Category: Social Policy

This occasional blog discusses issues in Social Policy.

Labour’s manifesto could have been more exciting

Coming to the Labour manifesto so shortly after viewing the Liberal Democrats’, I was struck more by the similarity of approach than by the differences – not so much the common emphasis on, say, climate change or mental health, as the fact that both parties have opted for a very long series of specific proposals rather than – as they might have done – a strong critique of government since 2010, a focus on key principles, an analysis of Britain’s democratic problems, the failures of regional policy or measures that could help to bridge the divide between our alienated and marginalised communities.

The policy on social security is, as is all too common, mainly reactive; there is lip service to dignity and respect, but not much that explains how that can be achieved.   There is a commitment to help people with disabilities, which  mainly boils down to £30 on ESA or accepting a supplement within UC – putting back what’s been taken away – with other marginal measures.  The best idea is getting rid of Universal Credit – but that’s reactive, too.

Another of the peculiarities of this document is how much it proposes centralisation.  A National Education Service; a National Care Service; a National Crime Agency; a National Youth Service: a National Strategy for Childhood; even a national LGBT+ plan. The proposals are mainly specific to England. I searched for references to Wales, only to find that devolution is not central to the vision here; it’s being treated in a different manifesto.

This is being feted as a deeply radical document, but I’m not convinced it is.  There are too many token measures  – removing hereditary peers, or an enquiry into Orgreave or releasing papers about Cammell Laird shipyard workers.  With the splendid exception of universal broadband, there’s not enough that is really game-changing.

Additional note, 22nd November.  There are some elements of the proposals that I missed, because they are  not in the manifesto at all: they are in a separate costings document.  Most of the elements are straightforward, but I should welcome the proposal to bring basic corporation tax and Capital Gains Tax to the same level as Income Tax – currently there are incentives to present income as if it was something else.   No doubt this will be represented by critics and some over-enthusiastic supporters as a radical attack on the wealthy, which it is not; it is a dull but sensible rationalisation of a system that has grown far too complex.

 

The Liberal Democrat manifesto: baby steps, but it could have gone much further.

The Liberal Democratic manifesto, or  “Jo’s plan for the future”, has lots of small, specific policies to flesh out the cult of personality.  Being specific is no bad thing, but it makes it more disappointing that they have not a great deal to say about either social care or benefits.  In relation to social care, their main proposals are to spend more on general practice and on mental health services – fair enough, but it falls somewhat short of responding to the needs of dependent elderly people, and particularly the issues surrounding residential and domiciliary care that undermined the Conservatives during the 2017 election.  Too difficult, perhaps?

In relation to  social security, much of what they want to do is to rein back on some of the damage that the Conservatives have wrought with Universal Credit – the five week wait, the bedroom tax, the two child limit, the rules for self-employment, sanctions and assessments.  I’ve previously been critical of the Labour Party for going through the same kind of reactive exercise – ‘pretty feeble stuff’, I called it in a paper earlier this year.  We need to do far more to ensure that benefits are more adequate, to address insecurity,  and to make sure they get predictably to the people who need them.  The Liberals are proposing a ‘right to food’.  How about an income that makes it possible for people to buy the food they need?

The Manifesto’s heart is in the right place, at least.  And there is one particularly cheering, specific proposal: to separate employment support from benefits administration.  Spot on.  Lumping the two together has impaired the effectiveness of both of them.

The Green Party Manifesto proposes a Universal Basic Income

The Green Party is first to reveal its manifesto for the General Election.  An important part is the proposal to introduce a Universal Basic Income, offering £89 a week to every adult, supplements for disability, single parents, lone pensioners and means-tested allowances for families with children.  Housing Benefit (or the housing element of Universal Credit) will be retained only for existing claimants.

I’m sure that advocates of Basic Income will welcome the direction of movement, but there are problems with the specific proposals.  First is the distributive effect.  If other benefits are stopped, the financial gains to better-off households far outstrip any benefit to people on lower incomes.  This scheme is highly regressive.  Secondly, there are the supplements.  Disability benefits will require a test; supplements for lone parents will require a cohabitation rule; means-testing for families will inevitably be complex.  Third, there is the proposal to freeze Housing Benefit.  That means, bluntly, that new claimants (mainly younger people) will not be able to afford housing; and that social housing providers will not be able to provide it.  Overall, this scheme will leave many poor people worse off.

