mudhook

Practically everyone with blue eyes is descended from a single, common ancestor who lived 6 000-10 000 years ago perhaps in the north west region of the Black Sea.

You can read the research report of 3 January 2008 by Hans Eiberg et al in Human genetics here and an article in today’s Independent here.

Look back at the post about the milk gene shared by most Cornish and English people. Now there’s the blue eyes mutation. Practically everyone in England and Cornwall who has blue eyes is biologically recently related whether they call themselves Anglo-Saxon or Celt or English or Cornish or British or…

Oh and here’s some other research about blue eyes. This post goes back to the beginning of our species of anatomically modern humans. On origin for us all.

Cast your mind back to the post on the market forces factor in the NHS and my criticism of the simplicity of the grievance agenda in damning the funding of the NHS in Cornwall.

The Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) has published this month a report on NHS nursing pay, Can pay regulation kill performance? Panel data evidence on the effect of labour markets on hospital performance.

Pay in the private sector, outside the NHS, varies from area to area. Nurses’ pay, which is nationally fixed, has some regional differences but nurses’ pay in areas with high pay outside the NHS does not match that outside pay.

The CEP report says that hospitals in areas with higher outside pay have problems in the recruitment and retention of nurses and have worse hospital performance and productivity than hospitals in low-outside-pay areas.

Productivity is defined on page 61 of the report.

Disturbingly, on performance or quality the report suggests that hospitals in higher-pay areas have higher death rates for heart attack patients, that is the death rate for deaths in acute hospitals from heart attack within thirty days of emergency admission for patients of fifty five and over; and offers explanations linked in part to uncompetitive pay.

Cornwall is a low-pay area and so the problems identified in the report do not, or should not, apply here. Indeed, the somewhat dated maps in figure 5 on page 54 of the report show Cornwall as an area of low wages, low rate of use of agency nurses, and low rates of defined heart attack deaths.

The report is a powerful argument for effective regional differences in NHS pay to reflect outside wages: it explicitly says on page 39 that productivity will improve and lives will be saved if this is done. I have previously posted about arguments for meeting regional realities in the minimum wage.

In the light of this report and the arguments for the market forces factor, just saying Cornwall unfairly gets less than other areas in NHS funding is a simplistic approach which fails to recognise the need to provide a good NHS service everywhere whatever the local circumstances; and getting fair NHS funding between different areas is problematic.

It is folly to fail to recognise local outside influences on the public services in Britain. Sloganising about “fair funding for Cornwall” is an inadequate response to the problems and does nothing to encourage understanding of the funding of public services. The hard question that all the political parties and people in Cornwall must answer is, Do you accept that pay and funding in the NHS must recognise outside pay realities and must therefore vary from area to area – and that some areas should receive more than Cornwall, a low-pay area?

Is public spending per head in London higher than in Scotland?

I’m not sure that it is productive to compare a country with a region but let us examine the per capita public spending as set out in the annual public expenditure statistical analyses (PESA) documents published by the UK Treasury. The outturn figures for 2005/06, the latest outturn figures presently available, are Scotland
£8 179 and London £8 164. That’s London less than Scotland.

The 2006/07 planned identifiable expenditure gives figures of Scotland £8 623 and London £8 404. London again less than Scotland. The outturn figures may be different of course.

In fact in the five years since 2001/02 for which outturn figures are known, London has had a larger per capita spend than Scotland only in 2004/05.

You can read all the statistics here on the Treasury website at table 9.2. The introduction to the document has some useful technical comments about the statistics.

The table also shows clearly that per capita public expenditure in Scotland (and Wales and Northern Ireland) is higher than in England, which includes Cornwall; and that the proportion going to Scotland, after a dip in 2004/05, is not significantly declining.

Incidentally, there are no separate PESA figures for Cornwall but the south west per capita outturn figure for 2005/06 was £6 398. How odd that nationalists here complain about perceived underfunding for Cornwall but never raise the issue of per capita public spending across Britain. Why is that?

For 2006/07 the Scotland figures are probably about £5 overstated, ie the per capita figure should be about £5 less than given; previous years have a per capita overstatement of about £1. With this correction Scotland still exceeds London. The correction is noted here - scroll down to Revision to chapters 9 and 10. There will be a correction in the next PESA.

These per capita public spending figures are contended as this article in the Guardian for 3 November 2007 shows.

Perhaps here is a good place to point out that the latest available government expenditure and revenue figures for Scotland (GERS), for 2004/05, show that Scotland receives about £11.2 billion more in public spending than it contributes to the UK excluding North Sea oil; including the oil revenues, the difference drops to about £6 billion. Read it here .

I think that UK public expenditure should be redistributed across Britain on the basis of the need of the individuals and communities wherever they live and, where given to communities, to the smallest feasible units rather than large units though devolution has complicated that. In terms of need does it make the best sense to redistribute on a country or even regional basis if we can target more precisely than that? Given the controversy and even ill-will that the present distribution causes, along with the disputes that surround the data, it is time the government looked again at the population-based Barnett formula and at need, and looked again at the collection of the relevant data, so that we can consider what sort of redistribution we want.

The other day Colin Breed, the Liberal Democrat MP for Southeast Cornwall, initiated an important short debate about the transport problems of post-16 students in his and other rural constituencies. Read it in Hansard 14 January 2008, column 762 onwards.

Breed made a very telling case for more equality of access to further education for rural students in Cornwall, what that meant and the part public transport and its costs play in it. Discussing the practicalities he wittily said, “Waiting for buses is often seen as an act of faith.” While he spoke in detail about his constituency, he also sensibly included rural areas generally.

