Author: Paul Spicker

Thinking collectively

Policy Press have contacted me to say that three of my books are now available on their online service, Policy Press Scholarship online.  This is subscribed to by many institutions – I have access by way of the National Library of Scotland.  The books are, in order of publication, Reclaiming Individualism (2013), Thinking Collectively (2019) and The Poverty of Nations (2020).

If the books were being written now, I’d need of course to take account of the current pandemic; but oddly, there’s little in the intellectual content that would need to be changed.  In Thinking collectively, I review a range of moral arguments for collective action, and competing conceptions of the ‘common good’.  The common good might be understood as the sum of particular interests, such as economic development; on interests which are shared with other people, like the arguments for clean water; on interests which we share as members of a collectivity, such as defence or foreign policy; and, beyond that, the process of collective action, such as democratic participation.  The response to Covid-19 is – or should be – an example of aiming for the common good in every sense.

‘Sovereignty’ doesn’t mean that a state can do whatever its government pleases

Arguments for ‘sovereignty’ are prominent in several disputes, around the world.  For many of the governments using the word, notably China and the UK, ‘sovereignty’ seems to be about independence and the absence of foreign interference.  The term has been used for centuries in international law, apparently going back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War.  In that narrow context, a sovereign state has exclusive authority within its territory.  But sovereignty means much more than that.    A study of the Westphalian peace (D Croxton, 1999, The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty, International History Review 21(3)) brings together some helpful explanations of the term: sovereignty is

‘the idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community … and no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere’ … By this definition, ‘sovereignty is not a fact. Authority and power are facts …[Sovereignty] is an assumption about authority.’ Hence, as John Ruggie states, sovereignty ‘signifies a form of legitimation’.

Exactly the same principle applies to domestic law.  The legal theorist John Austin argued that

Every positive law, or every law strictly so called, is set by a sovereign person, or sovereign body of persons, to a member or members of the independent political society wherein that person or body is sovereign or supreme.

There are reservations to make about both these presentations, but it is important to draw out what they have in common.  All of these explanations of sovereignty are concerned with legitimacy.   The ‘sovereign’, whoever or whatever that may be, is the source of legitimate authority.   If legitimate authority springs from a particular source, it follows that

    • a sovereign government can make laws
    • a sovereign government can make treaties, and
    • a sovereign government can act collectively to exercise authority within its legitimate sphere of influence.

The first reservation to make is that sovereign authority is not ‘final’.  Sovereignty is where authority starts, not necessarily where it finishes.  We know, when a sovereign body makes laws, that they are laws – that they satisfy what Hart called “rules of recognition” (how we know that a rule counts as law) and “rules of change” (how we know that new rules have been created, or abolished, or added to).  But after the sovereign has acted as the fount of authority, others may draw on that legitimate authority in their turn – e.g., the laws passed by devolved administrations, or the extensive use of statutory instruments in social security.   The second reservation is that sovereign authority is not “supreme” authority, because it may well be subject to other authority in turn.  The US constitution divides authority between a range of actors.  The authority of the UK Parliament is undivided, but governments in Parliament can be voted out or corrected by the courts. In modern states, the courts usually have the power to review whether actions are legitimate.  Nor is sovereignty necessarily ‘exclusive’.  Many states share sovereignty internally – in federations,  between states and the federal government – or externally, which is the position of the European Union.

And so to the dispute between the UK and the European Union.  The EU is not simply the product of a set of treaties: it is a body that makes laws, independently of the legal systems of the Member States.  That means that every member of the European Union shares sovereignty with the Union.  There have been some legal challenges to this principle – most recently in Germany, where it was successfully argued that German Basic Law takes priority  – but the central premise, that EU law has a direct effect on governments and citizens within the EU’s areas of exclusive competence, has been established for nearly sixty years.   It is correct, then, to say that the members of the EU have given up some sovereignty to become part of the Union; and it is also correct to say that the UK, on leaving the EU, will be able to act as a sovereign state.