Four years of independent work

I’m coming up to an anniversary of sorts.  It’s four years since I took early retirement, leaving my employment with Robert Gordon University.  I’d been asked to move in a different direction, far away from social policy.  I thought that I could do more of the things I cared about if I worked independently.  Since then, I’ve finished three books plus one (the fourth, currently in press, will be out in March), had a semester in Poland, attended conferences in France and Italy (but can’t afford the SPA conferences), and had three research contracts.  I’ve also passed a small personal milestone, with more than four thousand citations recorded on Google Scholar. The work goes on.

Institutional racism comes from ‘othering’, not just from hate. We need to recognise the dignity of difference.

Institutional racism has come, in Britain, to be understood as

the collective failure of an organisation to provide and appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.

Those words come from the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.  The elements of institutional racism lie, not so much in the expression of direct or personal discrimination, as in the actions of institutions – acts, processes and the promotion of outcomes which are discriminatory.

Both the leading candidates in the electoral contest have been criticised,  with some reason, for making stereotypical or prejudiced comments about race.  Boris Johnson has made offensive comments about Muslims, women, homosexuality, Liverpudlians, Africans, ‘orientals’ and heaven knows what else.  Jeremy Corbyn is accused more often of condoning racism more than of making racist statements,  with the main exception of accusing Jews of not understanding British irony; but the racism he has appeared to wave aside includes accusations of conspiracy, divided loyalties, sinister influence and Holocaust denial.   I don’t think we can appeal for ‘zero tolerance’ of inappropriate comments, because – like going ‘back to basics’ in moral conduct – it asks more of us than we’re capable of living with.  Everyone has some prejudices,  even if we might hope that public figures would think twice before they gave vent to them.

We should be more directly concerned with about the levels of institutional racism that have been on display in both the Conservative and Labour parties.  Both parties have factions who want to deny that there is any problem.  Some right-wing commentators have  claimed that Islamophobia has been invented; Labour supporters often refer to ‘smears’ (itself a racist accusation, claiming that complaints are based on deliberate fabrication and conspiracy).  The Conservative leaders promised to hold an inquiry into anti-Muslim hatred, and have backtracked; Labour stands accused of  institutional racism and a toxic environment.  We need to understand the effect on institutions that is produced, not by racial hate as such, but by ‘Othering’ – painting minority groups, such as Jews or Muslims, as alien.  The damage is done not when we call people names, but when we accuse them of alien patterns of thought, divided loyalties, dishonesty and ulterior motives.  Those, rather than outright racial hatred, are the sentiments which lead to denial, rejection and the inability to deal with justified complaints.

 

The pitfalls of comparative analysis: does the welfare state lead to wealth inequality?

A blog from the right-wing Cato Institute caught my eye.  It claims, on the basis of an article published last year, that poorer households have less personal wealth in countries with higher welfare state expenditure.  Apparently, this is because people in welfare states don’t need to provide for the same contingencies that others might have to.  The headline claims: “Welfare State Causes Wealth Inequality”.

The original article , by Fessler and Schürz, is complex and careful, and it’s capable of being interpreted in several ways.  The article is behind a paywall, so here’s a link to a slide show with key details.  Wealth holding is very strongly reflects the pattern of inheritance, and the people this most affects aren’t the poorest.   The authors explore a range of interpretations, most notably the apparent paradox that

social services provided by the state are substitutes for private wealth accumulation and partly explain observed differences in levels of household net wealth across European countries. …  This implies that an increase in welfare state spending goes along with an increase — rather than a decrease — of observed wealth inequality.

I’m not convinced that we can treat social expenditure as a unified element – the way countries treat pensions is not necessarily how they treat people with disabilities – and if there is a generative relationship, it’s not at all clear what affects what.  In my own published work, more generally, I’ve been critical of analysing country effects in this way.

The paper where I make the arguments is on open access here.  What matters is not the number of data points within the countries, because those points are interdependent, but the number of policy units (that is,  governments).   There just aren’t enough countries to be able to do this analysis sensibly, and this paper is no exception.  direction  Here is a graph from Fessler and  Schürz‘s paper, showing some of the key information.

The data in the article are based on 13 countries; this graph has eleven.  One of them is Luxembourg, a notorious outlier – not just because it’s small, but because it’s distinctive.  Remove Luxembourg from the analysis, and the line in the graph goes clearly and strongly in the opposite direction.  (That reversal of direction, which contrasts with the apparent pattern for people with less wealth, actually makes the findings more interesting.)

This doesn’t mean that the interpretation in the article is wrong.  The hypothesis is intriguing and plausible,  and it could still be true.  The problem is that we can’t tell.