Of course life in a rural area has it ups and downs and public transport is one of the downs. It is impossibly uneconomic to provide public transport in rural England approaching the level found in large urban areas; and how far government should tax people in cities to subsidise chosen life in villages is debatable. I don’t think the urban/rural playing field can ever be level; both have desirable and undesirable points and the desiderata vary from person to person but on the whole it is not further education students who have chosen one place to live rather than the other. Whether free public transport for students in rural areas is economic is an issue to be considered; I hope it proves viable.

The government response to Colin Breed was large but somewhat vague on promises. We shall see.

I hope that this is an issue which all those concerned with life in Cornwall will engage with. We shall see.

How soft my posts on the shortcomings of Cornwall county council seem now that the Improvement and Development Agency (IDEA) has reported on it.

The report is here and is disturbing. Its ominous opening sentence is: “Cornwall county council is faced with a significant number of serious problems.” The report also says that the council has a “low level of self-awareness” and is unaware or in denial about the challenges it faces. That’s polite talk for they’re losing and don’t know it.

The county council, which becomes a unitary council in 2009, faces an Audit Commission comprehensive performance assessment in May/June this year and asked the IDEA to do in effect a dry run.

The main observations of the report are that collectively the county council falls short in corporate performance, that is the various parts of it do not work together as a corporate whole as well as they should; that its performance in several spheres has declined; and the obvious point that the council’s reputation depends upon its delivering its promises in its unitary proposals.

Not everything is poor, some people’s work and understanding of what needs to happen is noted very favourably.

Some of the harsh comments are:

+ The council faces service failure if it does not improve its corporate performance.

+ The council should better communicate to the people of Cornwall what the council stands for, what its overarching purpose and vision are: “there is a general perception that the council is invisible outside of county hall.”

+ The council’s ratings for services from external assessments have “slipped downwards” and the external overall assessments of the capacity to improve are too low. These are singled out: the Direction of Travel judgement of December 2006 said the council was “not improving adequately”; the judgement for children’s social care was “not improving adequately”; the council’s score for Use of Resources fell from 3 to 2 stars; and both the recent inspection reports for Supporting People in 2006 and Older People in 2007 gave only one star.

+ On the move towards a unitary council the county’s partners “are unclear about the plans and who is involved in managing the change.”

+ “Collectively there is an absence of a strong performance culture at corporate level, with the status quo being the preferred option.”

+ The council’s self-assessment suggests that it is unaware or in denial of the problems it faces

And on and on and on…

It is dismaying reading, a detailed catalogue of failure or poor performance or weaknesses over many areas with change and those keen for it stymied. I read it as a forecast that unless there is a sea change the county council will move from failure to disaster. The parrot is not dead yet but is looking very pale.

Although the report does not say so, I think it shows the ruling Liberal Democrats as a party that is letting down the people of Cornwall in county government. Let us hope that things can only get better, as they sing. The report was made in summer 2007 so perhaps since then the council is out of the slough and marching to the sunlit uplands and the delectable mountains as we speak and come the spring the Audit Commission assessment will be glowing. Yes, I hope so.

Oh, there’s one amusing comment. The council should “listen and be seen to be listening to local stakeholders.” I’m not sure what a stakeholder is; does it include members of the public in Cornwall, those people whose views the council chose not to notice in the unitary debate? Probably not.

The steam has gone out of the online Cornish nationalist and nationalist-leaning petitions. They are receiving little support from the 420 000 adults of Cornwall.

On the petitions.pm website the one urging the prime minister to “recognise the Cornish genocide of 1549” has only fifty six signatures and ends next month. Is that a measure of how many think it was genocide and relevant in any way to life today?

One calls for an investigation into Cornwall’s “unique” constitutional status which, it claims, is an argument for the county to have more devolution. I am unsure what an “investigation” is supposed to do. Anyway, it has thirty four signatures. There is a woolliness about the petition’s desire for “a greater degree of devolution,” which means whatever you want it to.

The only one to attract more than a thousand names is that calling for a holiday on St Piran’s day. It closes this month. This marries genuine political conviction with a day off work with pay and a celebratory public holiday, formidably attractive. Even so well less than half of one percent of Cornwall’s adult population have signed up.

Over at the pledgebank site the tick box pledge looking for one thousand signatures – no Cornish tick box on the 2011 census, no completed census form – has 460 signatures and new signatures have been running at less than five a week since the autumn judging by the graph on the site. At this rate it will not meet its thousand by 2011 the site says.

The one on the petitionsonline website for a referendum on a Cornish regional assembly has 966 signatures. That’s an increase of about one a week since I last looked in July last year. Two thirds of the latest tranche of names seem from outside Cornwall.

Look at it this way. One percent, merely one percent, of Cornwall’s adult population is about 4000. None of the nationalist petitions have come anywhere near that. Online petitioning is an exhausted approach which is making Cornish nationalism look silly and is certainly revealing its lack of appeal.

I noticed in an article of 12 December 2007 on this Cornwall Liberal Democrat website the phrase “Cornwall - one of the poorest counties in the country.” The italics are mine but the phrase is true, with the proviso that it is pretty meaningless and unnecessary to talk about county poverty when we can and should differentiate between subwards. But this phrase represents a welcome advance in Libdem thinking from the claim that Cornwall is the poorest. Poverty has so many measures and so many aspects that “the poorest” is misplaced anyway.

On small step forward.