A dangling conversation about Mrs Roosevelt and parking outside Cullingworth Primary School

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For many years I subscribed to that famous Eleanor Roosevelt dictum - you know the one:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Now leaving aside just what an unpleasant gossipy bitch Mrs Roosevelt was, I've now come to the conclusion that this dictum is a monumental load of tommyrot. And this realisation came from listening to a song I really don't like all that much - Paul Simon's 'The Dangling Conversation'. In the third verse Simon tells us:

Yes we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in The Dangling Conversation
And the superficial sighs
In the borders of our lives.

The couple in the song lived absolutely according to Mrs Roosevelt's dictum yet Paul Simon suggests that the result of this is that what they considered to be grand thoughts about important matters were, in truth, utterly superficial. What matters is more personal, more direct and much much more difficult to discuss - how we feel about others, how people relate and how this affects our lives.

This morning I turned down the opportunity to go on the radio for a discussion about 'Charlie Hebdo', free speech and all that stuff. I did so because some neighbours of the primary school in Cullingworth have complained about parking by parents delivering their children to the school. An utterly mundane matter of no strategic significance but, I decided, far more important than pontificating about grand things on the radio.

At the primary school I've got a fighting chance of doing something to make the situation a little better, to allow my neighbours (and the school's neighbours) to rub along together a little better. And this matters far more to people than whether or not I think it's OK to publish cartoons that might upset someone. Those people are the small minded folk that Mrs Roosevelt viewed with such snooty disdain - they want to tell me about the man who parks his 4x4 on the pavement or the taxi driver who always ignores the double yellow lines. This is because these things matter.

When the grand people on the radio or television - or those apeing them like the couple with the dangling conversation in Paul Simon's song - talk about grand ideas they forget that those grand ideas, when acted on, result in real effects on real people. Indeed that, were the ideas presented to those mums at the school gate or the couple in the council house round the corner, they'd get short shrift - out-of-touch would perhaps be the most polite response.

Because us grand folk have Mrs Roosevelt's disdain for such small-mindedness (too often thinking that those people simply won't understand so why bother), we resort to conducting political debate through dumbed down slogan and pithy soundbites. This is the world of 'not right or left but right or wrong', 'long term economic plans' and 'for the many, not the few' - endlessly repeated advertising mantras that mean little but make a pleasing sound.

We pretend that people like what we're saying by the liberal use of opinion polling as post hoc justification of the slogan or soundbite. Yet this brand marketing is weak, inconsistent and ineffective compared to that from big brand owners - put simply Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Persil are more trusted than any political brand anywhere in the world. And this is because, unlike those brands, political parties treat their customers - the voters - with Mrs Roosevelt's disdain.

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't discuss grand ideas but we need to try to include more people in those discussions rather than, as is typical, using words and concepts seemingly designed to close the debate off to any but the cognoscenti. Whether it's a debate about 'culture' or a discussion of macroeconomics, we should try at least to use words people understand rather than pretending that language is somehow a barrier to the analysis of the subject in question. In the end - as so often with these things - someone has made the point much better - here's George Orwell:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Above all, it seems to me, we need to spend more time talking about (and to, and with) people and their daily lives and not pretending that somehow this is a lower form of talk reserved for people who aren't nearly as clever as we are. For, by the use of that grand language, we fall into Orwell's trap and become fools. Fools no-one else much can understand but fools - snobbish fools - nonetheless.

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Bradford's parking fines and the economic downturn...

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In the latest (Q1 2012/13) Bradford Council financial monitor there's a bit on why the Directorate of Environment & Sport is predicting an overspend. Amongst other things it says:

Revenue generated from Car Parking Services is currently declining; this is primarily as a consequence of the economic downturn and a reduction in income from parking fines. Our analysis raises questions about the trade-off between less income than planned and the positive outcome of more law-abiding parking.

Implicit in this statement is that the 'economic downturn' is responsible for a predicted reduction in income from fines. No-one was able to provide any substantiation for this a today's meeting. Probably because the real evidence suggests the opposite:

Traffic tickets go up significantly when local government revenue falls, they found. Their study showed for the first time evidence of how "local governments behave, in part, as though traffic tickets are a revenue tool to help offset periods of fiscal distress." ...

Controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point drop in local government revenue leads to a roughly .32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year, a statistically significant connection.

My feeling is that this reflects more enforcement rather than more bad driving - perhaps (although I'm pretty sure most Bradfordians would giggle at this suggestion) the City's drivers are behaving better?

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Efforts to stop Bradford's Labour Councillors from their mission to kill the City centre

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Although Bradford's leader has graciously agree to put off killing Shipley, Bingley and Keighley town centres by announcing a two-year delay to the introduction of on-street parking charges, the 'let's raise some more cash' brigade are still winning in Bradford City centre.

