Evidence-free policy-making is the norm

The main point of Chapman's article is that no adequate process of evaluation has been put in place for this policy.

This quotation, lifted from Chris Snowdon's article about the limiting of stakes on FOBTs (fixed-odds betting terminals) could apply across a huge range of public policies. Worse than this, there is very often no way in which an evaluation can be better than informed opinion or observation.

Take, by way of example, Bradford Council's planning rules on the opening on new hot food takeaways. These rules ban new takeaways within 400m of a school or place that might be widely used by children and young people. To date the latter part of this definition covers parks, playgrounds, halls and community centres. Within the city proper there is almost nowhere (other than the city centre which is exempted from the regulation) where someone can open a hot food takeaway.

I opposed the ban and was told that, despite me pointing out the complete absence of any evidence linking hot food takeaways to child obesity is was (to quote Bradford Council's leader) "common sense" that there is a link. On a later occasion I asked the leader, via a question at full council, how the planning authority intended to measure the effectiveness of the policy. It seemed that they had no plans to do so but, when I pushed the leader, apparently this is part of a "raft" of policies that taken together will be effective in reducing levels of child obesity.

We're told by public policy folk that what they do is "evidence-based" but it seems that, where controlling public behaviour is concerned, there is no need for evidence or a framework for evaluation. When Bradford Council presented its consultation on a new PSPO (public space protection order) across the whole district meant to deal with 'anti-social driving', it was clear that while the things covered by the order - loud music, car cruising, loitering around cars - might be annoying they are not the things that the public consider the real problem: speeding, aggressive driving, road rage. And, just as with the ban on takeaways and the FOBTs stake limit, there is no indication as to how this PSPO will be evaluated so as to assess whether the limiting of civil liberties is justified by a reduction in car-related anti-social behaviour.

We will be having a 'review' but, like other policy reviews, it will feature how many orders were issued, how many people breached the orders and opinion from senior police officers saying how much they value the additional powers.

Finally, by way of example, lots of august bodies and respected individuals have responded positively to the government's consultation on introducing a register of home schooled children.The evidence for there being a need for this? None. But the LGA is keen for local councils to be de facto in charge of your child:

‘A register will help councils to monitor how children are being educated and prevent them from disappearing from the oversight of services designed to keep them safe.’

This is seen as a loophole by local education authorities (which probably should be abolished) and they are using safeguarding as an justification despite the evidence being that homeschooled children are significantly less likely to be abused than children attending regular schools.

It is clear that 'evidence-based policy-making' is almost entirely a myth - public authorities rely instead of expert opinion, referencing themselves and political popularity to justify intervening in private choices and behaviour.

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Unpopularism (some policy thoughts for conservatives)

There's a media caricature of conservatism as being a sort of red-faced, reactionary creed. And, at times, we do sound like the angry bloke at the bar as he moves from beer onto double whiskies - "send 'em home, stop 'em coming, hang 'em, flog 'em, blame the parents, close the borders, scroungers, layabouts, druggies". For all of his modest manner, politeness and media-savvy approach, this is pretty much how a lot of folk see the Rees-Mogg tendency.

Now I really am a conservative, probably more of one now than I've ever been, and this means that we need to take one of David Cameron's cute observations - "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as the state" - and ask what is means in terms of policy. We should also recognise that our social problems seem to be pretty resistant to both the left liberal's "give everyone a nice hug" approach and the reactionary's "kick them up the pants, the lazy oiks" policy platform.

Anyway it seems to me that we should start thinking about those social problems - social mobility, inequality in health and education, housing, community, crime - as conservatives. We should also draw on the actual evidence as to what underlies the problems and how a conservative outlook can make a big difference. None of what follows is economic policy, all of it is intended to strengthen social bonds, reduce barriers between people and places, and provide some pointers to a society based more on the idea of community than the one we have right now.

Crime and Punishment 1 -Shut down prisons. We lock up too many young men and, in particular, young men from less privileged backgrounds. This isn't just bad for those young men, it's bad for their partners, their children and for society. We should stop doing this, close down a load of prisons and make prison more effective. Prison doesn't work as a deterrent and acts to destroy families while damaging society still further.

Crime and Punishment 2 - Legalise pot. If your place is like mine, then hardly a day passes without a proud announcement from the local police about another cannabis farm they've found. Have you noticed how this is reducing the number of folk smoking weed? No? We're losing the war on drugs. With appropriate safeguards, licences and taxes legalised cannabis (and maybe some other drugs too) would immediately end a huge criminal enterprise with all its attendant violence and unpleasantness.

Families 1 - Pay childcare to mums (or dads). We're spending billions (getting on for £10 billion) on providing parents with childcare subsidy. Since the evidence tells us that full-time, attentive parenting is the best development environment for a toddler, we should make that money we currently pay to nurseries and pre-schools also available to mums or dads who opt to stay at home to raise their toddlers.

Families 2 - Divorce reform. OK, we're better off than the Americans as we don't have 'no fault' divorce but it's still probably too easy to get a divorce especially where there are children. We should reform the system so that the interests of children is central to any decision. And those interests must be guided by the evidence telling us that being raised by a single parent is one of the best ways to screw the life chances of those children.

Families 3 - Incentivise marriage. You know why we have marriage? Love and all that jazz innit. Nope - marriage exists to stop men leaving once they've fathered a child. And forget all the religion stuff - every single society on earth has marriage in one form or another. Marriage works because is places a social stigma (sometimes enforced by a familial big stick) on men who abandon women with children. As the evidence on life chances for children born outside marriage tells us, not having married parents is bad for children. We should incentivise marriage through the tax system and, for the least well off, introduce a specific benefit payable to married couples.