Clause 38 of the UK Act on the withdrawal agreement states:

It is recognised that the Parliament of the United Kingdom is sovereign.  … nothing in this Act derogates from the sovereignty of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Nothing in that was incompatible with the Withdrawal Agreement, or likely to give the EU pause.  It is simply a statement that the Parliament of the United Kingdom is the primary source of legitimate authority for UK legislation: to which the obvious response is, of course it is.  The EU was relying on that legitimate authority to be used to resolve the terms of withdrawal.

What the clause doesn’t say is that the EU has no further authority, either delegated or determined by treaty.  It doesn’t say, either directly or indirectly, that the EU can have no influence in decisions made by the UK government.  It does not say that the UK is not to be bound by the Withdrawal Agreement, its most recent treaty with the EU.  In short, the assertion of sovereignty simply doesn’t mean what some of the most ardent Brexiters wish it to mean.

Tax rises won’t pay for the deficit – but they might help to make Britain fairer

The central fallacy behind the strategy of ‘austerity’, so-called, was the assertion that the deficit had to be made up by cutting public expenditure. The policy was built on two key mistakes: that the deficit was something that mattered in itself, and that the belief that cutting public spending would make the books balance. Governments can’t cut their way out of a slump, because the very process of cutting increases the size of the hole the economy has to fill. The argument for paying off the debts incurred during the pandemic is open to the same objection: now is not the time to take money out of the economy.

There seems to be a general consensus, on both right and left, that tax rises would make our economic situation even worse. It’s generally true that tax takes money out of the economy, and that’s not what we ought to do when the economy is depressed. The same is true, of course, of cuts to public services, which are not just bad economics, but bad for well-being.

Does it follow, however, that tax rises have to be avoided? I think that has to depend on what kind of tax rises they are. One of the peculiarities of the way we’ve come to record ‘public spending’ in the accounts is the treatment of every form of expenditure as if it all had the same kind of effect on the economy. When people are taxed, money is taken out of the economy; when people receive benefits, money is put back in; and so, it seems, the two sides of the process have different effects on economic activity. If we look at the finance of benefits, however, we find that there is a direct relationship between tax and spending, and that in some cases it makes no visible difference to the performance of the economy. The National Insurance Fund, which took in £109bn in 2019, is an example. State pensions aren’t, properly speaking, a form of ‘expenditure’ at all. They’re a transfer payment: money is taken from one group of people (workers) to move to another (pensioners). If there are any economic implications of a transfer payment, it has to do with the possibility that the two groups will treat the money differently – they may have different patterns of spending and saving.  However, the initial assumption has to be that, unless there are reasons to the contrary, transfer payments are economically neutral.

That implies, in turn, that there are different implications of raising  different types of tax, depending on the use that the money is put to. Some tax which represents a withdrawal from the economy, and some other tax doesn’t, because the same money goes straight back in to the economy in the form of a transfer payment. The objection to raising taxation, that it will take money out of a depressed economy, only belongs to the taxation in the first category. If taxation is increased to pay for benefits, the same doesn’t apply. There may be other objections to doing that – though some of the objections, such as arguments around incentives for very highly paid people, are pretty iffy – but the effect on the economic activity overall wouldn’t be one of them.

The implication is that taxation can be used directly for redistribution without any evident damage to the economy. If, for example, we want to increase taxation to pay for the pensions, the costs of social care, benefits for disability or Child Benefit (which was developed from a combination of benefits with tax reliefs), we should be able to do that. By extension, it should also be possible to pay for some services, providing only that there is a direct equivalence between transfers (for example, wages) and the level of tax raised.

So – why don’t we do that? There are many political objections which defend established rights to property, which is at least a moral principle, even if it is one that I disagree with. By contrast, the economic arguments seem particularly thin. They are that the economy is too complex to be tampered with, and there may be unexpected effects (the argument made by Hayek); that public expenditure devalues the currency, an argument that is not applicable to transfer payments, because the amount of money they put in circulation is the same as the amount taken out; and that public expenditure needs to balance the books, which is probably wrong but doesn’t apply to transfer payments anyway.

