Manchester's review makes the case for a national public enquiry into street grooming

It's some time in the early 2000s and, as the controlling group's executive on Bradford Council, we're briefed about 'grooming' in Keighley. It's a matter-of-fact presentation albeit one informed by the political issues associated with the BNP and the concerns raised publicly by Anne Cryer, then Labour MP for the town. And, since you are going to ask, that's it. We were told it was with the police, that social services were engaged and that it was a bad but isolated incident. I don't recall any other discussion or presentation on the subject in the remainder of my time as a member of the Council Executive (I left in 2006).

I present this observation - it's a recollection rather than a set of facts - because it seems to me that we failed some very vulnerable young people back then. And I say 'we' here to refer to us as councillors because every year, sometimes more than once, we make a big thing of us being 'corporate parents' to hundreds of young people in the Council's care. So when one of those young people is raped, exploited and abused we should be (and mostly aren't) taking some responsibility.

Today the review commissioned by Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham has reported on the scandal of how Greater Manchester Police allowed hundreds of abusers to carry on raping and exploiting young people in the city. The report describes how GMP made choices about resources and priorities, the downgrading of serious accusations and the ending of the investigation that, without question, resulted in subsequent abuse, exploitation and rape of children:

After her (Victoria Agoglia) death a police investigation, Operation Augusta, was set up to see if there was a wider problem of child sexual exploitation in south Manchester. Officers managed to quickly identify a network of nearly 100 Asian men potentially involved in the abuse of scores of girls via takeaways in and around Rusholme, but the operation was shut down shortly afterwards due to resources, ‘rather than a sound understanding’ of whether lines of inquiry had been exhausted.

Barely any charges were made against the men identified by the operation. Eight of them later went on to commit serious sexual crimes, including the rape of a child, the rape of a young woman, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.

At the same time as we were being told that a similar case in Keighley was under control and an isolated incident, GMP along with Manchester social services were, in effect, doing the same. And we know now that there were other cases in dozens of other towns and cities including Rochdale, Rotherham, Birmingham, Dewsbury and Bradford. Far from being isolated incidents, we had a pattern of abusive and exploitative behaviour directed to vulnerable teenage girls right across the country.

Since this became clear, we have seen individual reports from each of these places, some more telling than others but all showing the same detachment as public authorities repeatedly ignored representation, dismissed exploited girls as 'making their own choices' or 'sexually aware', and hinted as other sensitivities contributing to the lack of action to protect the abused or deal with the abusers. Beyond these public reports there is a lot more information, detailed and granular evidence, hidden away in Serious Case Reviews and Court Files. Public authorities have used every trick in the book to avoid their failings being revealed - that the victims were mostly children means that these authorities feel able to hide behind the laws intended to protect young people, extending them to protect social workers, police officers and the CPS lawyers from proper scrutiny. Too many people responsible for failing to protect young girls from exploitation, abuse and rape have avoided being held to account.

There have now been dozens of similar cases across the UK and it is time to ask how it is that, despite the attention supposedly given to correcting past failures, the cases still keep coming forward, each one showing public authorities being slow to respond and hesitant in taking action. Every case involves failures by social services to protect children in their care and most involve the police giving a disturbingly low priority to the abuse. We're told by councils and police that all the past problems are resolved (this, in my experience, is definitely the argument in Bradford) but we get no actual evidence to substantiate this assertion. Meanwhile, anecdotally, the problem on the streets persists with girls (often as young as eleven) targeted by young, mostly Pakistani heritage, men.

It is time to think seriously about how we are responding to this problem and the words coming from police and councils, while sympathetic and carefully crafted, seem complacent and intended to give the impression that all is right when evidently it is not. There is a very strong case for a properly constituted - as Ed Miliband would doubtless say, judge-led - enquiry into the failures of public authorities to protect vulnerable girls from abuse. If government can find time and money to do enquiries into the gender pay gap (and to pass legislation too), I'm absolutely sure they can find the time and money to look into the far more serious issue of the industrial exploitation, rape and abuse of girls, many in the care of the state.

Such an enquiry can, as well as considering actions to take in response to public sector failures, look at why girls in public care are given so much license and at how young men - and some not so young - feel able to treat those girls as the trashiest sort of disposable chattel. There are some who say that we can't do this because the Pakistani community would feel put upon in some way but, from conservations I've had over recent years, I'm absolutely sure that this is not the case and that many from that community (and the wider Muslim community), especially those trying to provide a voice for women, would welcome a robust and honest examination looking at a problem they know persists with a minority of Pakistani heritage men.

In failing to respond openly to the problem - as we know from Rotherham, partly from fear of being accused of racism - public authorities give oxygen to those who are racist and anti-Muslim. The complacency of council leaderships, police and crime commissioners and those leading social services risks building up to a further problem as exploitative grooming continues on the streets of many towns and cities. A public enquiry would provide some restitution for victims, would put the problem in a national context instead of as a series of local challenges, and would provide the basis for government to consider whether changes to law, regulation or resourcing are needed to provide better protection for girls and a tougher response to those men who want to exploit, abuse and rape those girls.

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Transport planners are asking the wrong question - which is why their answer is always 'more trains'

Places of work are not conveniently distributed and, to make matters worse, where most people live is more disbursed than planners seem to think. Since most people don't live in dense inner-city suburbs and don't work in 'central business districts' (this is true even for a city like London), transport planning solutions founded on urban transit from suburb to city don't work. Transport planners are asking the wrong question and getting the wrong answer.

