Private bin collections, vulnerable people and the funding of local councils

I'm going to be very careful here because I don't want you all to think I've an issue with the concept of 'vulnerable' people or indeed our obligation to support them. But we need to look at how two factors are throwing a spanner into the works of local government (and the local delivery of services):

1. We're getting better at keeping people alive, which is great, but we're also getting better at giving those people a real life

2. We've realised that year on year real terms increases in the cost of government are unsustainable in an era of (relatively) low growth rates

The consequence of these two - somewhat contradictory  - factors can be seen in stories like this:

Some householders in Greater Manchester are paying a private firm to empty their bins.

Many are angry because some councils have reduced rubbish collections in an attempt to cut costs, and to motivate people to recycle more.

A local businessman who bought himself a truck eighteen months ago is now emptying up to 800 bins a week.

Collecting the rubbish is, as far as most people are concerned, the main - they'll say "only" - service they get from their local council. Yet nearly every local council has now moved from weekly to fortnightly collections (all wrapped up in nice weasel words about recycling) and some are now creeping from every other week to every third week - even once-a-month.

Many of you will have noticed how local roads are getting worse too. There's a simple reason for this - to maintain roads in Bradford over a 25 year cycle, we currently need between £10 million and £11 million spending on them every year. We're actually spending £7 million to £8 million. Even with efficiencies and new technology, those roads will deteriorate.

It's easy to blame austerity - "the cuts" - for this parlous state of affairs. After all that's the second of the two points above. But what you should appreciate is that, even without 'austerity' (which I'll define as spending by local councils remaining at 2010 levels) there would be huge pressures on those general services as a result of 'vulnerable people'.

To illustrate this, I'll talk about the police. Recently I met with a couple of senior coppers to discuss policing challenges in Bradford. For the police (even with, now, a relatively protected budget) there's real pressure on basic frontline service - 'bobbies on the beat' as we most often call it. This is because, quite understandably, the police have been told to give more attention to child sexual abuse, missing people (especially children) and getting better at dealing with people they encounter who have serious mental health problems. These new priorities - usually just added onto the old priorities - are very resource intensive. One missing girl takes up a great deal more police time than one house burglary meaning that more and more resource is redirected to this work with 'vulnerable people'.

For local councils (and here I'm talking about unitary authorities like Bradford) approaching 50% the spending we control is now directed to dealing with these 'vulnerable people'. And there aren't very many of such folk. Looking at the numbers in Bradford, between adult social care, children's social services and programmes in public health (drug and alcohol rehabilitation and so forth) we work with about 15,000 people out of Bradford's half-a-million population - that's 3% of the District's population taking up nearly 50% of the money spent by the Council. And the looking after is expensive - one out-of-district placement for a child with special support needs can cost up to £200,000 a year.

As a result of this, small changes in predicted numbers have a huge impact on budgets - 900 looked after children rather than the 850 we expected and there's a multi-million pound overspend. And other support extends too - we seldom used to get situations where learning disabled adults ended up as carers for their physically disabled parents but this is now happening because we've helped those learning disabled adults have a better, longer and happier life. I could go on - more old people living longer in their homes, disabled children who used to die in their teens are now living into their twenties and thirties and we've rightly decided that children in care shouldn't just be dumped in kindly but crowded children's homes.

The result of all this is that, in one way or another, we're going to end up paying more for things we once considered free. And, while taxation is one way of doing this, I'm not sure I want the council tax of a young family struggling to pay the rent or mortgage to go up and up so we can provide care for an older person living in a house worth £250,000 or more. Unfortunately the debate about funding local services is trapped in a model of property taxes plus grant that precludes alternatives - even in places trying radical approaches like Swindon the solution is based on taxes rather than charges.

Regardless of national funding settlements, local council spending will continue to shift onto personal support services and away from the universal visible services we tend to think of as what our council does. This rather brings into question both the purpose of the local council and also the means by which we fund local government. Property taxes make sense when the services are primarily directed to place rather than people (emptying bins, sweeping streets, fixing potholes, running parks and so forth) but make much less sense when those taxes are overwhelmingly directed to personal support.

I don't know the answer to all this but I am sure that our national debate needs to pay attention to these trends. As a conservative, I'm in favour of personal responsibility with a safety net - where people are able to pay they should pay - but I recognise that we've somehow got the "I've paid into the system, I'm entitled to free stuff" mindset to deal with if this is going to change. In the meantime, Councils will continue to scrimp with the result that you probably won't get your bin emptied so often, the roads will be poor and the park will be tatty.

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More on the need for benefits reform...