Education 1 - school place lotteries. Grammar schools are one of our things as Conservatives. We love them despite the evidence telling us that they make barely a jot of difference to overall educational attainment or social mobility. If we want working class kids to do better then we have to mix them with middle class (and posh) kids rather than, de facto, herding them into separate schools because of social sorting by house price. So rather than grammar schools, let's have school place lotteries thereby creating better social mix in schools to the benefit of those working class kids.

Education 2 - fund more extra-curricula activity. Non-classroom stuff is really important - sport, music, art, debating, clubs - and we've been gradually squeezing it out (mostly by pulling funding and expecting parents to pay). We should fund activity like music, dance and school sport directly and pay the teachers who support extra-curricula activity more money.

Health - merge 'clinical commissioning groups' into local councils. Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are the bodies that hold local budgets for the NHS. We've already created 'Health and Wellbeing Boards' to make them at least talk with the local council. We should go further and put all the health and care commissioning under the local council - it would be more accountable, more transparent and might result in some creative, community-based health initiatives.

Housing 1 - scrap the 'green belt'. All the evidence, wherever you look in the world, tells us that policies constraining the supply of land in large, growing cities result in unaffordable housing. Let's abolish anti-suburb, anti-sprawl policies and focus instead on a planning system that actually protects special, beautiful, and environmentally-important land rather than a huge blanket consisting mostly of agricultural monoculture with all its attendant ecological negatives. This won't make housing cheap overnight but it will set a direction for more supply of land, more homes being built, more variety and a chance for young people to aspire to own a home.

Housing 2 - extend the right-to-buy. Right-to-Buy was the single biggest transfer of wealth from government to people in our history. We need to extend right-to-buy to all social housing with similar incentives to those offered to council tenants in the 1980s. And we should give tenants of privately rented homes the right to buy when a landlord seeks to sell the property - again with a discount similar to that offered to social tenants.

And finally - scrap beer duty for drinks sold in pubs. The pub is the heart of the community - how often does some politician tell us this (usually while having their picture taken with campaigners opposing yet another pub closure). Well pubs are places where people drink beer, that's their primary purpose. So why, if pubs are so bloody important, do we slap a massive additional tax on those drinkers? Scrap the beer duty (and probably duty on cider and wine but not spirits) for the on-trade.

As I said - unpopularism?

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Obesity policy - snobbery dressed up as healthcare

So, yet again, the Guardian lays into the choices of normal people:

A ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm watershed is long overdue. It should be supplemented by a ban on promotions and price cuts for “sharing” bags of chocolates, as Action on Sugar urged last month. And the sugar tax on drinks could be extended to food products, with the revenue channelled into initiatives making fruit and vegetables more affordable and attractive to consumers. The government’s failure to force change means that the rest of us will pay the price – in ill health and higher taxes – as big food rakes in the profits.

I've given up pointing out that obesity hasn't risen for over a decade, that how we define obesity (BMI of 30+) has no scientific basis, or that individual ingredients - sugar, fat, salt - are not the reason why folk today are fatter than they were in the 1970s (when they ate a lot more sugar, fat and salt).

Now I'm just cross and irritated by the snobby, self-righteous people who write editorials in the Guardian, pontificate on daytime telly, and fill the minds of young doctors with utter tripe about diet and health. It really is the case that what these fussbuckets believe is that your choices - especially if you're one of McDonalds' 3.5 million daily customers in Britain - are wrong. Worse these snobby judgemental nannies want to slap on taxes, bans and enforced 'reformulation' - to take away your pleasure in food - simply because what you like doesn't match what they like (assuming they get any pleasure at all from their sad diets of spiralised vegetables, quinoa and bean sprouts).

It really is time that the vast majority of people who eat a decent diet - including sugary snacks, fizzy drinks, pizza and burgers - tell snobby Guardian writers and public health officialdom to take a hike. Obesity really isn't the number one health problem facing the UK and slapping on controls, bans and taxes that might (but probably won't) result in all of us losing a handful of pounds will not improve the overall health of the nation one iota. Most people - 95 to 97 out of 100 - are not unhealthily overweight and, if we want to do something about obesity, we need to direct the resources towards the relatively few for whom it is a serious issue. Right now we're squandering millions on a fool's errand of reducing the whole population's weight when, quite frankly, the whole population doesn't have a weight problem.

The truth, of course, is that grand public health fussbuckets have decided that, because they disapprove of the eating habits (and drinking habits for that matter) of less well off people, those people should be forced to pay more for their food. It's just snobbery dressed up as health care.

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Free trade is not a policy...

Excellent exposition on free trade from Jon Murphy:

...since free trade is no policy, it is not dependent upon the assumptions of the economic models to function... None of the arguments for free trade require perfect information, identical principles between buyers and sellers, known utility functions and universal preferences, etc. Free trade is robust to deviations from the ideal; the system still works because it is a process, not a policy. Deviations from the ideal, movements away from equilibrium, present opportunities for entrepreneurs to correct issues; the many plan for the many and do not require the guiding hand of government to correct for deviations.

And this, especially, on using models to guide policy:

To guide policy, you need a descriptive model, not an analytical model. In other words, you need a model that is descriptive of reality, not one that reflects reality. When attempting to guide policy, this is where the assumptions of the model become important. To impose an “optimal tariff,” you need to know the demand and supply curves (something which is unknowable), you need to know indifference curves and von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions (which are unknowable), true relative prices and equilibrium, etc etc.

Go read and learn.

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Let's stop watering down Corbyn's policies and offer a property-owning democracy again

There is a modicum of welcome introspection within my party. Questions about our values, purpose and mission are mixed in with less considered and more tactical debates about getting more support from young people or responding to what Brexit (and Corbyn) "means". Alongside this is a discussion about organisation - whether the party has the structure, membership and organisation to take a positive message to the electorate.