Here's Joel Kotkin talking about Los Angeles:

If you want a job in Southern California, it is very useful to have a car. The average worker in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (which includes Orange County) can get to fewer than 1 percent of the jobs by transit in 30 minutes. By car, the average worker can get to 33 times as many jobs, according to University of Minnesota research. In Riverside-San Bernardino, the average worker can get to nearly 100 times as many jobs by car as by transit in 30 minutes.

Yet, as Kotkin observes, the city managements in Southern California have "...decided only their solution — more trains — is an acceptable alternative." There's no consideration of ride-hailing, ride-sharing or private jitneys - responses that work with the dispersed nature of the place and the realities of how people live.

West Yorkshire is, you'll all agree, pretty urban in nature but its land area is a third bigger than Greater London with a quarter of the population. And, for all Leeds supposed significance (something I consider consistently overstated to the detriment of the region), the distribution of employment is such that the same applies to West Yorkshire as does in Los Angeles - if you want a job it's pretty useful to have a car.

Despite this reality, transport planners remain transfixed by the idea of the train (or some other fixed line system such as trams, streetcars or trolley buses) - transport solutions that, as one wag put it, "take people from one place they don't want to be to another place they don't want to be". We go to London, which has the most comprehensive public transport system of any major city anywhere, and say "let's do that" without appreciating the constraints of physical geography, where people live and where they work. We need a tram because Manchester has a tram.

But Manchester's tram system doesn't serve most of Greater Manchester:



So, because the tram doesn't go near where most Mancunians live, they do what they've done for years - get in their car and drive to work. Tram systems are great but still, for places that have them, represent fewer than 5% of commuter journeys.

The central problem here - one that transport planners must know but seem to ignore - is that the distribution of people and jobs simply isn't suited to the sort of mass transit solutions those planners like other than where population density is high and there has been a long history of major investment in transport infrastructure (London and Tokyo are the two best examples). Given that it is uneconomic to run relative cheap bus services into many dispersed parts of West Yorkshire what hope do we have of creating a fixed infrastructure transit system that can replace using the car?

Last night I had a conversation with some folk about buses and taxis (it started with us talking about getting the train to Carlisle). The conclusion of the conversation was that, if there were more than two of you then getting a taxi to Bingley station for the train is cheaper than using the bus. And, even with two people the extra cost of a cab is minimal (seven quid in a taxi, six quid and change on the bus). So you get a taxi that comes at your convenience, gets you there quicker and picks you up from your front door rather than have you stand in the wind and rain at a bus stop.

So the right way to think about transport in this case is "how do we make taxis cheaper, cleaner and safer". But that's not what transport authorities are doing - quite the opposite. When a system arrives (ride sharing) that promises to do just this the response of authorities is to try and stop the improvement. And the same goes for ride-hailing, jitneys and mini-buses - public authorities put regulatory barriers in the way, often at the behest of those whose interests are affected by these innovations.

This isn't to say you shouldn't have a tram (although I consider it the wrong thing for West Yorkshire) but to argue for transport planning to work with human behaviour rather than to see itself as trying to force people to change that behaviour. I never drive into Leeds city centre, not because I'm trying to save the planet or think cars are evil but because it's cheap and convenient for me to do so (especially when my wife drops me off at the station). I do drive into Bradford centre because the public transport option isn't cheaper or more convenient.

Joel Kotkin is right to criticise this sort of statement from transport chiefs (this is from the CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Phil Washington):

“It’s too easy to drive in this city. We want to reach the riders that left and get to the new ones as well. And part of that has to do with actually making driving harder.”

Since no transport system based on fixed lines can serve a dispersed population as well as the car, this attitude condemns many people to a less pleasant, more expensive and slower journey that can't be substituted for a ride on a public transport system. Yes the new capacity will fill up (although it is interesting to note that most journeys on UK tram systems outside London are not commuter journeys) but it will be marginal to the totality of journeys.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the 'decarbonisation' of road transport (what you use to generate the electricity, how to keep all those cars charged up, power grid problems, etc.) but the intention of public authorities is to do just that - we're committed to 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2040. It would be, therefore, better to invest in resolving those unanswered questions than to pile more billions into transport systems that don't even begin to answer the question we should be asking - how can people move around as they do now but more efficiently, more safely and more cleanly?

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Why? Thoughts on terrorism too close to home.

I don't get it. Really I don't. I cannot begin to comprehend why someone would blow themselves up in the foyer of a concert hall filled with youngsters enjoying a fantastic night out. I doubt you can either. Yet someone did. Not only blew themselves up but planned the attack on the literally innocent - an audience mostly of young teenage girls.

For only the second time in my life - and that is twice too often - I've been looking at a terrorist attack from the point of connection rather than as a distant, shocked onlooker. Back in 1984 I didn't go to Party Conference but dozens of friends and colleagues did. As people were pulled from the rubble I worried that one of them would be someone I knew. Fortunately this wasn't the case but I recall - in days before mobile phones and text messaging - trying to find out.