There is one practical issue to consider, too, which is also a political obstacle: our public accounts don’t allow for it. We don’t have hypothecated taxation, which means that we can’t tie taxation to specific expenditure, and we don’t distinguish transfer payments from public expenditure used to pay for things. We can do things differently; these are conventions, and not very helpful ones. We should take transfer payments out of the public spending figures altogether, and account for them in their own right.

Enfin, le passport français

I have, at long last, my French passport.  As I explained last year, I started the process of acquiring the information to obtain it in November 2016, five months after the referendum, and it has taken until now to get the thing into my hand.  The importance is more than symbolic; it’s a European passport, and it carries the right to live and work in the EU.  I had hoped, for example, that I might be able to work again in Poland.  My state of health makes that unlikely, and in due course the suspension of reciprocal medical cover will present me with another hurdle to overcome.  I am no less shocked by the loss of fundamental rights than I was four years ago, but my attempt to petition the European Parliament was waved aside, and I regret that I  have only been able to mitigate this for myself.

Some of the complexities of social protection, laid bare

The World Bank’s  Sourcebook on the foundations of social protection delivery systems is a substantial document, but it’s a bit of a curate’s egg: while some parts of it are excellent, others should be avoided.  ‘Social protection’ mainly refers to benefits; it seems to take in social work – part of the same process only in some countries – but doesn’t apparently extend to medical care, and social care for older people is largely dismissed in a page (half on page 254, half on 264-5).  The text is based around a seven-stage process of application and service delivery, shown in the graphic.

I wasn’t convinced at the outset that this  was an ideal way to explain how the process of administering benefits and services was translated into practice; that’s partly because they’ve opted not to use or even refer to some well-established literature about claiming, and partly because the labels they use  don’t quite capture what they intend to refer to.  ‘Outreach’ is about how the intended population is identified, and becomes aware of services prior to claiming; ‘registration’ is mainly about basic documentation; ‘onboarding’ is induction.  These stages aren’t necessarily sequential; many services apply eligibility criteria as a part of acquiring information about the population, and needs assessments are sometimes done to winnow out initial enrolment.  (I think the point is made for me in chapters 7 and 8, which have to track backwards to get a view about information, contact, referral and verification.)

Despite those reservations, I warmed to the model as the book went on, because it does at least give shape and structure to discussion of the issues.  It may be particularly useful for some of the advocates of Basic Income to consider: any viable Basic Income scheme still has to negotiate issues relating to documentation, identity, addresses, banking, how updates and corrections are made,  and such like.  This is the first document I’ve seen in an age which engages with that kind of issue.

There are, however, some problems with the way that the questions are explored, and arguably they reflect the agenda that the authors are implicitly following, much of which assumes that shiny new IT contracts and commissioning are the way to go.  I suspect that some readers will have strong reservations about the criteria the authors of this report set for schemes for disability assessment, which need to be ‘valid, reliable, transparent and standardized’ (p 107) rather than being, if it’s not too wild a leap of the imagination, personal,  dignified, expert or sensitive to complexities. The report promotes  a sizeable range of approaches using digital tech, but  the detailed coverage is fairly casual about many of the familiar problems that relate to reliance on such approaches – the obstacles the technology presents to claimants, the difficulty of determining whether their personal circumstances fit the boxes that people are offered, the role of the officials administering the system (most are not ‘caseworkers’ – a bureaucratic division of labour is more common), and the role of  intermediaries.   It doesn’t consider, with the main exception of enforcing conditionality, the possibility of using existing institutions such as schools and hospitals as the base for service delivery.

There are eccentricities in the way that benefits are described – the bland acceptance of proxy means testing, for example, the idea that a tapered minimum income is a ‘universal’ policy, and the treatment of grievances as a ‘confidential’ issue, when systematic reporting and review of complaints is essential to public management and scrutiny.   Taking the UK as an exemplar for the recording of fraud and error is a bit rich, when the accounts have had to be qualified for years because of it.  The entry that grated most, however, was about a ‘predictive tool’ for child protection, in  Box 4.10.   It claims that they have an instrument that can predict future out-of-home placements “accurately” and “to a high degree”.