For me, and the apparent success of Corbyn's populism doesn't change this fact, the answer doesn't lie in contention or extremes but rather in consensus and moderation. Don't misunderstand me here, this isn't a rejection of ideology, but rather a recognition that policies drawn from our belief in freedom, community, neighbourliness and self-reliance have to chime with the values of people who we want to vote for us.

So let's start with those values rather than - as we see here from David Skelton - an approach based on opinion polling - little better than a list of bribes (higher minimum wages, housing subsidies, free tuition) aimed at attracting support. This is what we mean when we talk of populism and is precisely the programme that Corbyn espouses - rail nationalisation has big opinion poll support so we propose rail nationalisation. Students say they want free tuition so we give them free tuition. All paid for through another solidly opinion poll tested plan - increasing taxes on big business and "the rich".

What Skelton proposes is a return to what was once called Butskellism, a policy platform based on trying to have as close a policy platform to the other side as possible without quite abolishing any difference. Here's an example:

A reformed Toryism could address the growing disparity between capital and labour and encourage firms to empower their workers with shares and board representation. But that shouldn’t obscure the need for higher wages. The minimum wage should be increased when possible, and companies above a certain size should be expected to report on how they are moving towards paying the voluntary living wage (£8.45 in the UK and £9.75 in London).

If I'd replaced the first three words here with "a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn" no-one would have batted an eyelid. What we have is a policy platform founded on wording current Labour policies slightly differently and calling it "reformed Toryism":

a new generation of genuinely affordable, low-rent homes,

reducing tuition fees and concentrating the greatest attention on those from poorer backgrounds

hindered by cuts to in-work benefits and anti-trade union rhetoric.

All of this is good stuff but it does not give a single young person (or indeed older person) a solitary reason to switch from voting Labour to voting Conservative. All Skelton - and too many others on the left of my Party - is saying is "be more like Labour by proposing toned down versions of their policies".

So let's start instead with these values:

Wherever you go in the world you'll find people who hold as important such things as family, neighbourliness, independence, duty and effort. That you should work hard, contribute, look out for the neighbours, bring up your family as honest, self-reliant and care for those less fortunate.

And these are conservative values, the building blocks of community. None of them are about government, large or small. None of them see society as greater than the sum of its individual parts. And none of them are predicated on knowing better what is good for your neighbour.

Let's frame a policy platform beginning with the communities we want to represent rather than with centrally-directed proposals determined by opinion-polling. Let's talk about community, about how health, social care, good jobs and much else start with the places we live in rather than with the Bank of England, International Monetary Fund and National Health Service. I like it when Skelton talks about people having a stake, although he makes the mistake of talking about "the economy" rather than "society". As conservatives we need to renew the offer we made repeatedly - in 1959, 1970, 1979 and 1992 - do the right thing, play your part, get an education, work hard and you will have a stake in society. Right now overpriced housing, the pillage of pension funds and disincentives to invest mean that people, especially younger people, struggle to see how they're to get that stake in society - the real cash stake we all believe we were offered.

I'm pretty sure this means some tough choices about policy but we start by renewing the offer - to everyone - of a property-owning democracy. To get there we've to have some tricky converstaions about green belts, care for the elderly and the balance between taxing what we earn and taxing what we spend. We've to embrace the idea of family again - not as some sort of mythical Oxo advert image but the messy, complicated and varied things that are the reality of our lived experience as families. And, above all, we need to start talking about community and getting the decisions about care, health and social support down to that basic building block. You only need look at the benefits system - which can't process a claim in less than seven weeks leading directly to destitution - to see how centralised, national systems really don't work.

I've said before that we should start, as conservatives, with caring about what's right outside our door. It's dull, I know - soft loo paper conservatism as a university colleague called it - but most people are not either interesting in or impressed by fancy dan utopian solutions. Don't get me wrong, we'll respond to a straightforward bribe - free stuff paid for by taxing anonymous others - but conservatives have usually been better than this and, when we are, we change the world for the better.

We won't win by offering watered down versions of Corbyn's policies but by renewing the offer we made to my generation - an offer that was met - of creating a property-owning democracy. Let's do it.

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How alcohol policy is set by temperance campaigners

Fussbucketry Central

Chris Snowdon writing in the Spectator explains the dreadful truth about the UK's alcohol policy - it is designed by people dedicated to teetotalism and temperance:

The Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), a small but hardline anti-alcohol organisation, was heavily represented on the committee. The IAS was formed in the 1980s as a direct successor to the UK Temperance Alliance which, in turn, had been formed out of the ashes of the UK Alliance for the Suppression of the Traffic of All Intoxicating Liquors, a prohibitionist pressure group. The IAS receives 99 per cent of its income from the Alliance House Foundation whose official charitable objective is ‘to spread the principles of total abstinence from alcoholic drinks’. Its director, Katherine Brown, was on the CMO’s panel, as was its ‘expert adviser’ Gerard Hastings, although he failed to disclose his IAS role in his declaration of interests.

So when you hear the latest piece of public health dribble about drinking remember that it comes from people with an ideological opposition to drinking alcohol.

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Why stopping immigration is good politics but lousy policy

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We need immigration. This shouldn't be a matter of argument or dispute, it should be a matter of fact. Without immigration our society - the civilisation too many claim is threatened by migration - withers and dies.

Though demographers have long anticipated the transformation Japan is now facing, the country only now seems to be sobering up to the epic metamorphosis at hand.

Police and firefighters are grappling with the safety hazards of a growing number of vacant buildings. Transportation authorities are discussing which roads and bus lines are worth maintaining and cutting those they can no longer justify. Aging small-business owners and farmers are having trouble finding successors to take over their enterprises. Each year, the nation is shuttering 500 schools.