Today, having been briefed about the Bradford people - including children - affected by the Manchester Arena bombing, I discover that one of those affected is a colleague's wife who had bought tickets for their daughters as a Christmas present - all three injured in the attack. They'll be OK it seems but it keeps running through your head how close it is - and how some Mums and Dads have a different and terrible shock to deal with today.

I've been involved in politics all my life. I get the passion involved and how sometimes is spins into anger. But what is gained by blowing yourself up among a load of children? What is achieved?

There will be a great deal of speculation. Lots of pointless chatter about who to blame and who's at fault. Fingers will point at religion, at past wars and at current foreign policy. Shouty arguments about the precise words used in a Tweet will crop up. And, in all this, we won't be an inch closer to understanding what made some young man strap on a bomb and blow himself - and hundreds of innocent girls - up in Manchester last night.

Right now we can pull together. Recognise the commitment, bravery and dedication of emergency services, doctors, nurses and others who responded so quickly to what happened. Plus the taxi drivers, hotel managers and Manchester residents who went out of their way to help. It's a reminder that most people are good people, regardless of size, shape, colour or creed, and that ordinary people will always do extraordinary things at these times.

But at some point we have to ask why the bombing took place. Not through some dull old analysis of geopolitics. Not by sweeping statements about Muslims. But simply by asking what made that person strap on that bomb and head off to murder and maim innocent girls having a great night out in Manchester. What got into their mind, infected their behaviour and made such a terrible act, in some evil and warped way, justified? We owe it to the 22 people killed yesterday, to their families and friends, to the injured and hurt, and to people everywhere who look on and simply ask: "why?".

For my part I don't get it.

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Local protectionism is no way to raise economic growth in poor places - a critique of inclusive growth

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The RSA, that trendiest of slightly left wing think tanks, has launched a thing called the 'Inclusive Growth Commission':

Chaired by former BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders and building on the success of the RSA’s City Growth Commission, the Commission will seek to devise new models for place-based growth, which enable the widest range of people to participate fully in, and benefit from, the growth of their local area.

The core of the Commission's argument is:

Public services and welfare remain fragmented; economic and social policies often seem to pull in opposite directions. Although growth is happening and unemployment falling, large sections of the population are not benefiting. Big wealth gaps and large numbers of economically inactive people have negative impacts on local economies, life chances and social cohesion. Costs to the state remain high, growth is low and prosperity the privilege of a few.

It seems an entirely noble idea to look more closely at how, to borrow a phrase, the proceeds of growth can be shared. The focus - entirely right for a geographer like me - is place-based, stressing the uniqueness of a particular town or city and seeking development solutions that resonate with that locality. The problem is that the RSA, like many other such organisations, has taken as its text the idea that inequality is the cause of poverty in places like Manchester, Liverpool and Bradford.

The worry I have with this place-based model, especially when coming from a centrist, 'government is good' ideology, is that we fall easily into the ideas about resilience, the local multiplier and social models of business. Here's Neil McInroy from the Centre for Local Economic Studies (CLES):

Overall, the plans to build a more inclusive growth model faces a choice. On the one hand the commission can add a stronger social face to an economy which works for the few, not the many. In this, they will reveal some of the problems of growth and this will prompt some policy changes. However, will the commission’s recommendations alter the longstanding frame to local economic activity – where productivity and growth has a pre-eminent position and is viewed as having much higher importance than that of inequality and poverty?

McInroy sets out a 'critique' based on his organisation's position - alongside the New Economics Foundation, Transition Towns and the New Weather Institute - as advocates of what I call local protectionism. For McInroy there is a dominant regional growth model - agglomeration - that needs to be challenged if we are to get an inclusive economy. Essentially in the critique the place-based model means that growth has to be spread across a region rather than being focused on city centres and 'growth hubs'. McInroy will point to the success of Manchester city centre and then to the fact that, despite this success, the metropolitan area of Manchester still contains many of England's poorest places.

It also has losers – city region peripheries, smaller towns and the low skilled. We must look at areas beyond city centres to outer boroughs. We must focus much more on local supply chains and ensure investment to local small businesses is on an equal footing to global corporates and global investors.

In here we have the problem - that reference to 'local supply chains' will be familiar to anyone reading the output of CLES, NEF and NWI. It refers to the view that local supply chains keep more money within the community than supply chains based on the national economy. The idea of the local or regional multiplier is central to this assertion - NEF make a good living from plugging their LM3 model to all and sundry (despite it having no real theoretical basis or any robust empirical support). The problem is that the local multiplier is something of a myth - the impact of excluding national supply chains is, in effect, the same as any act of protectionism. So any gain from having the money circulate within the community for longer is lost in that community having to pay higher prices.

The second element here is the persistence of the view that welfare payments somehow contribute to a local economy. It's true that the very poor places in Manchester and Liverpool receive large amounts of the money we redistribute (giving the lie to those who say there is no dispersal, no 'trickle down') but it is also true that, however valid that welfare payment might be, it still carries an opportunity cost. If the money wasn't raised in taxes it would have been used in another way - perhaps on consumption, maybe invested.

No-one disputes the objective - we'd like more of those people dependent on benefits not to be dependent on benefits. I'm guessing that's what the RSA mean by inclusive growth. The issue is how we go about this - do we run the risk of a slower rate of growth by insisting that large sums are redistributed in some way. If we reject the idea of agglomeration as a driver of growth, then we have to put something in its place. The problem is that the alternatives on offer from the likes of McInroy will act only to futher damage local economies by raising prices and decoupling them from the more successful national economy.