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Some readers may be familiar with Debbie Purdy the 'right-to-die' campaigner but she's been in the news again. This time the campaigning lady was in the Magistrates' Court for non-payment of Council Tax. And, while there she said this:

...benefits officials told her on five occasions that she would get more money if her musician husband Omar Puente stopped working.

“It is outrageous. The benefits system is supposed to be a safety net, not a hangman’s noose,” she said.

The couple’s benefits were recently reviewed and officials told them if her husband was unemployed they would get further benefits such as free council tax, free prescriptions and help with paying the interest on their mortgage. 

Tell me again about having a system that rewards working?

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Dear Res Publica, taxing the shopping habits of the poor to subsidise the preferences of the wealthy is immoral and stupid

I wasn’t planning to comment at length on Adam Schoenborn’s Res Publica report, The Right to Retail – indeed Guido’s comments might have sufficed:

Food price inflation is bad enough as it is without Blond trying to undermine the competitiveness of the supermarkets, who will inevitably just pass on increased costs to consumers. Blond and Zac are a danger to the affordability of basic needs to consumers with their attempts to foist a Tory form of autarky on us all. If Blond wants to open a grocery store good luck to him, no need to hobble the supermarkets in the process.

However, I made the mistake of starting to read the report and to consider what it says:

The finding of the Competition Commission in 2008 – that the grocery market represents a “good deal for consumers” – has exposed the limitations of our national competition framework. We participate in our economy not just as consumers but as employees, community-members, investors and crucially as owners. As such, competition law must go beyond price-based consideration of consumer interest. It must create and sustain markets and a model of growth that can sustain small owners alongside the big. If instead we continue to be indifferent to ownership, we will continue to be a society without assets, practicing capitalism without capitalists.

The obvious question that springs from this comment is why? Why do we need to “sustain small owners” – surely in a free market small owners will succeed if they make a good enough offer, buy well and are properly managed. And I know this because I wrote a Masters Dissertation on street markets and farmers markets. Unlike the author of this report, I took the trouble to read the wide academic literature, to look at the experience of the USA, Canada and Europe and to consider how you can see small traders succeed alongside the supermarket. And yes, there is a movement out there, growing and expanding – filling a niche of local, high-quality food.

• FARMA, the farmers’ market, farm shop and pick-your-own organisation now boasts over 700 members trading through 800 markets and retail outlets across the country.
• Ocado, set out in 2002 to provide high quality food online and is now a listed company – demonstrating again how new entrants to the grocery market can succeed
• And Abel & Cole lead the field in the provision of veg boxes – regular deliveries of fresh, seasonal fruit and veg to the consumer’s home

Moreover if you visit inner-cities you’ll see other grocery phenomena – thriving municipal markets stuffed with Asian, African and East European stalls, corner shops that, in response to demand, have suddenly become the Polish shop and in places like Bradford great supermarkets like Pakeezah and Haq. All these businesses are successfully trading in competition to the big supermarket chains. I even saw fruit and veg van sales in Bradford last week – something I’ve not seen since I was a child!

What saddens me about Schoenborn’s report isn’t just that it completely ignores all this exciting new retailing but that there is absolutely no reference to the extensive literature about the drivers for supermarket success, the long term decline of town centres as locations for convenience and bulky goods shopping and the different strategies available to rejuvenate town centres. The only theory in the report relates to economics – there is nothing from the wider field of urban studies, from town and country planning (despite the proposal for a whole raft of new planning regulations and controls), from sociology or from geography.

And the prescription set out here – to introduce a further tax on out-of-town retail – won’t work. It may provide some extra cash for town centres but are we really suggesting that a tax on one business should be used to subsidise another business – selected through some unspecified process of ‘designation’? Is that not a recipe for state control, corruption and market distortion?

More importantly, at a time when food inflation is well in excess of 5%, such a tax would act merely to raise prices. And it would be the less well off – the folk who shop and Morrisons, Tesco and ASDA – who will pay those prices. What Schoenborn proposes is a tax on the shopping habits of the relatively poor so as to subsidise the shopping preferences of the relatively rich.

A while ago I wrote – referring to a study by US sociologists Susie Pryor and Sanford Grossbart (“The Ethnography of an American Main Street”, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 2005):

Main Street is not simply a place of commerce – a shopping centre. Nor is it (as if in some Soviet dream) just a place for formal events and celebrations. It is a place of engagement and co-operation between merchants, consumers and “ancillary actors”. It is alive.

The driver to the success of Main Street isn’t the shop – although to hear us talk about town centres you would think that – it is the relationship we have with that place and the space it provides for the events and activities of our lives. In Bradford, when Pakistan wins at cricket, hundreds of fans head for the local centres. Not to shop but to share their happiness at victory.