Specifically, for children with a predicted score of 1 (predicted low risk), 1 in 100 were later placed out-of-home within two years of the call. For children with a predicted score of 20 (predicted highest risk), 1 in 2 were later removed from the home within 2 years of the call.

Calling this ‘accurate’ is overstating the case somewhat: if 1 child in 2 is going to be removed from the home, the other 1 child in 2 isn’t.    I tried to dig for more information, but couldn’t find it – the source the report cites for this study isn’t public.  From a previous published paper on the same project, it seems that the account given here is a misinterpretation anyway.  The purpose of the scheme was not to predict whether the child ought to be removed to a place of safety, but to stop the people who are answering the telephone hotline from dismissing calls about child abuse that might otherwise seem innocuous.  If similar low-level calls were being made repeatedly, they might all be dismissed in the same way.  This looks more like a problem in logging and managing referrals than it is a problem with casework judgments. But for what it’s worth, predictive tools based on profiling referrals have major limitations when it comes to managing benefit claims, too.  The problem is that there are too many variations and complexities for generalisations about claimants to work at the level of the individual.

Grading students’ work

Reversing previous decisions about the grades awarded to students whose education has been interrupted makes some kind of sense, but only some.  The problem is that we expect grades to mean three somewhat different things, all at once.

In the first place, grades are given for achievement – reflecting the knowledge, skills and competencies that students have demonstrated.  This is problematic in the current situation, because even if the grades are given fairly, they will reflect the position of students who will have done several months less work or development than previous cohorts have done.

Second, grades are supposed to represent potential – not what students have actually  achieved, but what they might be capable of doing with further development.  If present achievement gave us a clear guide to the future, that might work – but it doesn’t, and there’s always been the suspicion that it says more about the preparedness of the school and the resources that school students are offered than it does of the abilities of the pupil.  This was a problem before the pandemic, and it will be a problem long after it.  The truth is that we only have very unreliable predictors of what students might be capable of – A levels, in particular, often make over-fine distinctions between very narrow bands across the grades, and are a weak guide to university performance.

Third, the grades represent opportunities, and impose limits on those opportunities.  If a student wants to study medicine, for example, the opening will depend more on high academic performance than it does on personal experience, sensitivity, commitment or interpersonal skills (the sort of thing that we used explore in interviews for social work places).

The emphasis on opportunity is the argument that has carried the day.   In Scotland, the decision will make it possible for more than 3000 students to go into a university course they wouldn’t otherwise have been admitted to.  Many people will look at that and say: why not?   But there is an objection: increased opportunities within the current system might just mean that people have more opportunity to fail.  The French system opens doors to everyone with the Baccalaureat, but it fails half the students after the first year.  In the UK, the institutions with the most liberal admissions policies are also likely to be the lower status institutions, and they may lose  up to 20% of their students as the course goes on.   It doesn’t follow that we’re wasting those students’ time, but  far too many university courses work on the principle that students must ‘sink or swim’.  I’d be more confident in the process if at the outset there were more engagement with students and more emphasis on developing the skills they’ll need to qualify.

Mandatory Reconsideration is “a disproportionate interference with the right of access to court”.

Eighteen months ago, I made a case on this blog that the process of Mandatory Reconsideration demanded by the DWP was unlawful, that it was designed to prevent claimants from access to justice,  and that it stood clearly in breach of the principles enunciated by the Supreme Court in the Unison case.  Now the  High Court has heard a case about MR as it affects Employment and Support Allowance.  Justice Swift demurred from the case I argued for in one important respect:  that even if MR was an “impediment or hindrance” to access to justice, it did not actually deny people the right of access altogether.  Nevertheless, the judge decided that the process was “a disproportionate interference with the right of access to court”, and found in favour of the claimant.

Decisions of the High Court are not necessarily decisive, and it is likely that this judgment will be assumed to apply only to ESA claims.  But the grounds for the judgment are matters of general principle, and they apply  across all benefits to which the process has been applied.   That prompts some questions.   First, what does it take to get rid of regulations that are transparently  unlawful?   Second, why did the process of independent scrutiny, undertaken by the experts of the Social Security Advisory Committee, not raise concerns when these regulations were being introduced?  And third, what on earth was the Scottish government thinking of when it decided to mirror “a disproportionate interference with the right of access to court” in the design of the Scottish social security system?