We have called in the Labour's executive's decision to extend the City centre on-street parking charges mostly because it's a really stupid idea. Plus of course Bradford's good little socialist car-haters had every intention of ignoring any objection (from shoppers, shopkeepers and local businesses) since they'd spend £125,000 on buying the new parking meters.

The decision will be looked at by the Environment & Waste Scrutiny Committee at its meeting on 28th February in City Hall. The meeting starts at 5.30pm and should be an interesting occasion - I am hoping that the Committee sees sense and tells our Labour bosses that making it more expensive to shop in a struggling city centre really isn't the best way to go about regenerating that city centre.

The Labour executive will doubtless ignore this but it's worth a try!

In the meantime, the Telegraph & Argus have a little poll (you can vote here) that current shows 83% against the idea.

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Bradford Council's lunatic justification for killing town centres...

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On a day when town centres will be in the news, Bradford Council announces its latest wheeze to promote town centre success. On-street car parking charges. Yes folks, the Labour Party in Bradford - wedded as they are to utter lunacy and supported by anti-car, anti-business, anti-sanity Green Party councillors - tell us that these car parking charges will:

...improve access to town centres and stimulate trade by creating a higher turnover of customers.

The current arrangements - for example on North Parade in the City Centre or on Bingley Main Street - are for short stay free parking. Now we'll have short stay with charges. How exactly will that promote a higher turnover of customers?

Let me predict what will happen. Fewer people will go to town centres to shop, choosing instead to to to places where they don't have to pay to park.

In the middle of a massive retail downturn, this perhaps takes the prize for the stupidest of stupid proposals. And it's just about raising cash anyway.

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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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Free parking and lower rates - now that might help town centres!

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New Start Magazine report on the increasing problem of a declining independent retail sector noting that:

“Vacancies have continued to increase over the last two quarters and overall shop vacancy has nearly doubled in England and Wales since the end of 2008. More than 12% of shops were empty across Great Britain between July and December last year”

Partly this reflects the impact of a very severe recession on the sector. It is not surprising that retailers struggle and especially independent retailers with low margins and little scope to reduce staffing or argue with the landlord about rent levels. The concern we should all have – a concern expressed in the Clone Towns reports – is that regardless of the cycle of growth and recession, the traditional high street is in decline. Indeed, it is already the case that many secondary centres are barely sustained by a convenience store, a building society branch and a couple of hairdressers.

It seems reasonable therefore to discuss the role of purpose of town centres and why their retail role is declining. A while ago I wrote that:

“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 win at cricket, hundred 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.”

Simply talking about shopping misses the point – shops are there because the customers are there not the other way round. In suggesting ways forward, I argued that rather than controls, what town centres needed was programming, animation. But there is a further, practical issue illustrated by this:

“Free on-street car parking spaces in Bradford city centre look set to be scrapped.

The news was immediately condemned by traders as a further body blow in their fight to attract custom.

Only last week a study revealed that the city centre has the second highest proportion of vacant shops in the country.”

So the customer has to pay to go shopping in the town centre – something they don’t have to do out-of-town. Whether at the supermarket, in the retail park or at regional centres like Meadowhall and Trafford Park, we get to park for free. Despite this, local councils – urged on by central government – continue to promote extensions to on street parking charges, congestion charging and even the exclusion of cars from centres. Is it any surprise we go elsewhere?

But it’s worse. For all its rhetoric on supporting town centres. For all the planning policy discussions on hierarchies and sequential tests, out-of-town retailers have a significant financial advantage – the property taxes they pay are half or less than those of the town centre retailer. Our tax regime supports supermarkets. By way of illustration look at one small town – Uttoxeter:

“Town centre traders' business rates are nearly double that of Tesco – despite pulling in only half the supermarket giant's turnover.

The Post & Times revealed last week that the out-of-town chain store takes 50p of every pound spent in Uttoxeter.

But Government figures show the company's business rates are 46 per cent less than the combined total paid by shopkeepers in the centre.

Tesco forks out £386,000 each year for its Town Meadows Way site, while the 145 shopkeepers in The Maltings shopping precinct, High Street, Carter Street and Market Place stump up £714,000.”

So while we are right to look – as I suggested – at town centres as:

"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"

…we also need to look at providing easier access including free parking and at removing the enormous tax advantage we are giving to out-of-town retailers. It would be a simple matter to drop business rates in designated town centres by 90% - and the impact would be immediate and beneficial. And local councils can remove parking charges on-street and drop car park charges straightaway - again to immediate benefit (and probably political advantage too!).

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