Together

In 2010 the Government announced its intention to pilot Community Budgets as a method of integrating public services. It wasted time and effort by trying to re-invent a similar programme it had inherited.

Basically, Community Budgeting recognises that, if you are going to provide the best services, there must be freedom to redesign services locally. This follows through the policy of best value – focused on continual improvement to provide services that are efficient, effective, equitable and responsive. However, to achieve that, all the players have to be committed, flexible and willing to give up power and resources to get the best outcomes. 

This doesn’t happen easily. There are cultural barriers to overcome at all levels of government and their agencies - as well as service users and voluntary organisations –and new systems to put in place. The challenge of doing this in the current economic and financial climate conditions cannot be underestimated.

The all-party Communities and Local Government Committee, which I chair, has been reviewing the government’s pilots. These were four 'Whole Place' Community Budgets and ten 'Neighbourhood' Community Budget areas. We also looked at the progress of the Troubled Families Programme, the priorities of which—turning around "troubled families" by integrating public services and tailoring them to families—came out of the Community Budget programme.

We found that the pilots are already demonstrating the clear potential to facilitate cheaper, more integrated and more effective public services. However, achieving that potential requires strong local leadership and a commitment from central government to facilitate local flexibility. It also requires a framework for agreements on sharing the benefits of investment.

Getting the biggest benefits will also require risk-taking – including the risk of failing occasionally. There isn’t a successful company in the world which, even after doing all the essential research and analysis, doesn’t occasionally get a product wrong and have to withdraw it and go back to the drawing-board. Public services are no different, but politicians, the public and the media have to be a bit more grown-up about this. There aren’t any successful organisations which rely on a blame culture.

You can read more about the Committee’s findings at:

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/communities-and-local-government-committee/news/cb-report-substantive/

Trusted with our NHS?

Back in 2010, David Cameron told us how he could be trusted with the NHS. All the evidence now tells us that he was wrong. The NHS is going backwards:

• Accident and Emergency is already in crisis with almost 1 million patients waiting longer than 4 hours in A&E over the last 12 months.
• There are over 5,000 fewer nurses since 2010
• £3 billion has been wasted on a reorganisation nobody wanted and nobody voted for.

The government has completely lost its way on public health

• David Cameron promised to get tough on smoking but, instead, just caved in to big tobacco and vested interests.
• 41 organisations have quit the Government’s public health responsibility deal, including Cancer Research UK and the Faculty of Public Health

 The government is now planning a massive switch of health resources from north to south, from urban to rural and from the poorest to the wealthiest communities. This month, University of Liverpool researchers said the proposals would penalise

• areas where people die earliest
• places with the worst quality of life
• areas hit hardest by council cuts 

Prof. Paul Johnstone, Public Health England’s regional director in the North, confirms that the biggest causes of early death under the age of 75 in England are cancer, heart disease and stroke, lung and liver disease, with figures showing most areas of the North are worst hit by premature deaths. Eleven out of 15 council areas in Yorkshire have among the worst rates of premature death from lung disease in the country and nine out of 15 have among the worst records on early deaths from heart disease and cancer. Five out of the 15 have the among the worst records on early deaths from liver disease

Yet the Yorkshire Post confirms that every part of the NHS in Yorkshire would lose out under the changes, costing the region £416m in total and the North £722m overall. Sheffield alone would lose health funding of nearly £50m every year to healthier and wealthier communities in the south.

And Cameron and Clegg continue to break their promises on transparency by:

• still refusing to publish the NHS Risk Register
• resorting to unprecedented measures to cover up the warnings they were given about their reckless re-organisation.
• refusing to extend Freedom of Information legislation to cover private providers delivering NHS services, against the recommendations of the regulator, Monitor.

Do I trust them with the NHS? No.

Where do we go from here?

Picture the public meeting. It’s been a rumbustious, packed, session with strong views being forcibly expressed throughout. The meeting’s chair is desperately trying to end the acrimony, find some common cause and bring the meeting to a close.