 

 

Academic freedom: the problems with a contentious report aren’t mainly about statistics

A report published by Policy Exchange seeks to defend right-wing academics against the suppression of their academic freedoms.  Their cause is open to question, and I’m not sure that I should be bothering with a report that has been described as ‘methodologically abysmal‘, but I’m intrigued that there’s so little understanding of basic research methods on both sides of the argument.  On one hand, we have this somewhat inept explanation in the report itself:

The sample consists of 820 respondents (484 currently employed and 336 retired; average age of current academics is 49 and of those retired is 70). Given the approximately 217,000 academic staff working in British universities in 2018-19, our sample is proportionately many times larger than a conventional opinion survey (typically a sample of 1,500 across a national population of 60m). As such our data has a good claim to being representative of the wider academic population even though, as with all opinion surveys, there is a margin of error in the results.

A survey isn’t made more representative simply by being larger.  There are potential biases in the inclusion of a hefty proportion of retired academics and the assumption that non-responses (from page 51, 24% to 39% of the totals) don’t skew the results .

On the other hand, we have the combative response of Jonathan Portes, who comments that this would fail any basic undergraduate course on statistics.  Well, he’s right that their argument is based in bad statistics.  The reporting of the methodology and the questions isn’t systematic or complete. The size of a sample does not make it representative, and making it bigger does not make it more representative, it only magnifies the bias.  But of course this sort of thing  wouldn’t actually fail a project, because undergraduate projects are judged by what they do, not just by how sound they are.   I’m also troubled by Portes’s dismissal of ‘dubious anecdotes‘, the common complaint of those who believe in the inherent superiority of numbers.  What is the difference between ‘anecdotes’ and responses that can be counted?  Why is richer, fuller evidential material less credible than ticked boxes?  Qualitative research studies do the same kind of thing that is done in the courts: they look for evidence, and they look for corroboration of that evidence. The ‘anecdotes’ in most research studies, including this report, are the bits that really matter.  Additional note, 13th August:  Jonathan Portes has written to me to clarify that he was intending to challenge accounts that he thought were ‘fabricated’, rather than the validity of using anecdotes.

In the course of my career, I’ve taught research methods for about twenty years.  I’ve often found that neophyte students come to the subject with preconceptions about what research evidence ought to look like: ideally there should be numbers, and clear categories of response, and statistics, and statements about representativeness. That seems to be the attitude that has prevailed here.  The basic questions we need to ask, however, are not about statistics.  They are, rather, a question of what makes for evidence, and what we should make of the evidence when we have it.  The Policy Exchange report tells us openly that it was looking for corroboration of problems experienced in a small a number of widely reported incidents – that’s the background to their report, in Part 1.  Their sample consisted of academics and retired academics registered as respondents on Yougov.  There may have been some statistical biases in that process, and it’s possible that the retired academics may have answered differently to others; we do not have enough information to tell.

Their respondents pointed to a range of issues.  The questions they ought to have asked about their data, then, was not ‘is the sample big enough?’, or even ‘how representative is this sample?’   but ‘what does the evidence tell us about the issue we are looking at?’  The first thing you can get from a survey like this is a sense of whether there’s an issue at all.   The second is whether there is corroboration – whether different people, in different places, have had related experiences.  There’s some limited evidence to back that up -there are contributions from a handful of right-wing academics,  but the  report also indicates that there is a small but identifiable element of political discrimination across the spectrum.  (I’ve encountered that myself: I have been rejected more than once for jobs because the external assessor at interview objected to something I’d written about poverty.)  Interestingly there is little in the survey relating to more extreme examples, and ‘no platforming’ hardly appears as a problem.  The third is whether we can discern patterns of behaviour.  That’s more difficult to judge, and it’s where information about extents might have been helpful; the main pattern the report claims to identify is a ‘chilling effect’, that people who are fearful of consequences tend to alter their behaviour to avoid the potential harm.  That’s plausible but not conclusive.