One of the world's oldest and greatest civilisations, Japan is slipping slowly away. Whole abandoned villages, towns populated almost exclusively by the old, shuttered businesses closed from lack of a workforce. Without new blood Japan will die - not a sudden violent shock but a gradual decline to the point where the assets and value of the nation are devoured by the old. Yet Japan still keeps one of the world's strictest immigration systems:

Abe, however, ruled out any significant change to Japan’s closed-door approach to immigration at the UN general assembly in New York in September.

“It is an issue of demography,” he said. “I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, elderly people and we must raise our birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants.”

This is the demographic equivalent of tilting at windmills or commanding the tide not to come in - yet it is actively promoted as a policy by politicians eager to exploit people's distrust of migrants, a distrust built on race, religion, culture and language:

“Look at nurses, they believe their income will be cut if we let in Filipinos and Indonesians,” said Katsuyuki Yakushiji, a sociologist at Toyo University in Tokyo. “They also say that these people can’t speak Japanese well and that could be risky. Yet, at the same time, they complain about severe overwork and say we need to add nurses.”

Familiar rhetoric to Europeans and now, tragically for an immigrant culture, in the the USA - short-term fears and self-interest are placed above the fact that there aren't enough people to do the jobs we want done. And that it's not just high skills we need but also old-fashioned labour from people willing to kill chickens, clean lavatories and help old people get in and out of bed.

It's great politics - easy pickings - to wind people up about immigration, to claim that it's damaging our culture or society. But it's lousy policy - we need those immigrants for, as Japan shows us, without them the basis of society, the social compact that forms our civilisation, slowly washes away.

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How I might be disappointed by Brexit - and why this doesn't matter

EEA, EEA Plus, EFTA, WTO, the Norway Option, the Swiss strategy, the Canada solution - even the Liechtenstein approach. A veritable pot pourri of acronyms and discarded titles for Robert Ludlam novels - none of us really has a clue as to what the UK Outcome might be, what Brexit really means. We could even - parliamentary sovereignty being what it is - simply stay a member of the EU (although this option might do little for the electability of the politicians who take it).

In settling this matter some of us are going to be disappointed. This is because - as everyone has noticed - there's a divide in the world of the leave supporter. On the one hand we have the 'sunlit uplands' team who talk about an independent, free-trading country, a sort of giant version of Singapore. And on the other hand we have the autarchs, protectionists and nativists who want a sad, declining (and probably white) nation crouching from the nasty world behind barriers to trade, movement, investment and choice.

Now I'm a sunlit uplands sort of chap - I didn't vote to end 'free movement' but rather to leave behind a dated, tariff-based and protectionist customs union and go for free trade. As I say again and again, trade isn't something that's done by governments, it's a simple reflection of that human desire to maximise value by exchanging things with other humans. What governments have done is create barriers to trade - everything from bans and sanctions through to tariffs and regulatory constraint. All the state does is make trade more difficult and then, through tortuous negotiations, trim away some of those constrainsts to trade thereby allowing bigger, more open and more free markets.

I also don't know which of those acronyms and rejected Robert Ludlam titles is the right approach to leaving the EU. I know that the GATT rules and the WTO mean that, for most trade, the impact of us being outside the single market is negligible. But I also know that a big chunk of our economy isn't covered by those rules - not just agriculture but important sectors like finance, law and advertising where the UK is a dominant player. So it's not enough to simply sit back on WTO rules in trade if we want to make sure important export sectors perform.

I'm pretty sure too that imports - consumption - are more important than exports - production. So it's too easy to dismiss the argument that we simply have no trade barriers (beyond the physical and logistical) other than those contingent on domesitc standards set by the UK parliament. What we don't know is whether such a radical approach really does what the theorists say - reduces prices and costs allowing the glorious benefits of opportunity to drive economic growth.

Looking at what our new prime minister has done, I get a feeling that I'll be disappointed. There does seem to be an assumption that some new sort of immigration model - more restrictive, more limiting - will be imposed and that, free from EU state aid restrictions, we'll see a rash of supports and interventions that use taxpayers money to prop up inefficient industries. This sort of protectionism - in capital and labour - is politically popular with that constituency making up a sizeable portion of the leave vote and especially the provincial, suburban working class that tends to vote Labour.

So I'll be disappointed. The Brexit model chosen won't be the best one, will probably be rushed a little, and will focus more on protecting the British working class from the realities of the world's economy than on riding that economy as a route to riches. For sure, there'll be trade deals galore with each new one rammed down the throats of Remain advocates. But these will be technocratic deals - dropping a tariff here, a regulation there and a loophole over there, all washed down with state-sponsored grand deals in defence, technology and infrastructure. We won't have markedly changed from the system we enjoy - if that's the right word - within the EU (with the exception of replacing Romanian fruit pickers or Polish care workers with Indian, Chinese and African ones).

Now, dear reader, not only could I be wrong but, just as importantly, my disappointment doesn't matter (any more the does the disappointment of Faragist enthusiasts for a crypto-fascist autarky) for one simple reason. We - that's you and me as voters - can change it. If the chosen Brexit model doesn't work, we can seek a different approach. The people can elect a different bunch of politicians with different ideas to see if they can get it to work. We can have robust arguments about the options and choices available to government and then elect an administration with a fighting chance of implementing one or other of those choices. This is the real change that brexit brings - yes, I think we'll benefit economically if we get it right but next to regaining the power to choose where we go with our economy this is as nothing. So long as we remember the curse of democracy - sometimes the wrong people get elected. As democracy's blessing - we can kick those wrong people out when they screw up.