The advice I would give the chair at this point is “Whatever else you may be thinking, do NOT say ‘Now, where do we go from here?’” I can guarantee that the audience will tell you where to go…. and the route, destination and the method of transport are all likely to be unpleasant!

It seems that British Gas and its highly-paid PR agency have not learned this basic lesson.

Ed Miliband put cost-of-living and, particularly, energy prices centre-stage in the political debate last month. Cameron and Clegg have been all over the place in trying to position their responses, at the same time as they are having a big internal row over renewable and nuclear energy. And John Major has now waded in to the fray, saying energy price hikes and record energy company profits should get the response of a windfall tax.

But what did BG do?

First, it unveiled a 10.4% rise in electricity prices and an 8.4% increase in the gas tariff from 23 November. The announcement itself was rather like lighting the blue touch-paper of a massive unstable firework. Consumers and politicians alike didn’t just stand and watch. They all exploded in response, especially as Centrica (BG’s owner) had pledged earlier this year to use windfall profits from last winter to keep prices down.

Then, instead of taking stock, BG took to Twitter and turned the dreadful announcement into a complete PR disaster as well. It invited comments from customers. Inevitably, nearly 16,000 customers told BG precisely where it could go.

BG’s stupidity and insensitivity was compounded by its inability, or unwillingness, to answer customers’ questions about the price hikes.

And, what was Liberal Democrat Energy Minister Ed Davey’s response to this?  ‘Customers should shop around’, he said. Seemingly, he had forgotten that he’d made the very same suggestion a week earlier when SSE hiked its prices. Customers had followed his advice and switched to… you’ve guessed it……British Gas. 

I’m just waiting for him to ask ‘where should I go from here?’

Not listening on anti-social behaviour

Back in June this year I wrote:

“Vandalism, dangerous dogs and nuisance neighbours make families’ lives a misery. People want to know that if they are a victim of crime - or if they are being regularly harassed by yobs on their street - then the police will have the power and capability to restore peace as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s why I strongly supported the measures – new laws, new penalties, additional resources – that Tony Blair’s government committed to the fight against crime and anti-social behaviour and, as a result, it fell considerably.

But, as I’ve argued before, I’m worried the clock is now being turned back. I make no apology for returning to the issue because it is so important. On top of big cuts to neighbourhood police, the Cameron/Clegg coalition wants to weaken police powers to fight anti-social behaviour. I’m clear that they need to rethink these policies, as we need stronger action against crime instead of their weak approach.”

Since then, colleagues and I have consistently told Conservative and Liberal Democrat Ministers that they are making it harder to fight antisocial behaviour and, unbelievably, wasting money in the process. We are not alone. 8 out of 10 people told the Office of National Statistics that antisocial behaviour had got worse in the last year.

Weakening antisocial behaviour powers is going to lead to lost police officer time

And the government is creating red tape to make it harder for the police and local councils to get CCTV will cost between £14m and £29m. – not my figures, but the government’s own assessment. The low estimate is equivalent to taking 400 police officers on the beat to deal with the new bureaucracy.

The Government’s proposed Community Trigger is weak, ineffective and doesn’t do what it says on the tin. In the pilot areas, the Trigger has been successfully activated just 13 times from a reported 44,011 antisocial behaviour incidents.

And the government is being far too weak on dangerous dogs. Scotland has already introduced Dog Control Notices which can enforce:

• Muzzling the dog whenever it is in a place to which the public have access;
• Keeping the dog on a lead whenever it is in a place to which the public have access;
• If the dog is male, neutering it; and
• The owner and their dog being required to attend and complete a training course in the control of dogs.

Why is the government not listening, when it could save money and provide far better protections for local people and communities?

Water, water

From a particularly mild and warm autumn, it appears that colder and wetter weather is now on the way. It’s timely, therefore, to reflect on water.

First, the water we do want. We should continue to celebrate the fact that we have permanent access – apart from the occasional hiccup -to fresh, clean, wholesome water, a situation not enjoyed by most of the world’s population.  But, are we now paying more than we should be?