The two main weaknesses in this report, in my view, are not about statistics at all.  The first rests in the bias of the design.  The questions asked people tendentiously about right-wing causes such as multiculturalism, diversity and family values.  An illustrative question:

If a staff member in your institution did research showing that
greater ethnic diversity leads to increased societal tension and
poorer social outcomes, would you support or oppose efforts by
students/the administration to let the staff member know that they should find work elsewhere? [Support, oppose, neither support or oppose, don’t know]

I suppose my immediate reaction would be that anyone who claims to ‘show’ a clear causal link between complex and unstable categories of behaviour, rather than ‘argue’ for an interpretation, hasn’t quite grasped the nature of social science.  (The same criticism would apply to someone claiming to prove the opposite.)  But the questions that people ask often reveal something about the position of the team that’s asking, and this is the point at which, if I’d been asked, I’d probably have stopped filling in the questionnaire.  (I wasn’t asked.  I was removed some years ago from the Yougov panel after I objected to the classification of racial groups I was being asked to respond to.  I got a formal letter from Peter Kellner telling me my participation was no longer required.)

The report’s other main weakness lies in its political recommendations, centred on the appointment of a national Director for Academic Freedom.  I couldn’t see any clear relationship between the proposals for reform and the evidence presented.

 

 

 

Universal Credit isn’t working: the Lords Economic Affairs committee’s judgment on UC

The report on Universal Credit by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee will not come as a great surprise to anyone who’s been following the evidence.  (Except, perhaps, me: I submitted an evidence paper  myself in March, and in the wake of moving house, and major illness six weeks after that, I’d quite forgotten that I’d done it until I saw it quoted on page 12.)  The chair of the committee, Lord Forsyth, has suggested that the report approves of UC in its ‘concept’, but that there are problems with its design and its administration.  Given the questions that the committee raises about real-time information, digital access and fluctuating incomes, I think the criticisms go beyond that.  The problems they recognise also include a familiar litany of failures:  among them, the 5 week wait, unpredictable benefit streams(“impractical” and “fundamentally unfair”), conditionality, the two-child limit and inadequate levels of benefit.  Despite all that, the system is “not broken irredeemably”.

The initial request for evidence asked whether UC had achieved its objectives.  As the statement of objectives has frequently shifted for political expediency, it’s hard to say even what the current tests are, but the committee proposes a range of distinct principles: dignity, adequacy, providing a predictable income, flexibility, fairness, achievable ends and comprehensibility.  They suggest that there could be a two-week payment up front, a three month fixed level of payment, and that child support could be taken out of the system altogether – those all seem to me to be good ideas.   But the fundamental problems will remain:  a tapered benefit, an obsession with labour market issues when most claimants aren’t going to be in the labour market, and a reliance on information that can’t be supplied or managed.

The government’s misleading figures about poverty reflect a wider problem

The Prime Minister has been upbraided by the Office for Statistical Regulation (part of the UK Statistics Authority) for his assertion that child poverty is falling, when on all the tests used by the government the opposite is true.  I’m not greatly enamoured of those tests.  I’ve considered the case for the standard test of ‘relative’ poverty, 60% of the median income, in other work – it’s not bad, but we need to accept that it’s a pointer, not an authoritative measure. The claim that the figures for 2010/11 represent a test of ‘absolute poverty’ is particularly suspect.  Having said that, however, there’s no real excuse for blustering that poverty has been getting better, when your own figures say that’s not so.

This is part of a wider problem, and one we’ve seen increasingly in the course of the last few years.  The UK Statistics Authority was formed in the hope that it would be possible to maintain confidence in the integrity of official statistics.  In the course of the last ten years, however, we’ve seen a growing contempt for statistical evidence,  shown in the treatment of figures about crime, social security claims, incapacity, the management of coronavirus and more.  It’s done whenever departments publish figures that are not official, when the press is steered to have a go at popular targets like migration or benefit fraud, and when ministers just make stuff up. There is a cost to undermining public trust: it’s not just that some figures can’t be believed, but that everything becomes open to doubt.