A Nobel prize for using RCTs?

Economics as a discipline doesn’t always connect with the real world, but at least the Nobel laureates with an interest in development economics are working on something that matters.  The new laureates have apparently been selected on the basis of their ‘experimental’ approach.  I gave the subject a brief mention in my forthcoming book, The Poverty of Nations, but you’ll have to wait to next March before you can read it.  Here, as a spoiler, are the sentences in the typescript I gave over to their evidence on Randomised Control Trials.  The reference is to A Banerjee, E Duflo, 2011, Poor economics, published by Penguin.

Banerji and Duflo advocate a greater use of RCTs, but their own examples show cases where this fails. In one study they mention, it appeared that textbooks did not help education; that was misleading. In another, the evaluation was supposed to identify the influence of contraception on family size; it overlooked the importance for parental decisions of the  prospects of children surviving to adulthood. Experiments and RCTs work by screening out extraneous information; the gaps that are left are only to be expected.

 

On the stigma of council housing

A notice on Twitter, advertising a radio appearance, drew my attention to a paper published last year on the stigma of council housing by Tom Slater. The paper is here; there’s an earlier version, for those who can’t get past the paywall, here.  Slater claims to be paying attention to

“a term that was invented by journalists, subsequently amplified and canonised by think tanks and then converted into doxa by politicians: the sink estate. “

That’s not right.

The stigma of council housing is long-standing.  It dates back at least to the people rehoused from slum clearance in the 1930s (disreputable areas had been identified before that, but  they weren’t council estates).  Many council developments were designed deliberately to be held at a distance from respectable housing: that is the subject of The Cutteslowe Walls, published in 1958 (the walls were built in 1934).  To take another example, the primary school I went to in Newcastle had different entrances for kids from the council estate and private estate.  Tucker’s 1966 book , Honourable estates, outlined the problems.

Within that system, however, some council tenancies were always seen as worse than others.  Harry Simpson, a former director of housing in the 1960s, commented that “ghettoes developed because councils, when allocating accommodation, graded families according to their deserts instead of their needs”.  In the 1970s, the leading text on housing management, Macey and Baker, advised agencies to rate the type of accommodation a person should receive by their personal suitability, including cleanliness and tidiness; that was how things were done when I started  letting houses in Hartlepool, where prospective tenants were rated on such things and got a house that matched their rating.   (I was carpeted at the time for writing an internal memo which said that this was leading to a concentration of people with problems in undesirable areas; later I included a comment on grading in my first report for Shelter in 1983.)   Macey and Baker did, at least, reject the idea of segregating ‘problem families’ deliberately.  I have the 1973 edition:

“All these problem families exhibit one common factor, namely, their inability to cope …. in some few instances, one or both of the parents may be physically well and of average intelligence, but of a type which the ordinary man in the street would classify as ‘bone idle’.  … (but) it is difficult to believe that such a background of coercion, coupled with the fact that the families are thrown into association with other sub-standard families, is likely to be a good atmosphere in which to raise any family’s standard …”

Bad areas were variously known as ‘difficult to let’, ‘ghettos’, or (in a 1975 Scottish report) ‘depressed schemes’.  ‘Ghetto’ estates were seen “as a form of punishment, a device for disciplining and the social control of tenants”.   So the term “sink estates” was not a new, or a particularly influential, invention; it was just another way of referring to a widely observed set of problems.

The government’s counsel digs a pit for the government’s case to fall into

The challenge to prorogation is currently being broadcast. I’ve previously been critical of the way that the Supreme Court goes about its business, and the current hearing does not give me any reason to think differently about that.  The hearing has been punctuated by confusion about supportive documentation – misleading reference numbers, flapping between paper and electronics, and to cap it, Lady Hale’s computer failure this morning.

Having said that, I am going to take my courage in both hands and try to second-guess the outcome.  The government’s submission basically has been to say, ‘hands off’, and the most persuasive part of that case has been a series of previous instances where prorogation has been used politically.  And then, I think, the government’s counsel undermined his position, possibly fatally.  This is a clip from this morning’s hearing, as summarised in the Guardian briefing.

Eadie says a decision to prorogue parliament is “fundamentally political”.  He says the government has given examples, in paragraph 71 of its submission (pdf).

Lord Wilson asks if the court is being asked to intervene in a political decision, or to decide if it clashes with a precious legal principle.

Eadie says sometimes precious principles of public law need to give way when the prerogative is being exercised.