In the end local economies thrive because government does not direct them - the vanity of the RSA position and the stupidity of the CLES outlook is that there is some magical role for local or regional government in delivering both economic growth and a less unequal society. For me the reduction of actual poverty is more important than endlessly fretting over measures of inequality (or 'relative poverty' as folk like to call it) and this is brought about by government not obstructing the drivers of growth. It implies lower taxes when often poorer places have high taxes. It demands less regulation and intervention when the preference of big city governments is to intervene more. And it requires that we connect poor places to the rich places making it possible for people to travel - economically and physically - from the former to the latter.

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"Leeds, Leeds...everyone hates us but we don't care" (except you do really)

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OK, so I'm in Bradford meaning that what I say about Leeds is filtered through a historic rivalry. More recently that rivalry has been further tempered by a sort of sophisticated grumpiness - how come it is that Leeds is ever so shiny while Bradford struggles. We seek out the little wins - the fact that Bradford, all stone and grandeur, is so much better looking than Leeds; the superiority of the South Pennine uplands to grey, man-ruined central Yorkshire coalfield. And we point or laugh at the struggles of Leeds United.

But we're allowed this indulgence. It's a sort of West Riding sibling rivalry and, when the chips are down, both cities are both great and also in Yorkshire. Unlike Manchester.

So I smiled at this passionate grumble inspired (if that is the right word) by Evan Davies' 'Mind the Gap' programme on the BBC and its conclusion that 'only Manchester could compete with London'. Here's a flavour:

What the BBC tend to do on such occasions is ‘confuse’ the city of Manchester with Greater Manchester, which is not a city but a type of county. I’ve no idea how they sneaked Greater Manchester past the people of Salford, Bolton or Wigan. I do know that if, at any point in history, you suggested that an area of Yorkshire was called Greater Leeds then the proud people of Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax or Keighley (a town bigger than Wigan) would, quite rightly, be out on the street smashing and burning stuff.

Fighting stuff! But Mick McCann (in the mix for the biggest fan of Leeds as a city) needs to step back and ask a serious question. Why is it that Evan Davies concluded what he did about Manchester (other than rank bias because the BBC got transplanted - or is it dumped - in a city that isn't Manchester but is close by)?

Mick sets out all the statistics, observing that Leeds folk are wealthier, brainier and prettier than Mancunians, but this isn't the point. The point is that, while everyone knows about Manchester (blame football for this), Leeds is best described as "oh yes, Leeds, I forget about Leeds". Folk out there in the wide world know about Yorkshire - the Yorkshire marketing folk win prizes for their efforts:

Yorkshire's bumptious tourist board has retained its title as best marketeer in the World Travel Awards, the nearest thing to the Oscars in the industry.

And the county is great - what other English county gets its name chanted at rock concerts? (The London indie band Goodshoes, when they first appeared at the Cockpit in Leeds were taken aback - they thought the 'Yorkshire, Yorkshire' chant was 'You're shit, you're shit').  Across the world, Yorkshire ex-pats are telling people that it's the grandest, greatest, most beautiful and definitely most manly place on the planet.

But somehow this doesn't rub off on Leeds.

Leeds is boring, workaday, the dullsville of the West Riding. And not just because it lacks the glamour of a premier league football team. Ask people what there is in Leeds and they'll go, "er, shops?" People will stay in Leeds (hotels, restaurants) but remember the trips out of town - to Saltaire or Ilkley, to York and up into the Dales. So when someone asks those visitors where they went, the answer is Yorkshire not Leeds. Never Leeds.

Leeds needn't be boring - after all there's little to recommend Manchester (football and telly apart - and that's not really in Manchester anyhow) but it has scrubbed up well, put on its new pair of Converse and made out that it's the trendy place in the North.

Here's the problem for Leeds. Instead of a shaggy haircut, a beard and skinny jeans (or whatever is trendy these days - I'm not an expert) what Leeds has done is buy a Hugo Boss suit, some shiny shoes and a man bag. All those hipsterish trendsetters (or people who think they are and have access to a TV camera) aren't impressed.

So rather than dwelling on a (pretty impressive) arena, a (very fine) new shopping centre and some (splendidly grand) art and music venues, what Leeds needs to do is find something edgier, rougher and tougher. Perhaps change the perception so those visitors who came to Yorkshire go home and tell people they went to Leeds.

But what I do know is that moaning about how the BBC (or anyone else for that matter) has some sort of down on Leeds will get the city precisely nowhere.

Trust me on this, I'm from Bradford.

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So what are local councils for? A thought on objective-setting

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I'm reading the agenda for Bradford Council's Regeneration and Culture Overview and Scrutiny committee (like you do). And I'm struck by the problem with local government - perhaps the problem with government everywhere - the problem of, for want of a better term, 'mission creep'.

Except it's not quite mission creep. The problem is that most of the time, in most places, government is really uncertain about its objectives. It's not that extraneous or new 'objectives' are added to an activity but that government doesn't actually know what its there to do.

Government is something we rather take for granted. We can see the things it does - everything from invading Iraq to emptying out rubbish bins once a week. At the front end, we tend to see the job being done more or less well. Satisfaction rates for waste collection in England are generally pretty high -  certainly over 80% and, in many cases, over 90%. And we don't need reminding how good our front-line troops are at their job.

