Earlier this year I had a paper published about the use of 60% of the median income as a measure of poverty (Why refer to poverty as a proportion of median income?, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, Volume 20, Number 2, June 2012 , pp. 163-175.) I suggested it would be simpler, and easier to justify, if the reference figure was 50% of median earnings instead. According to recent figures in the HBAI series, 60% of median income fell from £259 in 2010 to £251 pw in 2011. By contrast, 50% of median earnings fell from £250pw to £249 pw.
Author: Paul Spicker
Promoting GP competition
Reform Scotland has published a pamphlet arguing that since GP practices are insufficiently sensitive to patients’ needs, the answer must be to promote competition between providers. That doesn’t follow. When markets are based on ‘choice’, the choices that are made are not just the choices of consumers; they are also the choices of providers. Competition works because providers refine and select what they do. They choose who their customers are. They choose their location. Making the right choices cut costs; that is why competitive markets tend to be efficient (and why public services aims for ‘cost-effectiveness’ instead of efficiency – the aims are very different). The selective decisions of providers, within the current system, are precisely the reasons why patients do not get what they need. Which practices are going to cover people in isolated rural locations? Who is going to provide services to drug users, who use GP services at ten times the rate of other people? Who is going to provide services to very elderly people, who cost practices seven times the resource of other patients? Competition is not the way to a universal service; it is the opposite of what is called for.
The case for transaction taxes
James Mirrlees, the chair of the IFS review on taxation, is reporting as criticising the Scottish Government’s proposal for a property transaction tax. His review in 2010 described property transactions taxes as ‘highly inefficient’ and argued that there should be an annual tax on housing services, based on up to date valuation of property. That’s all very well, but no such valuations exist; the current information is more than twenty years out of date. The problem faced by the current Scottish Government, then, is that there is no mechanism in place to do what Mirrlees recommends, and it will take years to create it.
The Scottish Government is inheriting a complex, rather obscure system. For example, there are some twenty-five different reliefs; three or four do all the heavy lifting, and about 15 are hardly claimed at all by anyone, but by the same token those reliefs don’t actually cost anything, and the Government can be sure that if they abolish them, there will eventually be protests. The system makes little sense, but it more or less works (largely because all property transfers are registered and solicitors enforce it). That’s an argument for incremental change at best.
London Metropolitan University
I have signed a petition to the UK Border Agency at http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/amnesty-for-international-students-at-london-metropolit.html. It reads as follows:
We believe that it is completely contrary to natural justice that students should be punished for problems emanating from their University.
We therefore demand that the UK Border Agency agree to an immediate amnesty for the international students at London Metropolitan University affected by the Agency’s decision to revoke the University’s ‘Highly Trusted Status’. This would enable them to continue their studies while the problems at London Met were addressed.
We believe that the UKBA’s decision is a disproportionate reaction to a situation that could be addressed without the recourse to such drastic action. The UKBA’s decision punishes thousands of students who are entirely innocent of any alleged immigration breaches and sends a disastrous message to the rest of the world that UK higher education is not accessible to international students. Its actions threaten the immediate futures of thousands of London Metropolitan students, as well as the future of the University, and casts a huge shadow over the very valuable contribution that international students make to the culture and sustainability of UK higher education.
Tuition fees
Joan McAlpine writes in today’s Daily Record that the Scottish Government’s actions to remove fees from Scottish students has been “well and truly vindicated” by improved recruitment. However, the story is not yet complete. Undergraduate fees have not been abolished; they are charged and reimbursed by the Students Awards Agency to Scotland, which makes a payment direct to the university. The fees which are being charged and reimbursed to Scottish students by this process are different from, and signficantly lower than, the fees charged to students from the rest of the UK. Expect the court cases to blossom. There is probably a very simple solution, which is to charge all students the same nominal fee and then reimburse it to Scottish-based students. It’s been done in Further Education for years.
Assessing PIP
The DWP has announced that two firms will be contracted to deliver the new Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment. They are Atos, who will cover Scotland, North East, North West, London and Southern England, and Capita, who will cover Wales and Central England. Atos’s appointment will be particularly controversial, but it is difficult to see who else has the capacity to deliver what the government is asking for.
Computer Weekly is not part of my usual reading, but their coverage has been exemplary: click here to find the articles. From them I read that the ATOS contract is worth £400m, and the Capita contract £140m; there is another contract still to be decided.
From the 2012 Budget documents, we know that what the government hopes to save from reforming DLA is zero this year, £355m in 2013-14, £1055m in 2014-15 and £1415m in 2015-16. In other words, the contracts are larger than the early savings. I suggested in this blog on April 20th that the proposed reforms were not likely to deliver the savings that the government wanted. If I’m right about that, this process could end up costing the government a large part of what it saves.
The base of the pyramid
There is more than one road to excellence. Six weeks ago, I went to an open-air concert performed by the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, the product of Venezuela’s El Sistema (try this clip on Youtube.) This is one of the world’s greatest orchestras, but they didn’t get there by selecting elite musicians. El Sistema is also a major project for social inclusion. It has achieved a small miracle through a mass programme of musical education, drawing in hundreds of thousands of children. The orchestra is only the apex of a large pyramid. That, as much as the performance, is what makes it special.