Q [From Wilson]: I was thinking of a bigger purpose. If anyone is well placed to defend parliamentary sovereignty, it is us here. Does the use of the prerogative here collide with a principle that we are obliged to uphold?

Eadie says of course parliamentary sovereignty is important. But it depends on what it means. “Paradigmatically” it can make and unmake its own laws, he says.  He says he will argue that the phrase “parliamentary sovereignty” should not be too widely bandied about without people saying what it means.

Let’s unpick that.  Lord Wilson offers Eadie a choice: politics versus legality.  In the bit that’s not in this summary, Eadie recognises that the judges can intervene where the executive has an improper purpose (which is why LJ Wilson talks about a bigger purpose).  But getting round to the question as put, Eadie opts neither to challenge the bifurcation or to defend the prerogative as an element of the British constitution.  He says that “precious principles of public law” have to give way –  a statement that seems designed to alienate the eleven justices as thoroughly as possible.  Then comes the supplementary.  Lord Wilson asks about parliamentary sovereignty, “a principle that we are obliged to uphold”.  Eadie doesn’t question that the Court is obliged to uphold such a principle – which is surely the point at issue.  The point about parliamentary sovereignty is that parliament is supposed to uphold it; the obligation of the Courts is to uphold our constitutional arrangements, and he could here have argued that the duty of the court is to maintain the balance, not to tilt it.  In fairness, the QC may not have wanted to draw out the argument, emphasising in the judges’ mind a point which could lead to the collapse of his case; if others agree with Lord Wilson that there is such an obligation, the game is over.  But his answer, rather than defending the government’s constitutional role, is that the term ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ is unclear.  That effectively challenges the judges to clarify the meaning of the term, and it would be astonishing if they did not do just that.  They went most of the way towards it in the previous Miller case, and after all, as Lord Wilson has stated, they see themselves as being under an obligation to protect parliamentary sovereignty.    You’ll know whether I’m right about this within the week, but given the way the issues have just been presented, I don’t see how they can possible find in the government’s favour.

Additional note, 24th September: As predicted, the Court has found against the government, citing the principal grounds of parliamentary sovereignty and accountability.  The main thing I did not anticipate was unanimity.

The poverty of nations: a relational perspective

I’ve signed a contract to deliver my next book by the end of this month.  The working title is “The poverty of nations: a relational perspective”, and it develops an argument I’ve been building over the last few years about the relational elements of poverty – understanding poverty, not as a lack of resources or income, but as a set of social relationships.  I posted, two years ago, the abstract of a paper on this general theme. Here is that abstract again:

Poverty is at root a relational concept, which can only be understood by locating the experience of poor people in the social and economic situation where they are found. This is not just saying that poverty is ‘relative’. Developments in policy and practice are increasingly focused on dynamic, relational and multi-dimensional understandings of poverty; our conceptual frameworks have failed to keep pace.

Much of the consideration of poverty in the course of the last hundred years, relative or absolute, has found it convenient to rely on three fallacies. The first is that poverty is a condition or state of being, which can be considered exclusively from the perspective of the individual who experiences it. The second is that can be understood solely in terms of resources, when resources themselves have to be understood in terms of social and economic relationships. The third is that there is a clear and decisive threshold below which people can be said to be poor, and above which they are not poor.

All of these positions are tenable – they are supported by many of the most eminent writers in the field – but they are not adequate, either as a way of describing the positions that people hold, or as a conceptual tool to analyse the issues.  Discussions of exclusion, a concept which is self-evidently relational, come closer to the idea of poverty than much of the academic literature on poverty in itself, offering a way to escape from the limitations of conventional models of poverty.

The book will be out next year. It will be my twentieth, depending on how you count them, and the fourth since I left my post in 2015. People may be surprised at the short time between contract and delivery of the final copy.  It’s been my practice for many years to write a book before I submit it.  I started to do that early on, after working through the more conventional route of proposal and writing to order, only to find when I delivered the script at the end of two years the publisher thought that I should have written a different book.  This way, I can guarantee is that we all end up with what we’re expecting to get.

I wouldn’t, however, advise any young academic to follow in my footsteps.  The fact is that academic institutions don’t like books very much, or social policy, and don’t really rate either when it comes to counting the beans.  When I left my employment, I was making a choice; I wanted to do more on poverty, benefits and social theory, and going independent was the best way to do it.  I don’t regret it; in the last three years I’ve done four books, a few research contracts and a semester in Poland, which I loved. If anyone out there wants an academic career, however, you’ll all be better off writing bids for research funding.