However (and I'll stick with local government here), sit down with a big local council and ask them what their objectives are. What you'll get is everything from the stupidly banal - "to be a world class city" - to the utterly meaningless. Here by way of example is Manchester Council's 'objective':

As a Council our objective is to support the delivery of Manchester’s Community Strategy through the Manchester Partnership. The Community Strategy was refreshed during 2012/13, reaffirming our vision of Manchester as a world class city as competitive as the best international cities;

• that stands out as enterprising, creative and industrious
• with highly skilled and motivated people
• living in successful neighbourhoods whose prosperity is environmentally sustainable  
• where all our residents can meet their full potential, are valued and secure 

Who could disagree with any of this - as a mission statement it's wonderful, capturing the idea of a thriving, dynamic, international city. But is it actually an objective? Does it tell me anything about what I should be doing right now? Can it help Councillors and officers know what decisions they should be taking today? And is it a guide to developing a strategy?

Sadly the answer to all those questions is 'no' (I'm not picking on Manchester here - Bradford's will be just as anodyne, just as purposeless, I just couldn't find them).

Local councils are complicated beasts running a lot of different services that, other than being delivered locally, don't really have a great deal in common. Some are related to place - roads, paths, parks, trees and so on - while others such as home help services relate to individual people. Councils respond to emergency situations ranging from flooding through to taking abused children into care. And councils provide (although this is a little moot these days) services such as education across the whole population.

Go on then. Set a clear, understandable and quantified objective for all that activity. Pretty challenging! And this is the problem that results in terms like "world class city" cropping up. It seems to me that, in the absence of a clear external incentive (such as that coming from customers switching to another supplier or from the profit motive) Councils are forced to look within themselves for that incentive.

As a result Councils create visions, missions and objectives that aren't within their capacity to deliver - those four bullet points of Manchester's aren't really within the City Council's gift. The council can influence every one of them but doesn't control them. Nor for that matter are those bullets under the control of government (or 'the wider public sector' as we like to call it) making them almost entirely useless as an 'objective'.

I'm a 'soft loo-paper' Tory. Local government is not some sort of ideological mission to change the world but a fairly prosaic set of services that we think need providing - schools, waste collection and disposal, looking after the roads, helping old and disabled people who need support, protecting vulnerable people especially children and things like parks, swimming pools and libraries that provide for our leisure. Plus a set of statutory roles and functions including planning, licensing and environmental protection.

Our job as a council is to do these things well. Both to the satisfaction of local residents and to agreed objective standards of service quality. For sure we can add a little bit of vision and future planning into our mix of activities but our purpose isn't to change people's behaviour but to provide a place - safe, cared for and open - that allows people to make the most of their individual, personal lives.

The problem is that councils can't leave well alone. We have to poke about at the 'let's change people's behaviour', 'let's save the planet', 'we will transform lives in the borough' sort of stuff with the result being (as Bradford demonstrates) a host of essentially interfering strategies - a 'play strategy', a 'food strategy', a 'cycling strategy', an 'alcohol strategy'. The public hasn't asked for any of this expensive activity and wouldn't even notice if it wasn't there. Yet because the producers of these strategies can provide a tenuous link to the 'objective' or 'vision' they are claimed as vital and essential to the council's purpose.

We fuss and worry about the grandiose - indeed there's nothing us councillors like more than a bit of grandstanding (sorry, 'looking at the big picture'). It makes us sound good, the papers like it and we can pretend we're actually changing something when all we've really got is another wasteful strategy.

What really matters is whether the council has its finances straight, satisfies residents, and meets its own targets on service quality improvement. Making it so the highways engineer, the social worker and the bloke digging the spring beds in the park are all delivering to the objective of the organisation (and even better, can explain how).

Right now council leaderships - political and professional - spend too much time on grand words, strategies and visions but far too little time on making sure children and the old are protected, the roads are swept, the potholes filled, parks tidied and that the loos have soft loo-paper.

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Singapore on the Ship Canal - why it's the economy that matters in regeneration

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The thing about regenerating the North of England is that we appear to have tried everything - sometimes more than once. Or rather we have tried every variation of government intervention. And it hasn't worked.

The latest (and this is definitely a rehash) solution is the 'local enterprise partnership'. Now these things - which seem not to be local, not to be about enterprise and bad examples of partnership - are the favoured vehicle for regeneration. And as Neil McInroy from CLES observes:

I recently participated in a round table debate on growth, with northern business leaders in Manchester. Inevitably, the key vehicle for local economic growth came up – local enterprise partnerships (Leps). Starting with a few shakes of the head and the odd raised eyebrow, that bit of the debate was summed up by one participant who said: ‘I am not sure Leps are fit for purpose in the drive for local economic recovery’. He was understating it, but spot on.

The problem here is that Neil, having identified how LEPs aren't the way to do it, stumbles into that old trap of believing that some other form of government intervention will do the trick. Indeed the solution preferred here combines one good idea and several lousy ones. The good idea is that local councils should lead on regeneration - more to the point, that local councillors (who Neil insists on calling 'elected members') should take ownership of economic development strategies.

The bad ideas are these:

We must aim for business success and private gain with social justice. They are not mutually exclusive.