This week, in Britain, we are having success in sport at the Olympics. The media are buzzing with claims that the success of elite sportsmen and women will trickle down; they will be role models; they will encourage children to participate in physical exercise; they will “inspire a generation”. I see no evidence to support any of these claims. Success has been achieved – as it was formerly achieved in East Germany – by selecting elite athletes and giving them elite resources (such as the individually engineered bicycles that have helped the British to dominate in the velodrome). Britain’s tally of medals is approaching that of the USA – another country which, like us, suffers from social exclusion and an obesity epidemic. If we built a pyramid from the base, it will be possible to identify people at the heights. If we start at the top instead, that is all we will ever see.
Changing the CPI
This may be one of the most obscure technical points I ever mention in this blog. The Office for National Statistics is consulting on a new version of the Consumer Price Index – the document is here. The CPIH will be intended to take housing inflation into account. That does not have any direct implications for policy, but indirectly it seems more than possible that those elements of the CPI which are used to reflect housing issues will ultimately be geared to CPIH rather than the existing CPI. And that matters because benefits, pensions and other issues are being uprated according to the CPI, which does not currently take housing into account, rather than the Retail Price Index, which does. It was recently announced, for example, that the Local Housing Allowance – the local limit on Housing Benefit – will be uprated according to the CPI. There will be a strong argument for moving this to the new CPIH.
The calculation of the new CPIH is not, however, going to reflect what people actually pay for housing. The consultation proposes to take into account the imputed rent of owner-occupiers, measured in an unrepeatably obscure way by drawing parallels with private rental values. This method is called “rental equivalence”. The concept was used long ago for taxation, and it suffered then from an obvious problem – information about rental values is hard to come by, and what we have is dominated by the social rented sector. I can’t tell as things stand whether this will lead to a higher or lower rating for the CPI. However, it does seem undesirable to produce figures that will influence benefit levels by jiggery-pokery, rather than straightforwardly measuring what people actually spend.
The consultation on same sex marriage
I read the report on the consultation on same-sex marriage with a certain professional interest: my team processed the previous consultation on civil partnerships in 2004. Nicola Sturgeon was subject to some hostile questioning on Newsnight Scotland about the treatment of the consultation, on the basis that a majority of respondents were clearly opposed in principle. But a consultation is not a sort of referendum; the purpose is not to count heads, but to make sure that a full range of views is taken into account.
Part of the problem is that consultations are presented as if the proportion of respondents mattered. We wrote in our report:
The consultation was not in any sense numerically representative, and caution should be exercised in interpreting the pattern of responses on the basis of majorities or minorities. The validity of a consultation depends, not on numerical representation, but on the extent to which it succeeds in representing and giving voice to diverse groups and shades of opinion. … A quantitative analysis does not really do justice to the range and diversity of responses. Many responses did not follow the pro-forma. Some responses respond to one question with the answer to another; others try to shoehorn issues under ill-fitting headings. … Where issues are raised by several respondents, this has the effect of cross-validation and reinforcement. This is the primary basis of analysis. However, it is also true that isolated responses may raise issues of importance: … where there are complex legal issues to unravel, particular responses also pose specific problems, cite examples and identify conflicts. In these circumstances we have recorded these concerns and sought to report on issues which require resolution.
This was reported in the press as saying that “Most Scots back plans to recognise gay marriages as legal, according to a study by the Robert Gordon University.” (Aberdeen Press and Journal 6.2.04) The Daily Mail headline (17.2.04) complained that “Same-sex marriage survey was hijacked by gay rights lobby” and that the consultation was “flawed” because several similar responses had come in from Stonewall.
From which I take it that either the press don’t understand what a consultation is about; or that they don’t bother reading the reports; or that the whole issue is so emotive that they will only read what they want to read. Possibly all three.
"Troubled" families
Louise Casey’s report, Listening to Troubled Families, does what it says in the title: it reports the concerns of issues of a number of families with problems. She’s convinced that intensive social work can make a difference, and as far as that goes I have no disagreement. But there are serious problems in the language that she is using, and in particular in her persistent references to inter-generational problems. She’s talked about “welfare dependency and sexual abuse going back generations.” She refers to “entrenched cycles of suffering problems and causing problems”. She claimed that “problems such as sexual abuse, teenage pregnancies, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency and educational failure were often repeated by different generations.”
This argument has a long history. “Troubled families” have been called degenerates, moral defectives, the abyss, problem families, multi-problem families, the ‘hard to reach’ and the underclass. The claim that they passed problems from one generation to another features in arguments on degeneracy, the culture of poverty, the cycle of deprivation, transmitted deprivation and the dependency culture. And what we can say about all of these arguments, because there are decades of evidence to draw on, is that they are not true. The population of people who have problems now is not substantially the same as those who will have problems in ten years’ time. Most adults have varying experiences through their lifetimes. Most children from deprived backgrounds are not deprived as adults. Keith Joseph, who coined the phrase “the cycle of deprivation”, set up a major social science project to investigate it. From that project, we know that if, over a long period of time, we begin with a cohort of the most deprived children and follow them through the generations, their great-grandchildren will have much the same profile as the rest of the population. For example, as part of the work, a thousand deprived families in Newcastle were followed through the generations. They did not pass down problems from parent to child. (The main source is I Kolvin and others, Continuities of deprivation, Avebury 1990.)