Yet we distrust such a use for the spaces of our town centres. Many of us grumble about public drinking, about young people gathering together, about hen parties and stag dos. And we certainly dislike political campaigns and religious promotion (unless of course it’s an official and state-sanctioned occasion) – to the point of complaining about these activities.

To make town centres work we need to start thinking about them differently:

1. Places of performance – planned or otherwise
2. Centres of culture not temples to shopping
3. A locus for excitement and discovery rather than the workaday
4. As venues for communal celebration, sharing and festivity

So rather than beating down the door of John Lewis, Selfridges or some other “iconic” store should we not be finding impresarios to programme and create the framework on which the community's events and occasions – large and small – might be hung? After all we won’t go to Tesco to celebrate when West Ham win the world cup again!

Simply using the blunt instrument of tax and planning controls to give preference to selected small high street shops (not street markets, farmers markets, van sales, veg boxes, farm shops or other innovative retail businesses) is both wrong and misguided. To make town centres work you have to animate them, to put on events, to make them party friendly and to make the centre accessible by car – so cheap or free parking and plenty off it, please.

And, when you undertake some research, it’s good practice to actually refer to the literature lovingly written by academics across the world who specialise in that field rather than simply revisit one report (in this case from the UK’s Competition Commission) the conclusions of which you – without any substantiation or theoretical basis – choose to disagree with.

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Poverty? Why am I not surprised....

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The Institute for Fiscal Studies has been looking at poverty and income:

Research by the IFS discovered that those at the bottom of the income spectrum had higher living standards than those with slightly better pay.

The findings suggest low spending is a better indication of poverty, instead of low income.

In fact, those with the lowest income had a high level of spending, suggesting they were only temporarily at the bottom of the income pile - drawing upon savings or other assets as a buffer against poverty - or that they are underreporting their earnings.

Yep, all those satellite TVs, iPhones and better cars than mine! They grow on trees!

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Bradford Council's budget...plus a thought about tweeting!

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The deed is done - the Council has set a budget. For most folk the most important thing about it remains the answer to the question: "so how much is my Council Tax going up by?" I know, I know - the real story is about the cuts - either spiteful and targeted at vulnerable people or forced onto innocent and efficient Councils by the evil monster Pickles. But when - in about an hour - I arrive at the Club ready to win the quiz, I know it will be the Council Tax question that gets asked.

Don't get me wrong here, the 'cuts' are important - especially important if you're the poor soul who has lost a job or no longer get a particular service. But in the round taking £56m out of a £1.2bn budget isn't going to make the wheels fall off the wagon - especially if, as in Bradford's case, the Council anticipated the scale of reductions. Nevertheless the decision today included decisions to cut services - closing small libraries, removing off-highway rural bin collection and dramatically reducing the budgets for maintaining highways, parks and local facilities. These decisions - for all the talk of equity and equality from the Council's leadership - disproportionate affect people living in rural parts of the district.

So when I'm asked why I voted against the budget it isn't because I could write a better one (although I could) but because the Labour Party chose to target cuts directly and deliberately at the people I represent.

And I shall be telling those people about that decision.

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Partly related to this is a comment from that rarity - someone in the public gallery during a council meeting - who asked why I was 'playing with my phone'. In truth I was tweeting - commenting on what was being said by members during the budget debate. To do this I have to listen to what's being said!

And it means that a load of people who might not be able to or want to come to the actual meeting are able to get a flavour - albeit coloured by my bias - of what's happening. Perhaps a few hundred people knew something - certainly more than would be the case in past years - about our budget deliberations.

I don't consider that to be disrespectful but to be an enhancement - its extending our engagement and people's involvement in the processes of democracy. I was able to give response and comment on things people were concerned about - care for the elderly, children's services and support for the arts - as decisions about those very things were being discussed.

So no, I wasn't playing with my phone. I was enhancing democracy - something more Councillors should do!

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Bankers Bonus Day - now that should be a holiday!

Let’s face it, we’re envious of those bonus-wielding bankers. That’s it – the whole story. There is no great economic issue, no nascent destruction to be visited upon us as a result.

No, we’re just envious:

So the annual feeding frenzy is starting. While the rest of us face the trauma of how to pay Christmas credit card bills, the City’s high-rollers shove their snouts in the trough and hoover up mind-boggling bonuses of £7billion. Government pleas to stop the gravy train have fallen on deaf ears.

And not only has the media got itself into a state of excitement but politicians have been quick to capture this envy with talk of “social responsibility” and other such tommy rot. Some, such as the boss of the Charity chief executive’s trade union, call for a special extra tax on these bad bankers to be handed over to the ‘third sector’ where of course it will be spent so much more effectively!