To be fair, I've really not the foggiest idea what we mean in this context by 'social justice' - it seems to be something that has to be said if you're a bit left-wing but want to talk about the necessity of free market capitalism. The problem is that it leads to mission creep - to setting environmental targets that squeeze out growth, to a misplaced belief that 'social enterprise' is an engine for development and to targeting based on social outcomes such as 'equalities' or 'community cohesion'.

It is evident from the recent fairness and poverty commissions and work in local authorities around social inclusion that there is need to match economic development with social growth.

Here's another example of this mission creep (and a warning that, while it's a good idea for councils to lead, they aren't always good at it). I'm sure Neil knows what he means by 'social growth' but it seems to me that, not only are Northern cities significantly more 'equal' than London, but that this is a direct consequence of their lack of success. More importantly, 'social growth' is a consequence of economic development not an alternative. If you trog round the poorer parts of Manchester or Leeds it's abundantly clear that the poverty results from economic failure compounded by poor government in crucial areas such as education and health. So the starting point for regeneration must be economic - get people into jobs, improve skill levels and encourage business creation.

In some ways we seem confused about what we're trying to do. On the one hand, organisations like CLES promote the ideas of an 'economy for all' that rejects traditional models of economic growth and opts instead for the idea of 'activity', for 'greening' and for more cooperative or mutual organisations. This is fine - although it only works if you set aside the desire to 'close the gap' with wealthier regions in the south - but I don't believe it offers genuine hope to the thousands of people stuck on benefits, in poor housing and with some of the country's worst schools and hospitals.

There is, in this argument, a view that equates the public and private sector in economic terms - ignoring the fact that, in general terms, the public sector doesn't produce but consumes (and we should remember that consumption is more important that production - even the squanderous consumption of the public sector). So in regeneration it is the private sector that matters - not the grandees that end up on LEP boards but all the others, the start-ups, the SME, the little manufacturers and the shops, large and small. Without this there is no growth - there might be spending but there isn't growth.

There are things that can and should be done - devolving tax-raising and rate-setting powers back to the local level and, at that local level, carrying through that 'double-devolution' idea to encompass schools, healthcare, leisure provision and much else besides.

But growth - and let's be clear, it's growth that the North needs not some sort of steady-state economy - will not come from this action but from an environment that celebrates business and enterprise however it is organised. From a society that finally escapes from the belief that some grand bloke in a top hat will arrive and give us all jobs for life.

If the North is to have a successful economic development strategy - or strategies - it has to focus relentlessly on the private sector and eschew the temptation to use regeneration plans to save the planet, eliminate poverty or create some mythical 'fairer' society.

Imagine 'Freeport Manchester' - a low tax, low regulation economy supported by local government and featuring investment in skills, education and business creation. A place focused on science and engineering, on export and exchange - a sort of Singapore on the Ship Canal. Wouldn't that be a better ambition?

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Why fans shouldn't be worried about Manchester United future income...

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...except that it's not really about Manchester:

Manchester United has signed a partnership with the first mobile phone firm to operate in Azerbaijan.

The three-year deal with Bakcell will give the telecommunications company the right to screen the club's MUTV in the eastern European country.

Bakcell will also offer United-themed phone packages, which will give subscribers access to club news, video highlights, ringtones and other features.

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Shisha, the next target for the anti-fun brigade

At its next Council meeting, Bradford Councillors will discuss the scourge of shisha smoking. In a time of austerity, when the Council is cutting services and too many people don't have jobs we're discussing how to shut down a few more businesses and spoil a few more folk's pleasure. But then the motion is from Respect - who seem to have appointed themselves moral guardians of the Asian communities in Bradford! 

I was therefore struck by the Pub Curmudgeon's spot of a similar campaign under way in Manchester:

Traders and  councillors say curry houses are now struggling to compete with the shisha bars and fear it could be the end for the Curry Mile.

They say some of the shisha bars are allowing customers to flout the smoking ban and illegally smoke shisha indoors.

Under the law, the shisha bars are meant to restrict customers to smoking outside, often on a terrace.

Manchester council is  now launching a campaign to crack down on people who flout the smoking ban at shisha bars, and to highlight the health risks of smoking shisha.

And doubtless the main element of the campaign will be this particular lie:

Yes folks this claim - from Bradford NHS - is simply not true. Nor is the claim in our Respect motion that:

...according to the WHO, an hour of smoking shisha for one hour is equivalent to smoking 200 times the volume of smoke in one cigarette.

 There are variations on this story depending on how many times it has been tweaked and adjusted from the original WHO report. And it's still not true:

...studies led by independent researchers at the Royal University of Saudi Arabia have shown that shisha smoke is 30 times less concentrated in chemicals than cigarette smoke, contradicting the WHO's warnings. "It is ludicrous and anti-scientific to claim that hookah or shisha smoke is 200 times more toxic than cigarette smoke," he says. "While about 5,000 chemicals have been identified so far in cigarette smoke, chemists and pharmacologists from Saudi Arabia only found 142 chemicals in shisha smoke. Also, a medical team in Pakistan found that shisha smoke can be much less carcinogenic and radioactive than cigarette smoke."