Rising water bills are making their own contribution to David Cameron’s growing cost-of-living crisis. Water prices have risen faster than in any other major economy. The average cost of water bills rose by 3.8% in April 2013 to £388. According to OFWAT, more than 2.26 million UK households now spend more than 5% of their disposable income on water.

Yet, the water companies appear to be making exceptional profits whilst ducking their tax obligations. In September, Yorkshire Water revealed that it had made £186m profit last year, but not paid a penny in corporation tax. Severn Trent paid out dividends of almost £160m last year, as well as paying its chief executive more than £1m. David Cameron’s coalition government seems to have no interest in tackling rising water bills, so it will be left to some of us to try to keep this issue in the spotlight.

Then, there’s the water we don’t want. The 2012 Climate Change Risk Assessment said that flooding is the greatest environmental threat to the UK. For many of us in South Yorkshire and North East Derbyshire, the devastating 2007 floods remain in focus. And 8000 homes were flooded last year. Yet, in the comprehensive spending review, the government cut the flood capital budget by 27%, whilst the government itself estimates that the number of people at significant risk of flooding will double to at least 2m by 2020.  So the government is now planning to invest £138m less in 2015 than the minimum investment its own experts have said is required. That’s not clever.

And now we learn that, after the near collapse of the flood insurance negotiations, the government hasn’t done a deal, but has reached a ‘memorandum of understanding’ with the insurance industry. Some homes and businesses have been totally excluded from the arrangements, and the government itself says that it is more than likely that the scheme will run out of money in the first 20 years, so expect higher premiums.

Get the sandbags ready.

Not picture perfect

Last week, the Conservative Party unveiled a photograph of its MPs, which was promoted as the first ever picture of the Conservative parliamentary party in the Chamber of the House of Commons.

However, the photo was not all that it seemed. It didn’t take long before it was revealed that several of the MPs apparently smiling along with the Prime Minister were not actually there when the photograph was taken. Clearly photo-shopping is not just for fashion magazines.

Actually, it struck me that photo-shopping accurately sums up David Cameron’s whole approach to promoting his policies. Unlike Nick Clegg, who is perfectly happy to promise something he has no intention of keeping – like student fees, Cameron presents enough verifiable information to make you believe he’s presenting an accurate picture, whilst hoping to get away with ignoring key facts and issues which fatally undermine his case. Let’s take a few examples from the last week.

David Cameron has consistently told us how the steps he has taken will secure a range of Conservative parliamentary candidates for the next general election which is more representative. Now we learn that, of the 48 aspiring MPs chosen to fight the election to date, only 14 – less than one in three – are female and just one is from an ethnic minority background.

Then he said that Ed Miliband’s energy price freeze was ludicrous and unaffordable before, a few days’ later, revealing that George Osborne is going to announce parallel proposals in the Autumn Statement – presumably these will be unaffordable too?

Once, David Cameron was telling us all about his intention to ‘hug a hoodie’, when actually we can now see that his real intention was to make them homeless. According to the latest statistics, 16 to 24-year-olds have lost services worth 28 per cent of their income since 2010 and the announcements made at Conservative Conference will push that far higher.

And then there’s Help to Buy, which Cameron presents as helping those on lower incomes to get on the property ladder. Leaving aside the almost universal criticism, across the political and economic spectrum, that fuelling inflation in an already over-valued market is dangerous, we now learn more about the details. Those purchasing the lowest valued homes and having the least available deposit will pay significantly more than those getting help to buy a home worth £600,000. Clearly, it’s that latter group, who would need an annual income approaching £150,000, who Mr Cameron believes is most worthy of support and subsidy.

Bunk up or bunk off?

Cameron and Clegg’s bedroom tax is a classic example of a policy which, superficially, looks logical but, in practice, is pernicious.

Many councils and housing associations had schemes which encouraged and sensitively enabled people to move to smaller accommodation when they were ready to do so. But now the carrots have been thrown away and been replaced by a tax stick.

If the alleged justification for the bedroom tax is principled – ‘we shouldn’t be subsidising a spare room’ – you only have to ask why the policy doesn’t apply to pensioners to see that that line doesn’t stack up.