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This is not a scandal - it merely shows us the difference between policy and advice

It is reported that 'minsters pressured' the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE as it's illiterately known) on the matter of minimum pricing for booze:

MINISTERS are accused of pressuring an independent health watchdog into dropping support for minimum booze pricing.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence removed backing for the scheme from recent NHS guidelines. It had previously supported it in advice which said slashing OAPs’ drinking could cut dementia.

But a British Medical Journal probe claims the watchdog only made the change after health ministers intervened.

Well actually this allegation - unsurprisingly from the British Medical Journal the house magazine for nannying fussbuckets and health fascists - is completely false.

NICE were clear that they had given advice on this matter and that it wasn't withdrawn (just not repeated - NICE isn't a lobby group). What we have here is departmental officials explaining that policy decisions are for ministers, the people elected to do that job, not advisors. And ministers are entitled to make policy decisions that run counter to the advice they are given by bodies like NICE. It is not the role of an advisory body like NICE to make statements of support for or disagreement with policy when that support or opposition is contrary to the government's position.

I wouldn't expect the fussbuckets to understand this distinction - indeed they usually adopt the position that government should do exactly what they say even when, as is the case with minimum pricing for alcohol or taxing sugar, the negative impact of that policy is very considerable (something the fussbuckets can ignore but which ministers have a duty to consider). What this advice to NICE reminds us is that political decision-making is - or should be - the reserve of the politicians we elect not advisory bodies. And there is no doubt that imposing a price floor or a new tax is a political decision not merely 'public health advice'.

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Tiptoeing back to the old conservatism...

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For a while, from the time Auberon Waugh called Maggie's 'mad period' in the late 1980s through to just a few years ago, the Conservative Party lost its purpose. We became captivated (as did Tony Blair, but that's a different story) with billionaires, millionaires, celebrities and the shiny lights of the big city. The real purpose of the party - set out at its founding by Benjamin Disraeli - was never the celebration of laissez faire, it wasn't some sort of whiggamore wet dream, yet this was what we got. We forgot that the purpose of the party is to better the condition of the working man.

Now I'm as keen on classical liberalism as the next man, the enlightenment settlement made for a better world in every way and capitalism is responsible for most of that betterment. But too many in the Conservative Party confused the idea of free choice, free assembly and free markets with a different thing called 'business'. We placed the businessman on a shiny pedestal, we wrapped public services in the language (if not the ethos) of business and we pretended that somehow better governance came from getting those business people into authority in government.

And the ordinary working man - the folk the party was founded to serve - watched as well-meaning policy was captured by the business class. There are, quite simply, too many business people who owe their wealth to tenders and contracts issued by government. There are too many cosy deals, consultants and  contracts that serve the interests of those commissioned and those commissioning rather better than they deliver for the receivers of service. The left chooses - out or either ignorance or misinformation - to call this 'privatisation'. Yet that same left is guilty of using 'in-sourcing' - bringing in well-paid outsiders and experts to manage public services.

On Saturday morning - because our ward surgery was quiet - I has a good chinwag with Baroness Eaton. We bemoaned some of the party's problems and agreed that, regardless of the actual policy solution set out, the current leadership too often start in the wrong place - with a sort of technocratic, elitist mindset rather than asking what the policy will do to meet our party's purpose.

All so gloomy. Made worse by there being no political party offering a positive, hopeful future to that ordinary worker. Rather we have UKIP's populist and exploitative agenda - forming a giant echo chamber for the anger, irritation and annoyance of those regular folk. The task for the Conservatives is to remember where we came from, what we're about. We aren't the party of the mill owner and mine boss - or their 21st century equivalent. We need to break the view - described by Charles Moore a day or two ago - that the Conservatives aren't the workers' friend. And this means finding policies that talk to those workers concerns.

Not the shouty, anti-everything policies that UKIP (and the raggedy bits of the left) promote but ones that link what we know about how free choice, enterprise and initiative raises everyone with the everyday worries of those ordinary folk - the cost of housing, the electricity bill, the need for a mortgage to fill up the car and the lack of a pay rise since we don't know when. Add to this a sense that those running the place - not just politicians but lawyers, doctors, social worker, policemen and legions of civil servants - are doing so in their interest not yours and mine.

Now I know most of these people aren't like that but I also know that unless we change the framing of policies we will ossify as the party of an elite. To change that frame we have to do three things - ask how every policy choice with affect ordinary folk, change the language using less of the 'save the planet' or 'change the world' nonsense, and set the policy platform exclusively on those who feel left out by what passes for economic recovery.

We make much of Adam Smith (and we should) but we can we remember that he supported progressive taxation, considered high degrees of inequality an outrage and warned us that giving business interests too much influence in government is a recipe for tyranny. It should be our task to work for a system that rewards enterprise but does so through the benefits of exchange not the machinations of government. And a system that offers the worker protection, support and a route to a better life.

The old conservatism - the one those maligned ragged trousered philanthropists espoused - served working people well. The new conservatism, all wrapped around with whiggish business interests and unwarranted moral judgement, serves those people less well. So let's tiptoe back to the old ideas of community, aspiration, opportunity and independence in a welcoming society. And away from the 'we know better' metro-liberal sanctimony that too often leads our policy thinking.

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Policies that work - the benefits cap...

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We were promised destitution and other horrors but...

Between April 2013 and August 2014, 51,200 households had their housing benefit capped, according to a Department for Work and Pensions statistical release yesterday. This number had dropped to 27,200 households by August 2014. Forty per cent of those no longer subject to the cap – 9,600 households – are exempt with an open Working Tax Credit.

Unpiggle the language and this is telling us that we capped the benefits and, lo, the people having that cap imposed went and got jobs. Well I never!