So shisha is a lot less of a problem than smoking cigarettes. This isn't to say that shisha is harmless just that it is a whole lot less harmful than smoking cigarettes. But that doesn't stop the prohibitionists (as the poster above shows) - despite little or no evidence at all for their claim this is the conclusion:

"The research on shisha is admittedly limited," concedes Anis. "But I have to concur with the WHO. If you watch the way people smoke shisha, they take deliberate, deep breaths before exhaling so there is a lot of smoke being inhaled."

Which rather begs a big question. Surely it's what the smoke contains that the issue rather than how much? The truth is that Dr Anis and the other prohibitionists just don't approve. These people are getting pleasure without purpose, they don't care about their health, they must be stopped!

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Next time local government "leaders" plead poverty mention the £10 billion in reserves they hold....

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Overall, English local authorities expect to be holding £10.8 billion in reserves on 31 March 2012. At the same time last year, their forecasts for 31 March 2011 totalled £11 billion.

 I've mentioned this little fact before - in the context of Bradford* and Manchester with the former holding over £180 million in reserves and the latter an incredible amount of £260 million plus.

So when your local council whines about the cuts, lays people off now and makes no use of these reserves they are acting irresponsibly. We do need to "re-base" but the impact can be spread, the reductions and services changes properly planned and the decisions made carefully with due consideration of the needs and expectations of local residents.

*Bradford folk will, I'm sure, be delighted to know that over the past two years the Council's reserves have RISEN by nearly £50 million. 

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Public procurement and framework contracts - inefficient, anti-competitive and expensive

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In public sector procurement we have got used now to the system of “framework contracts”:

A ‘framework agreement’ is an agreement between one or more contracting authorities and one or more economic operators, the purpose of which is to establish the terms governing contracts to be awarded during a given period, in particular with regard to price and, where appropriate, the quantity envisaged.

In layman’s terms a framework agreement limits the market from which the public body procures its goods or services in a given time period. Rather than a long-winded procurement process for each contract, the public body can “call off” for each purchase from the organisations in the framework. Nobody else can bid.

And these frameworks are used for multi-billion pound contracts:

Willmott Dixon, Morgan Sindall, Mansell and Thomas Vale have all been appointed to a regional framework worth up to £3 billion.

The companies were chosen by Birmingham Council to work on projects secured through the Constructing West Midlands Framework.

The quartet will work on the four-year framework covering work costing more than £500,000-a-year.

The framework has the potential to be extended to eight years and is available to all public sector bodies in the West Midlands.

So there you are – a small group of construction businesses have been given the exclusive right to bid for £3 billion in public contracts. During that time no other organisations can bid for that work – the councils involved have granted to those in the framework a degree of protection that should not apply, is anti-competitive and cannot possibly represent value for taxpayers’ money.

These contracts are done for reasons of procurement efficiency and administrative convenience. They cut out smaller contractors – the ones for whom £500,000 is a big contract but who do not have the financial elbow to get chosen for a large framework. Yet nothing is done. There is no outcry when the DWP carves up valuable contracts for delivering the Work Programme between fewer than 20 organisations – a process that allows BEST, A4e and others the opportunity to further extend their market dominance. Mostly at the expense of smaller, regional and local providers.

Framework agreements are now standard practice and the numbers of businesses on frameworks gets smaller and smaller. One “pre-qualification questionnaire” (PQQ) run by Leeds City Council to procure a framework for redundancy support across Yorkshire was explicit in seeking to limit the tender to just six organisations from which five would be selected to form the framework.

This is an example – increasingly common with large authorities like Leeds and Manchester – of the use of the PQQ as a shortlisting device rather than as a means of established whether an organisation is qualified and has the capacity to deliver. This is an abuse of the process and misrepresents the PQQ – it is not pre-qualification but a two-stage tender process. Again it is designed for reasons of administrative convenience and procurement efficiency rather than for reasons of good purchasing practice.

If there is one area in desperate need of reform, that is ill-managed and run for producer interests rather than for the good use of taxpayers’ money, it is the system of public procurement overseen by the Office for Government Commerce and implemented by local authorities, government departments and quangos up and down the country. It may not be corrupt but it is certainly anti-competitive, wasteful and produces overpriced and inflexible contracts.

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Isn't this the case wherever you put it?

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The Manchester Airport enterprise zone will undermine attempts at economic regeneration in other parts of the city, a new report warns.

Wouldn't that be the case wherever it's was located in the "city-region"? Or is this really about something else entirely?

Ah, yes! It's those professional NIMBYs again:

Research commissioned by the North West Regional Group of national charity the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) hits out at the Government’s decision to locate Greater Manchester’s enterprise zone at Manchester Airport, saying the site is the "wrong" place for a zone.

You see building an enterprise zone near existing transport hubs for rail and air plus great motorway links is a really bad idea! Here's CPRE NW fussbucket-in-chief, Andy Yuille:

"The evidence suggests that Manchester Airport enterprise zone will likely suck economic life from the rest of Manchester and the wider North West.

"There’s a real risk that major development in the green belt in south Manchester [where the airport is situated] will undermine attempts to revitalize town and city centres elsewhere.

"Nothing in the proposals we’ve seen so far indicates how this prosperity black hole will be prevented. There is certainly a need to attract investment and create jobs in Manchester, but this just isn’t the right place to do it."

So those distribution businesses, the manufacturers and the bit tech companies - they aren't more likely to set up here bringing jobs and wealth to places like Wythenshawe, places among the poorest in England?

