mudhook

More evidence that Cornwall is doing better than the miserabilists say.

Cornwall is at the 64th percentile in the list of 149 England local authorities and the proportion of their 16 and 17 year olds who are not in education, employment, or training (NEETS). This means Cornwall is as good as or better than 64 percent of these authorities in desirably minimising the proportion of NEETS.

That doesn’t make us Cornubia auspicatissima. It’s still 590 young people too many in Cornwall; but in ninety five of those authorities the proportion is higher (and worse) than in Cornwall.

Unfortunately the information appears available only for top-tier local authorities and does not show any differences across an authority. From what other data tells us about Cornwall we can assume that the proportion is not evenly spread across the county.

The latest NEETS data is here (Hansard 25 February 2008, columns 1284W-1290W).

(NEETS data previously came up in the Commons in November 2007. I noted it on 26 November 2007 here.)

Quietly, without trumpets, a revolution has taken place in Cornwall.

The amount of money spent in the six Cornwall district council areas on free bus travel – largely free bus travel for the elderly – last financial year was nearly £4.4 million, a vast leap up of about 340 percent over the previous year. This is the measure of the success of the new free travel benefit within a bus traveller’s county of residence and which began in April 2006. Before that there was a half-fare scheme.

The free bus travel scheme was introduced by our central government, by Labour.

Elderly people of Cornwall are getting about, visiting friends, visiting shops, getting out and engaging with their environment. That is good for mental, emotional, and physical health and independence; those are goods in themselves but additionally in economic terms likely reduce the call on the help services and perhaps increase spending in now-accessible local shops and on local services. The scheme also helps those elderly with meagre pensions.

For users the scheme is simplicity, just a plastic ticket.

The scheme applies all over England and includes some disabled people too. “County of residence” is my shorthand way of naming the travel areas in an England with various local government areas. There are separate schemes in the rest of Britain.

This April the scheme is extended beyond county borders and applies to travel on local, not scheduled, bus services across county borders. Hardy elderly people in Cornwall, using a succession of local buses, could travel free to Berwick.

Around eleven million elderly people and disabled people benefit from free bus travel.

Free bus travel is a civilised benefit. Of course in rural counties like Cornwall there are not and never will be the bus services that there are in large urban areas. Of course it can take a long time to get between distant places here on rambling buses. But this is a great and simple socialist scheme.

Celebrate it.

Now ask yourself: is this something the Conservatives would have introduced?

Another set of data shows Cornwall is far from the most deprived part of England. This data refers to the proportion of children aged 0-15 in parliamentary constituencies in households dependent on workless benefits. These benefits are income support, jobseekers allowance, incapacity benefit, severe disablement benefit, or pension credit.

Here are the results for the five Cornwall constituencies for April 2007:

Falmouth and Camborne 21.1 percent

St Ives 17.2 percent

North Cornwall 16.1 percent

Truro and St Austell 15.5 percent

Southeast Cornwall 13.7 percent

These figures come from the department for work and pensions in answer to a parliamentary question on 6 February 2008 (DEP 2008-0366). For comparison the ‘best’ constituency has 5.1 percent and the ‘worst’ has 49.2 percent. The average for England, Scotland, and Wales is 19.9 percent.

The Cornwall constituencies fall in the middle of the range for England. Here are their percentile ranks (worked out by me):

Southeast Cornwall 68th percentile, Truro and St Austell 61st, North Cornwall 59th, St Ives 53rd, Falmouth and Camborne 38th. Percentile rank means Southeast Cornwall, for example, is as good as or better than 68 percent of the 529 constituencies. ‘As good as or better than’ means the lower the percentage (and the higher the percentile rank) for benefit-dependency, the better.

There are 202 constituencies in England which have a higher percentage of benefit-dependent children than the highest scoring Cornwall constituency, Falmouth and Camborne.

Now I think it is disturbing and unacceptable that very roughly one in six children in Cornwall are in households dependent on out-of-work benefits. It is, frankly, a poor start in life for them and we should be doing much more to help their parent(s) into profitable work if possible and to increase benefits for those who genuinely cannot work. We have to try not to punish children for the failings of their parents while trying to show them that for the able work pays and is important for self-respect. I believe the marxist saw, From each according to his ability and to each according to his need, is an excellent recipe for a good society.

However, to be parochial again, though there is serious deprivation in parts of the county, constituencies in Cornwall are not at the bottom of this workless-benefits league table. It’s getting repetitive, isn’t it, saying this sort of thing? Look at the numerous posts making the point. The evidence is very clear: people in Cornwall are not singled out for unfair treatment by central government; and they are not, taken generally, sitting at the bottom of the heap. The grievance agenda is tosh.

I know it’s hammering the point and I’ve held off putting up this post but here goes. There are two pieces of data to mull over.

A parliamentary answer about the percentage increase in education spending in local education authorities from 1997/98 to 2005/06 shows Cornwall at 96th out of 149, that is ninety five authorities received higher percentage increases than Cornwall and fifty three lower (Hansard 12 December 2007 columns 722W-725W).

The dedicated schools grant for 2008/09 from central government shows that Cornwall has higher perpupil funding than ten other education authorities in England and that eighty seven education authorities, including Cornwall, have perpupil funding less than the average for England. These figures are similar to those for 2007/08 that last year I put here .

Cornwall is not at the top of the funding tables but once more the claim by grievancers that Cornwall is singularly unfairly treated in education by central government is shown to be wrong; Cornwall is not the most poorly treated authority and is not singled out by central government for unique low funding. The complaint based on comparative grounds, on what other authorities receive, fails.