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Social capital and the problem with immigration - some thoughts

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Immigration is a problem. OK, you can call it a challenge, a significant policy issue or some other 'slightly-dodging-the-issue' form of words but the truth is that people – voters – are bothered about immigration. We know this because they tell us so in polling and because, if any of us have any ears, we hear it every day. Whether it’s a casual racist remark in a queue to go through security at Leeds Bradford Airport or the comments that trail behind crime reports, stories about ‘multiculturalism’ and descriptions of events at mosques.

The problem is that, whatever people say, immigration really isn’t an economic problem. There really isn’t much – or indeed any – substantial research evidence showing that immigration has a negative impact on levels of employment, economic growth or other measures of economic performance. So when Jonathan Portes reports this he is right:

“The research found evidence of a positive and significant association between increases in employment of migrant workers and labour productivity. It found that recruiting from outside the UK had allowed employers to fill skilled and specialist roles and enabled some organisations to expand. Employers reported that migrants' skills are often complementary to, rather than substituting for, those of UK born employees.”

However, this really isn’t the problem (or challenge or significant policy issue) at all nor is this simply a case of people being fed misleading information by politicians and the media. A positive economic impact simply isn’t sufficient for people to accept the social changes that immigration implies. Yet much of what we might call ‘immigration-positive’ research and comment is dominated by economic considerations, arguments over statistics and accusations that opposition to immigration is essentially racist.

If we are to understand immigration and, more importantly, develop policies that respond to the genuine concerns of very many people, then we need to get a much better grip on the sociology of immigration. We need to get a better idea of how immigration affects existing communities, how those communities react to immigration and how we manage migration so as to give a greater chance of that community reaction being positive rather than negative. By focusing on the economics of migration we have missed completely the real driver behind those community concerns that some politicians exploit.

Indeed it is the need to reduce negative social impact that should drive immigration policies and controls rather than the prevailing preference for points-based systems based on a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether the ‘skills’ of the immigrant are ‘needed’. The evidence, both from polling and from qualitative studies, shows consistently that worries about immigration relate inversely to people’s exposure to immigrants. I would add that my personal view is that Britain’s current anti-immigrant feeling is substantially driven by the migration from EU accession countries being to parts of the UK that have had limited prior experience of immigration.

None of this gets us any closer to a basis for setting policy - assuming we’re going to plonk for somewhere on the continuum from totally closed borders to totally open borders. Regardless of the economic case for immigration, the potential social negatives (the cost of which may not be wholly contained in an economic model of migration) require some degree of control. And that will mean that some people will not be allowed to migrate into the UK.

And there is a good argument for striking a balance in terms of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity. I know we like to talk about how many different languages are spoken in our communities (this isn’t new – I remember the Principle of Bedford FE College saying just this in 1983) but the breakdown in social capital implicit in that heterogeneity damages both the immigrant andreceiving communities:

“People in ethnically fragmented communities have lower levels of interpersonal trust; lower levels of civic, social, and charitable engagement; less efficient provision of public goods; more sluggish economic growth; and lower levels of happiness and general satisfaction. It seems that the more diversity we experience, the lower our quality of life is.”

The risk we run with open borders is that they meet a short-term economic need but in doing so provide the seeds for more sluggish development in the communities where those ‘needed’ immigrants settle. Indeed, we should recognise that some degree of homogeneity is essential if a community is to develop the institutions, connections and structures essential to building social capital. Put more bluntly, the people within a neighbourhood have to share more than the fact of living in that neighbourhood if it is to become community rather than merely a place.

The unanswered question here is how we determine the point at which we set our migration policy. This has to be where the economic benefits of immigration exceed any negative impact on educational attainment, health or crime. Not just because those negatives carry a cost that isn’t necessarily picked up by the employers of immigrant labour (the prime beneficiaries of the economic benefit) but because poorer schools, health and community safety are reflections of a dysfunctional neighbourhood, of the breakdown in the social capital needed for the long-term.

Finally, there has to be some connection between the expectations of the current demos and the actions of government. In a democracy this should be a statement of the obvious but I fear it is not so – too often the response from public officialdom to concerns about immigration is to say ‘there, there - don’t worry’ or else to suggest that the person expressing concerns is simply a bigot. A further type of response is to flood the individual with (essentially meaningless) statistics accompanied with the implication that they are some kind of idiot.

We need to have immigration controls for the very simple reason that the public – the demos – demands that we control the arrival of culturally-distinct people into the neighbourhoods where they live. This can’t be dismissed as racism, bigotry or prejudice (although all those things may be present on occasion) but rather should be seen as articulating the collapse of social capital in many neighbours that large scale immigration brings about. People are not idiots but are reflecting concerns about the loss of community in their words and choices. And government too often fails to pick up those concerns in defining policies (locally and nationally).

I believe that immigration enhances our nations bringing new ideas, attitudes, food, drink, music and dance to pour into the English cultural melting-pot. We are a vastly better society for having welcomed generations of migrants to our shores. And I don’t want to live in a place where we push people away, where we don’t offer sanctuary and where there’s a preference for a sort of sclerotic monocultural numbness. But if we want migration to work for everyone, we’ve got to manage it, to try and mitigate how it can damage social capital and to direct our attentions to integrating all the wonderful, hard-working people who have come to make their lives in our great country.

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Our environment policies make people poorer...

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Well you knew that didn't you? You knew that the deal between big energy distributors, government and the environment movement is about driving up prices for the energy consumer? You knew that so-called 'regulatory oversight' coupled with obsessing about subsidised renewables results in more jobs for green activists, bigger government departments and higher profits for the distributors? And you knew that, for all Ed Miliband's populist nonsense about price fixing, the left is entirely wedded to making energy more expensive so as to 'combat climate change'?

