yesterday. But it’s going to be pretty difficult for your average person in the street to heed this advice when the goverment appears to be in a state of paralysis itself.
The council tax conundrum
So the big trail from Osborne’s speech is the Conservative’s pledge to provide funds to ‘freeze’ council tax for another year. I’ve yet to plough in to it enough to know whether this is new money or not. But it’s certainly not actually new policy – it was promised at Tory conference as far back as 2008 and was included in the coalition agreement. It’s possible confirmation of the actual cash to do it for next year is new (I’ll update if I can find out).
The ’freeze’ is good politics. There’s no doubt about it.
Council tax is part of a fairly outdated system of funding for local government. The amount it contributes to a council’s total budget for services varies wildly. Broadly the more deprived an area is, the higher the grant from central government, the lower the proportion of the budget comes from council tax. But this is a system the government is seeking to undo – they see targeting resources based on deprivation as unfair you see.
In Camden, with areas of relatively high deprivation council tax – prior to the cuts – contributed just under 25% or about £100m of our total budget for services. So even where our grant dwarfs the council tax take the proportion of our total spend is significant.
Council tax, as you will all know, is levied annually from April to April, set in an annual budget setting process. It’s different from income tax or vat because you get a physical bill and have to arrange to pay it separately – it’s therefore much more visible. Unlike the States, VAT is included in the ticket price so you never really see it, same with PAYE taxpayers who check their wages have gone in to their bank account and only vaguely engage with (or understand depending on how complex your employer presents the information!!) the lines of numbers on their pay slip. This means that psychologically our relationship with council tax is different. The policy to ‘freeze’ it understands this relationship between the taxpayer and the bill.
But what the announcement doesn’t say, is that the funding to ‘freeze’ is a real terms cut. Like last year, councils will be given the equivalent of, as far as I can ascertain an arbitrary 2.5% rise on their council tax in return for ‘freezing’ it. With CPI running at 4.5% and RPI in excess of 5% the level of funding amounts to a real terms cut. Meaning councils that set a one year budget in February/March this year will now have to do some additional thinking about what they do locally.
To give you an idea of the impact of this cut that 2.5% funding represents in Camden it amounts to £2m-£2.5m depending on which inflationary measure you use. This could roughly back fill the cut we’ve made to our voluntary sector grant funding, or the cut we’ve made to libraries, or that which we’ve made to youth services, it could fund a whole menu of smaller but important projects that have suffered like good neighbour schemes and discretionary freedom passes etc. We’d have to choose which to prioritise but you get the picture about what it could fund.
In Camden, we’ve left the possibility of council tax rises on the table, but not planned for it. The financial situation, nationally and internationally is so precarious that to do anything else would I think be foolhardy, this is particularly the case because although we have a ‘commitment’ about the third year of funding from Government it’s not confirmed. They could yet impose further cuts in 2013/14 with no redress for councils. Any rise would have to be done carefully and in my view, very carefully hypothecated to a particular service or issue.
What the government has done today is make it a lot harder politically to put this back on the table as we start to prepare our budget for next year. Even before today is was going to be politically treacherous territory for any council. The voter relationship with the tax and the financial squeeze families are facing means decisions to take more money from families advisedly.
But because this has been covered by the media as funding for a ‘freeze’ the Tories are quickly winning the presentation battle. In the minds of voters councils will have extra cash available so as not to increase the tax locally. And no local authority is now going to be able to play the presentational catch up to ensure that voters understand that because of inflation this is a further cut to funding for local services.
It’s also worth noting that people on low incomes benefit less than people on higher incomes, that’s because council tax benefit – available to some people and families in lower paid work – absorbs both reductions and increases in the tax. So the people who benefit most are those that pay their full council tax.
One of the reasons that we’ve left the tax on the table in Camden as an option is because it’s the only meaningful way that councils have to raise extra revenue. Other streams are self limiting – like charges for leisure activities, there’s only so much you can charge before people stop paying, or strictly ring fenced – like parking where what you can spend revenue on is strictly controlled.
At a time when the government has chosen to target local councils particularly hard for cuts in public spending the limitations of having only one meaningful way of raising revenue locally is demonstrated in stark relief.
But as I said at the beginning, it’s good politics, however damaging the policy might be in the long term to local services and local communities.