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...and how, Manchester, will that help rebuild your economy?

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Manchester - or rather the idiots who run the place - are committing the City to a 48% reduction in  carbon emissions:

The Greater Manchester Climate Change Strategy, put together by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, pulls together the various climate change plans in place across the city-region, with the aim of producing a more coordinated framework.

It outlines four headline climate change goals for Greater Manchester by 2020:

- A rapid transition to a low carbon economy
- Collective carbon emissions reduced by 48 per cent
- Be prepared for and actively adapting to a rapidly changing climate
- ‘Carbon literacy’ will have become embedded into the culture of organisations, lifestyles and behaviours.
  

So the poor residents of this once great city will be condemned to lag behind everywhere else while their leaders choose to further damage the economic prospects of Greater Manchester - and that means higher unemployment, fewer new businesses, less investment and a stagnant unresponsive economy.
 
And what in the name of all that's holy is "carbon literacy"?
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Tenders, framework agreements and suicide-bidding - how public procurement isn't working

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We can expect that – for many reasons not least the need to drive out costs in public administration – there will be renewed attention given to the processes of public procurement. After all if more provision is to be outsourced we need to know that the process by which suppliers are selected is fair, transparent and delivering value. I’m not sure we’re in such a position for three reasons – the tender process is over-complex, public agencies are relying on framework agreements rather than open market procurement and these problems are encouraging market distorting practices such as suicide-bidding.

Anyone involved with seeking business from public bodies will be familiar with the complexities of tendering – here’s just one cry of pain at the onerous requirements in the process:

Reading through the documents today was a jaw-dropping insight into the dream world of public sector morons.

Method statements, framework agreements, key performance indicators, robust performance management systems, equality and diversity policies, performance evaluations, environmental advancement, partnership milestones, sustainable procurement narratives, race and gender statements, service quality monitoring, volume forecasting, operational delivery reviews, governance structure audits, outcomes recording methods, business continuity plans, and contingency planning systems.

All of the above must be installed before we are even allowed to see the work we may be able to bid for, if approved. And, of course, there is no guarantee - by their own admission - that it will be of any quality.

Here we have a classic example of procurement processes seeking to capture every regulatory nuance – to the point where most suppliers and especially smaller suppliers simply give up and go away. And this process is intended simply to create the “framework” from which the public body can procure the services it requires. It is a process intended to limit the competitive environment by excluding those who fail to ‘tick the boxes’.

However, framework agreements are becoming a bigger problem than this – we are seeing them used as market control mechanisms. Rather than allowing any business that qualifies to bid, these agreements are setting limits on the number of qualifying firms. In one recent example, Leeds City Council (on behalf of a consortium of Yorkshire authorities) sought to procure a framework of businesses to provide outsourcing and redundancy support – the framework limited the number of suppliers to just five from the hundreds of possible providers of these services. There is no doubt in my mind that this process is anti-competitive and should be stopped. We should either have a tender process or a prequalification process, combining the two through a framework system compromises the market and acts only to provide procurement convenience rather than public benefit.

Given the nature of this complexities and the creation of a deliberately limited pool of competitors (protected for the duration of the framework agreement from new market entrants and, in effect, behaving as an oligopoly) the market response throws up some problems – not least what has been dubbed ‘suicide-bidding’:

Although EU law allows businesses to reject abnormally low bids, it does not define ‘abnormally low’, which has lead to disputes with bidders.

Paul Dooley, director of estate regeneration at Poplar Harca, said the association decided to act after receiving several low bids, including some of up to 20 per cent lower than the average. He said: ‘We feel that without a clause in the contract we could be subject to contractors making a challenge.’

The move follows concern in the sector about ‘suicide-bidding’, in which companies bid at amounts that do not cover the cost of their work. This can lead to poor quality service and to firms seeking contract loopholes to charge clients extra.

With complicated tendering processes, combined (and ever larger) contracts, longer contract periods, the temptation is to go for business at a low price and back your managers – and lawyers – to be better than public sector managers and lawyers. After all, it’s pretty difficult to get out from under a six volume contract on the basis of work being ‘not quite good enough’, a little slow or snag-ridden.

The process of public procurement is a minefield but one where Councillors tend to doze off – it’s not exactly sexy politics after all! We should be paying more attention to these processes. I started to complete a pre-qualification questionnaire for some work with Manchester City Council (or rather to get on a framework to be allowed to bid for some work) – the nature of the questionnaire was such that even the mid-sized organisation on whose behalf I was applying decided the requirements were too onerous.

Not only did Manchester require written policies on equalities, health & safety, environment, sustainability & climate change to be submitted (along with three years of accounts, bank references, nine public sector referees and insurance documents) but asked for detailed information about the implementation of these policies. Now Manchester may be the worst authority in this respect but sadly other large authorities – Leeds, Bradford, Liverpool – are little better.

Procurement departments are now pressured to deliver significant savings while maintaining standards of service delivery. And these departments will also be responding to new procurement environments resulting from the Localism Act. To deliver on price, quality and continuous improvement and to support new providers emerging in local communities, procurement systems need to be freed from these requirements linked to other policy requirements and to be encouraged to widen rather than narrow the market. We cannot continue with the too complex, anti-competitive, market distorting approaches that currently dominate public procurement.

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