All this is part of an international effort to drive up energy prices so as to make renewable systems (but not nuclear energy, of course) economic as an alternative to using the earth's abundant supplies of fossil fuels. And, like so much else in our environmental and international development policy, the consequence of this is to ensure that millions of poor Africans, Indians and Arabs remain just that - poor. And, here at home, to exacerbate levels of fuel poverty.

Yet when the status quo on energy is challenged - as Owen Patterson has done - the response of our Liberal Democrat energy minister is to sound like a cracked record justifying keeping people poor because of the risks from climate change:

“The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change exists while most leading British businesses and City investment funds agree with the Coalition that taking out an ‘insurance policy’ now will protect the UK against astronomical future costs caused by a changing climate.

“The majority of European countries are ready to implement proposals that would see [them] adopt targets similar to our Climate Change Act in a deal the Prime Minister should seal later this month.

“With the USA, China and India also now taking the climate change threat seriously, the global marketplace for green technology is increasingly strong.” 

Note the language of opportunity here - opportunity for the already rich to exploit, in effect, the diversion of money from the poor to their projects (and pockets). There is no doubt that the Climate Change Act represents one of the most regressive imposts on the UK ever enacted - a massive transfer from the least well off to the better off. All those feed-in tariffs for solar panels, those subsidies for wind farms and those bungs by councils at 'microgeneration' - these things don't benefit the least well-off in society, they are a cost to them in higher energy prices.

And take a look internationally at what Ed Davey calls an 'insurance policy' - a scheme to protect the rich world from the consequences of climate change while watching the poor parts of the world head off to hell in assorted and rickety hand carts. Not because of the floods, famines and pestilence of global warming but because we've prevented them replacing burning wood and dung with cheap fossil fuel electricity generation from coal and gas.

The truth about the environmental movement and 'green' policies is that they want to save the planet. But they want to save the planet for rich people living in a Brighton semi, a Shipley terrace or a docklands apartment not for poor people in Mogadishu, Mumbai or, for that matter, Bethnal Green. The environmental movement is filled with the comfortably off who worry about recycling, whether their brown rice is organic and the organising of walking buses to get Joshua and Emily to school. These aren't people who have to make a choice about whether to turn on the heating or have a hot meal, they aren't living in a shack with no sanitation cooking on a dung fire that's giving them lung disease and they aren't people living in a village that has one electric point that's live only a few hours a week.

I'm not a climate change 'denier' but I still think our policies are misplaced - worse that that we are imposing huge costs on the least well off to deliver that planetary salvation. This means there will be more of those poor people, more people in fuel poverty, more ill-health and more people dying for lack of food or heating. I don't agree with Owen Patterson that the concern is energy security (although this is important), I think our concern should be reducing poverty. And if we want to do that faster, we need to provide cheap energy to everyone and especially to the poorest in the world. Our environmental policies are doing the opposite, our environmental policies are making people poorer.

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Some public health doubletalk...

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Bradford Council (to the best of my knowledge) has no policy of supporting or not supporting a minimum unit price for alcohol. I checked and this is the response to my questioning about this article:

I have looked again at the original press response and I am clear that our response did not suggest that supporting MUP is council policy, only that Public Health Bradford would support the introduction of MUP.

It seems to have passed Public Health Bradford by but, for the past year they have been part of Bradford Council. And the thing about Councils is that policy is made by councillors not by officers. The Director knows this hence the wonderful piece of double talk above.

To save you following the link, this is what the officer told the press:

"Public Health Bradford would support the introduction of alcohol minimum unit pricing to help address alcohol misuse and its associated health problems."

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Does Bradford Council need a chief executive?

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Today Bradford Council's chief executive announced his departure from the Council. It seems to me, therefore, that this is a good time to look at the role in a manner free from suggestions (or accusations) of this sort of review being 'personal'. For the past two years Bradford's Conservative Group has argued that, given financial constraints and extensive change programmes, no function should be excluded from examination. We have therefore argued for a review of the scope and purpose of the chief executive's role.

It seems to me that there are two sorts of council - ones like Oldham, East Yorkshire or Barnsley with a dominant political leader (we should note that this applies de facto where there is a directly elected mayor) and those like Manchester, Sheffield and Bradford where the chief executives act - as a former colleague described - as an 'unelected mayor'.

In Bradford the collected policy development resource reporting to the political leadership consists of just two or three people. In contrast the chief executive can call upon and direct a 'strategic support' resource in excess of eighty officers. The policy-making function sits squarely with the chief executive and gets little or no direction from the Council's political leadership. This has applied under both Conservative and Labour leadership, it is the accepted arrangement (although the current chief executive has created a stronger policy profile at the centre by pulling resource from departments).

If we accept that local government is subject to democratic control, we need to ask whether this control is real. And by asking this question, we end up asking whether politicians should live up to role their description implies and take the lead in setting policy? Furthermore, since local government is complicated, it makes sense for professional policy support within a council to be for those politicians rather than for the chief executive. We do not expect government ministers to develop policy without policy advice provided independently from the job of administering the functions of government departments. Yet in local government such an arrangement - policy advice allowing politicians to develop policy - is not the case (or not in my experience).

Without policy development (and assuming that political leadership actually does some leading) the requirement for a chief executive such as Bradford's becomes more an exercise in organisational machismo than an essential function. The position returns to the old-fashioned town clerk role - a combination of essential governance functions and providing direction for those who the council employs to manage the different functions of the local council business.

The quasi-political role adopted by modern chief executives - a combination of ra-ra and promotion with some sort of 'sector leadership' - has contributed to the reducing of local politics to the fringes of relevance. A first step to restoring the balance would be in letting politicians develop policy rather than chief executives.

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On research and policy...