So, instead of getting ourselves in a lather about the paying of bonuses to bankers, let’s get a little perspective. Not about whether or not the payments are earned, justified, evil or corrupt but about whether it actually matters. Can we ask ourselves why we have such a problem with people receiving bonus payments in accordance with their contracts of employment? To the extent that we want to punish them for their good fortune by either banning the bonuses or slapping on an extra tax?

Personally, I think big bonuses for bankers are just fine.

In the same way I think what premiership footballers earn is great and the scary money earned by leading luvvies is just brilliant. I’m not even that fussed about people running £1bn plus public organisations being paid “more than the Prime Minister”. Nope, if banks want to remunerate their top employees this way, that’s fine by me – and entirely the banks’ business.

And I don’t think that these arrangement merit any further investigation, any greater transparency or some form of passive-aggressive quid pro quo from the Government – "it’s OK folks we won’t have a go at your bonuses if you let us lecture you about your operational practices". The Government – an organisation with a truly awful record in business management – seeks to direct banking decisions because there’s a big stick to beat the bankers with in the form of endless attacks on the normal remuneration practices of banks. This doesn't instill me with much confidence.

So British banks will pay out £7bn in bonuses to their employees. Bear in mind that half of this - £3.5bn – will go straight back to the Government in the form of taxes. And that doesn’t include the contribution from the bewildering panoply of duties and levies that these wealthy bankers will pay on their leisure and pleasure! And remember that these bankers will spend the money, invest the money, and make rational decisions that will help build our economy.

I’m not envious of bankers (well maybe a little) and think we should celebrate their good fortune rather than trying to argue that not receiving what you’re earned is in any way ‘socially responsible’.  The day bankers get their bonuses is a great day for our economy – a day when money leaves the business balance and starts being consumed, starts driving our great economy.

Perhaps that day should be a bank holiday – I’d party with the bankers for sure!

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No.......

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I'm sure many of you are familiar with the kind of meeting where the Chief Executive paints the gloomy picture of the business - pay freezes, shorter hours, no promotion raises and the dread spectre of the 'R' word - redundancy. I spent yesterday morning in one of those meetings - depressing stuff.

So imagine my delight when opening my council e-mail to read this:

Councillor

LOCAL GOVERNMENT PAY AWARD 2010- 2011

We are writing to you as the UNISON members representing NJC workers in Bradford Council to make you aware of our members’ anger at the pay ‘freeze’ imposed on them for the 1 April 2010 – 2011 pay settlement. We believe that, as a councillor, you should be aware of this, particularly in a year of local – and the General – elections, when issues such as pay will obviously influence how our members vote. We are urging you to ask our council and the LGA to reconsider their support for an effective pay cut for our members this year.

There have been no negotiations over our pay this year. At the last meeting of the NJC Joint Secretaries – at which they were expecting to open negotiations – they were told that the Employers’ Side had decided that there would be no increase in pay for our members this year. We understand that there was cross-party consensus amongst LGA Group Leaders on this decision. We are surprised and disappointed at the decision itself and the manner in which it was arrived at. The consequences of it are likely to be very serious indeed – for our members, service users and for local government itself.....

The letter carries on in this mildly threatening vein for several more paragraphs ending with this:

Below-inflation pay increases in recent years have already left our members – your employees - struggling to make ends meet. As a councillor, we know that you will appreciate the vital contribution they make to local people in our local authority and will want to ensure that our council can continue to recruit and retain such dedicated staff. We are sure that you will be seeking their support to continue to provide vital services as redundancies and workloads increase, but they will be reluctant to do so with only a pay cut to reward them for their efforts! Their commitment is being severely challenged and you will appreciate that 1.6 million employees, their families and friends will be unlikely to show electoral support for those who appear to value them so little.

We would like to hear from you and would ask you to give us a response to the following questions:

Do you agree with this year’s pay cut for NJC workers in our council?
What was the budget for pay this year in its Medium Term Financial Plan in 2008-9?

How does this council intend to use the pay element of the formula grant from central Government?

If you support our members’ right to a pay increase this year, we would ask you to write to the Chairman of the LGA, Margaret Eaton, urging the LGA and the Local Government Employers to change their minds.

We look forward to a response to our letter.

With best wishes,


UNISON Rep

Well that just took the biscuit. I thought about writing a long, considered response but why should I bother?

Dear Unison Rep

Why should you get a pay rise when others (equally poorly paid and without your lovely index-linked final salary pension) are facing pay cuts - assuming of course they've kept their jobs.

You and your members don't have a "right" to a pay rise - you get one when it's affordable just like everyone else. And in case you haven't noticed there's not a great deal of spare cash around out there.

So do I support your case? In a word....

++++++++++NO++++++++++

Yours etc.


Cllr Simon Cooke

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