The government has been desperate to present an image of those being hit by the tax as single idlers rattling around in large houses. The truth is very different. 416,000 of the 660,000 households being hit have a resident with a disability, including more than 75,000 in Yorkshire and Humberside and the East Midlands.

The other argument for the bedroom tax is that it will free up accommodation for other families. Except that in most areas there simply isn’t smaller accommodation that can be offered. And now we’re healing squeals from Conservative MPs saying that rural areas should be exempt from the bedroom tax because there is little alternative accommodation – but that’s no less true in urban areas.

Where there is some accommodation, it is mostly in the private sector with higher rents than the property being vacated, which defeats the government’s objective of saving money. In fact, there is now a real risk that the bedroom tax will end up costing more than it saves. The National Audit Office says that the government has got its sums wrong.

The real cost of the bedroom tax is overwhelmingly going to be paid by households containing households with disabilities. On average, they will lose £720 a year. Most of the small minority who can move will have to shell out a small fortune in removal and re-settlement costs. But there’s a lot more pain than just the cost. The Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation has described the policy as “an unfair, ill-planned disaster that is hurting our poorest families.”

The best way of tackling the growing housing crisis is to build more affordable homes to buy and to let, not by penalising those households who have the least choice.

Tips

While the summer can often be a quiet time for the news cycle, it would appear that Eric Pickles has been trying to break the monotony with a range of tips for councils

First, he told us about the support for local high streets, and announced ‘dedicated teams of experts’ to assist local leaders. Now, on that very same day, the CLG Committee took evidence from Mary Portas, the government-appointed high street renewal guru, backed with £1.2m for Portas Pilots. Strangely, we learn that, despite her requests, Ms Portas has never met Mr Pickles and she knew absolutely nothing about the new training and mentoring proposals. How curious?

Then, he moved on to parking. Mr Pickles’ has an ambition for ‘shoppers to have a 15 minute grace period to park on double yellow lines without penalty’. The proposal has been condemned by a wide range of organizations, but this wasn’t mentioned. He referred rather disparagingly to the income that councils receive from parking charges and fines. Yet, that same day, the Federation of Small Businesses published its research on this issue, which confirmed that such income has actually fallen in real terms over the last 5 years.

As he directed public anger towards parking policies and traffic wardens, one might have thought that Mr Pickles would be desperate to draw our attention to the one council, Aberystwyth, that axed its traffic wardens to save money and to placate the drivers who railed against them. Of course, within 6 months - after parking chaos, road rage and fisticuffs, congestion and regular gridlocks – everyone was demanding their return. Perhaps that explains the silence?

Mr Pickles then turned his attention to the fire service…. or rather, firefighters’ pensions. Not unimportant, of course. However, there was complete silence about the scale of the cuts being made in fire service cover throughout the country. How curious?

Next, Mr Pickles told us about his planned tax changes for granny annexes. Gosh, it’s great news, he told us, for all those households – nearly all in the top council tax bands and containing quite a few mansions – who will receive an average near £500 cut in council tax. However, he was completely silent about the higher council tax bills being imposed on millions of the poorest families by cutting funding for council tax benefit. Why, I wondered?

Then he turned his attention to those naughty councils that had increased their cash reserves. Mind you, he didn’t mention that reserves had fallen in a quarter of councils, nor that the vast majority of the increased total related to already ear-marked schemes. Never mind, perhaps he missed the comments of CIPFA and other professional bodies which didn’t share his perspective.

Of course, his support for coastal towns is welcome; that extra 5% in the £29m fund could make all the difference. But, for some reason there was no mention of the huge additional challenges facing many of those coastal towns – especially in Essex and Kent – which have suddenly found themselves having to cope with an influx of households being forced out of central London by benefit changes.

Then, why not raise a glass to celebrate that 100 pubs have been listed as assets of community value? Let’s just forget that, over the past 2 years, the number of pub closures has risen from 12 to 18 a week, and more than 200 pubs have been turned into shops.

We should all welcome the increase in new home starts. But, there’s no reference to his decision to cut the budget for investment in affordable housing by 60%, nor that housing completions are at their peacetime lowest level since the 1920s.