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This is a comment on research in education (from Tom Bennett) but it could apply across the whole of social policy:

I'm sure these people are engaged in the most rigorous of science, but the area that it addresses is devilled with darkest, emptiest aspects of bad educational research: small intervention groups, interested parties, cognitive bias, short term studies, conclusions that don't necessarily follow from the data, an aversion to testing a theory to destruction, etc. This matters, because huge and enormously expensive wheels are turning in education ministries around the world. Children's lives are chained to this wheel. Poor children can't afford to fix the mistakes of state education, as middle-class children can, through tutoring and familial support.

Yet we persist with allowing ideological bias and personal preference to be presented as research by social scientists. As we keep saying, if you really want evidence-based policy you need to start with robust evidence not ideological bias.

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Scrapping the position of Council chief executive? Well it's a thought...

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Indeed a thought that Bradford Council's Conservative Group has proposed in its last two budget submissions (more specifically we've asked that the position is included within a wider review of governance and leadership). It seems that the government down in London agrees with us:

‘The Government believes that the traditional model of chief executive, with a wide public role and a significant salary, is unnecessary and can weaken the ability of a council’s political leadership to set a direction through the executive role of elected members.'

Now partly this is all part of the "no public servant should be paid more than the prime minister" nonsense but there's a more important and broader issue here of governance. As council chief executives have drifted away from their traditional town clerk role they have become what one Bradford councillor called "the unelected mayor", individuals with an enormous amount of discretionary (even arbitrary) power. Moreover this power is exercised without the capacity of the electorate and its representatives to control or correct actions.

The intention of the 2000 local government act (for all its myriad flaws and failures) was to re-establish the authority of elections and elected people either through the introduction of a directly elected mayor or else through a powerful leader and cabinet model. The presence, especially within the latter, of powerful chief executives undermines the authority of that political executive by creating a different nexus from which policy and strategic leadership can come.

In Bradford this problem is illustrated by the fact that the chief executive has over £4 million worth of officer resource directed to policy, strategy and 'change' whereas the entire political establishment has just two and a half policy officers (less than £100,000 worth). A moment's glance at this structure tells you that the political leadership of the council, in terms of positive policy-making, is completely dominated by the chief executive. Indeed it often seems that the only action us politicians can take is to veto a proposal. Positive proposals, if they don't accord with the professional leadership's 'vision', run the risk of simply staying just that, a proposal.

None of this is a criticism of the capability of chief executives merely to observe that the position has grown to such strength that the over-riding principle of democratic leadership and accountability is undermined. We need to look again at the role of leading the 'paid service' and consider how we can - if we like the idea of democracy that is - rejuvenate the role of councillors and political leadership.

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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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"Minimum pricing to be shelved" - we're not quite there folks

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It's looking more likely that minimum pricing for alcohol - a ghastly piece of health fascism - is to be dropped:

Plans for minimum pricing on alcohol in England and Wales may be dropped because Conservative ministers are split over the proposals. 

Whatever the reason this is good news - the proposal was just another vote-losing attack on the less well off. But we're not yet there - the prohibitionists, fussbuckets, puritans and health fascists will be redoubling their efforts, churning out their lies and half-truths so as to get this 'back on track'.

So let's keep up the pressure, keep saying this is unwarranted, without evidence and punishes the moderate drinker as well as the serious toper.

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The poor can't be trusted with money, can they?

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Alec Massie is a pretty mild-mannered writer. So it is a shock to read this:

I  wonder how many poor people, far less people on welfare, Mr Shelbrooke encounters. Some, presumably. But, my, what a vile little authoritarian he is. It has evidently escaped his notice that the reason many poor people spend a disproportionate quantity of their meagre resources on gambling is that they have such limited resources in the first place. It may not be an advisable or profitable policy but it is at least an understandable one.

For that matter, cigarettes and alcohol are not necessarily luxuries. They might instead be considered small pleasures that make life a little less ghastly. Especially when you lack means.

I notice, mind you, that Mr Shelbrooke makes no comment on whether it is OK for middle-class mothers to spend their child benefit on gin.

It may well be that Mr Shelbrooke has some support in these proposals. They are just the sort of saloon bar policy – I can picture him, G+T in hand at some golf club do, holding court with ways to make the unemployed behave properly. And it is this image rather than the policy that causes the problem. It is the moralising, patronage of the ruling classes to those less fortunate. We kindly provide these indigents and unfortunates with the means to sustain themselves and they promptly toddle off and spend it on cheap lager and superkings.

I lose count of the times when I’ve described the circumstances of the poor and why this leads to – almost requires – the consumption of small pleasures: booze, fags, sex and TV are what sustains these folk in what is a crap life. But people like Mr Shelbrooke from their blazered comfort choose instead to try and order the choices of the poor since, in his view, they are unable to make such choices without his help and direction.

"When hard-working families up and down the country are forced to cut back on such non-essential, desirable, it is right that taxpayer benefits be only used for essential purposes."

This approach describes entirely the problem facing the Conservative Party. People support benefits reform – the objective of making working financially more attractive that a life on the dole is admirable and overdue. But this is not about condemning the lifestyles of the poor, it’s about the practicalities of allowing these people to live while they – hopefully – sort their lives out. Patronising and judgemental policies such as this “welfare card” idea (and other idiocies that include minimum pricing for booze) just get people’s backs up.

Put simply, it isn’t the government’s job to judge other people’s lifestyle. And when a wealthy MP does this, the ordinary person looks up, shakes his head and mutters obscenities under his breath. If people like Mr Shelbrooke want to get re-elected in their marginal Northern seats they’d do well to take heed of this and start talking instead about responsibility rather than about dictating the choices for people with the misfortune to need benefits.

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