More worryingly, Mr Pickles is lauding the Help to Buy scheme. Why is it that just about every serious research body, right across the political spectrum, is unanimous in saying not just that this scheme is wrong, but that it’s positively dangerous? The very last thing we should be doing is fueling inflation in a still over-priced market and, thus, actually disabling even more families from becoming owner-occupiers.

Of course, I’m pleased that Mr Pickles is helping a few councils with homelessness. But, why no acknowledgement that homelessness is on an upward trend as a direct result of the policies he’s implemented?

Unsurprisingly, last year’s obsession with refuse collection made a re-appearance. But, I searched in vain for the sentence “I’ve wasted a quarter of a billion pounds of public money trying to persuade councils to move back to weekly rubbish collections, but only one did so.”

Who said the summer can be a dull time for news?

Say one thing, do another

Up and down the country, we are beginning to see the real implications of the massive cuts that the government has made in local government funding. This month’s announcements about the closures of libraries, swimming pools, SureStart centres are just the start. The biggest funding cuts are still to come and, over the summer, Eric Pickles quietly announced a further £1bn cut in council funding.

Service cuts and increased charges for services are taking place in councils of all political controls and none. To those who suggest that ‘there wouldn’t be these problems if politics was taken out of local government’, I simply note that the councils closest to financial meltdown are controlled by Independents.

However, the government has been determinedly political in making the funding cuts. Millions of pounds are being switched from north to south, from urban to rural, and from the poorest to the wealthiest areas. But even that isn’t stopping service cuts in southern Conservative and Liberal Democrat councils, which rather gives the lie to suggestions that the cuts arise from political incompetence or perversity.

This switch is also being forced through in other spending areas. Last year, the government tried to make the same sort of funding changes in the NHS. Leading doctors managed to block the proposals, saying that the proposed changes were completely unjustified on health grounds. That hasn’t stopped the government trying again this year. It intends to cut nearly £50m a year from the NHS in Sheffield and give it to Surrey – a proposal supported by Nick Clegg, somewhat undermining his thin claim to be standing up for the city.

However, I will support Nick Clegg’s proposal to provide free school meals to 5 and 6 year olds. What observers might find strange is that when councils like Hull and Southwark provided free school meals, local Liberal Democrats described it as “disgraceful profligacy” and, when they took control of those councils, stopped the provision altogether. Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes twittered that the policy was “wasting extraordinary amounts”. At least we know that ‘Say one thing, do another’ is safe in Mr Clegg’s hands.

Their Red tape, your wages and rights?

It is being suggested that Whitehall departments will be legally obliged to scrap red tape and that ministers would be required to scrap twice as many existing rules for any new rule they wished to introduce.

Of course, there have been more announcements about ‘crusades against red tape’ than Frank Sinatra had final tours. And, it is absolutely correct that, where rules or regulations are unnecessary or counter-productive, we should do away with them. For that, we need to be ever vigilant.

Last November, the Government claimed that an initial “one in, one out” rule for new Whitehall regulation introduced in January 2011 had reduced the costs on businesses by almost £1 billion. It wasn’t true. David Cameron followed that by claiming that red tape should be attacked with the same vigour as “beating Hitler”. He hasn’t.

Enshrining it in law will test the Government’s rhetoric on reducing the regulatory burden to the limit. As one insider put it “The key question is what is regarded as a regulation. The Treasury likes to pretend that changes to the tax code are not red tape although they provoke the most complaints.” 

Similarly, some of those who continually demand cuts in laws and regulations – are regularly calling for new laws and regulations to tackle new sorts of crimes. Just think of the last few weeks with the demands for action on internet harassment and trolling.

But the real difficulty is that the vast majority of rules and regulations were introduced to provide protection – for individuals, but also for businesses. When some business organisations (like the Institute of Directors) and some politicians (like UKIP) talk about ‘doing away with red tape to save billions’, what they actually mean is doing away with the minimum wage, minimum protections on sickness and holiday pay, health and safety laws etc.

Their red tape is your wage and rights.