Of course none of these figures prove that Cornwall, or any local education authority, is receiving a fair and adequate share of education spending given its circumstances. That requires different arguments and the grievancers do not make in convincing detail any such arguments. Look at all the deprivation and poverty data I have put on this blog and ask yourself whether the data suggest strongly that Cornwall as a whole is singularly impoverished and should therefore receive as a whole more education spending comparative to other places. However, it may well be that schools in the seriously deprived areas of Cornwall should receive more funding and teachers. Does it make sense to see Cornwall as a whole in terms of education funding?

What should we make of this incident? The Cornishman last week reported a dawn raid and eviction of innocent migrants. Today a local blog has vigorously challenged aspects of that action.

I think the St Ivean blog has certainly made a case which calls for further explanation from Penwith council of the actions.

My initial feeling, in the absence of knowing all the facts, is that if I was ejected on to the streets after a dawn raid I would probably have difficulty in immediately seeing that as protecting my welfare. Was this the only way?

Parturient montes nascetur…Kernewek mashup.

They have laboured and produced a new, credible, viable, seventh, version of Cornish. No doubt it will have an uplifting adjective attached until it becomes just Kernewek.

It is a mashup of the present varieties of Cornish (listed, if you are really interested, here) and tries to accommodate the various spellings and sounds in a single spelling system. It is intended - hoped - that this is the version that will be seen as the official, standard one and will be paramount for writing; a single written form of the language. The current others will become variants, probably still used by some of their present devotees. I think that over time the users will develop naturally a living standard as happens in every language and these days of disagreement will be an unhappy far-off memory. Of course controversy will always accompany language usage but it will be about the Cornish homologues of the intrusive r and different from/ to / than and the death of the subjunctive in English, the whole world to a few, nothing to most.

There’s still much to do: for example, a dictionary, the spelling of place names, how to invent new words for new things that will come along. Despite the welcome from most users and friends for the cooperative work and its fruits after years of factional disagreements, there has been much public contention from a few and if that spirit prevails all will be lost - you and I may fume about global warming, poverty, terrorism, inflation; these people rage about how to spell words in a reconstructed language. The silent majority of the level-headed among the present Cornish users must cry themselves to sleep.

By the way, what’s Cornish for mashup?

There is a disappointing tendency among some of the Liberal Democrats in Cornwall to ooze simplistic negativity: they make theirs the dismal party too often portraying Cornwall as a place where it is “always winter and never Christmas.”

This goes beyond the usual stuff from any group anywhere demanding their area gets the very best from central government and complaining if another does better. They appear shackled to a grievance agenda. I realise that party politics is about keeping things simple and partisan but it is dismaying that there are few attempts in Cornwall to explain the conflicting claims faced by any government trying to achieve fairness in the redistribution of national funds to very different parts of the country and to explain the full background to hard government funding, topics on which I have written posts to try to indicate the fuller story.

We should engage people in a debate about what is fair funding across Britain rather than presenting national decisions simplistically as only sources for local grievance, the usual nonsense of Cornwall hard done by, Cornwall singled out for disfavour. Of course placing Liberal Democrats against a presented uncomprehending, unfair, and faraway Labour (or Conservative) government encourages Cornwall voters to see the Libdems as the only party which can be relied on to advance their interests.

An approach which openly discusses what we might mean by the fair redistribution of national funding would enable people to understand better and to judge for themselves whether Cornwall is drowning in unfairness or by and large gets a fair deal. I think that understanding the whole story, and understanding the sheer difficulty of resolving conflicting claims and in getting to what is compossibly fair, would undermine the largely unfounded grievance agenda.

As a light antidote to Libdem gloom read the Vorsprung posts - and there are also the specific data rebuttals of grievance in many of the other posts. As well as the CEP report on nurses’ pay, Saving lives, these posts are among those which explore getting to fairness:

Education spending

Formula grant and local government spending

Health service funding

Always winter and never Christmas: The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe by CS Lewis.

Water bills in the southwest are high compared with the rest of England and the government has been under continual pressure to get them reduced.

There is no easy way of cutting the prices charged by a private company, regulated and without competition. The regulatory system hasn’t put a stop to high bills because the company can justify them to the regulator though many customers probably think regulation ineffective in protecting their financial interests. Strengthening regulation so that it deeply cuts bills would amount to the government capping the prices charged by the private company at a level that the company considers destructive to its effective and efficient operation. No government of any party is going to do that.

The Libdems have suggested a national subsidy: our bills here are reduced by getting people in other parts to pay more than the economic cost of their water supply. I agree with an equalisation scheme but have two concerns about this.

Firstly, Libdems argue that Cornwall can run its own affairs without outside intervention. They support an assembly (though a regional English one rather than a national one, I think). Yes, the people who tell us that they want devolution in Cornwall also want people elsewhere to chip in and help to pay our bills. It is incoherent for devolutionists to ask that people in, say Northamptonshire and Cumbria, be required to subsidise private water company bills in Cornwall; or at the very least this needs more arguments than Libdems have so far presented.

Secondly and more importantly, I should like to see them take this case for higher water bills elsewhere to those who will pay more. Perhaps the people of the southeast, where they face drought, will willingly pay more so that we may pay less? Why don’t the Libdems test the waters? Let them ask and let us all see what the response is.

Labour has now come up with an answer. Phil Woolas, the minister for water bills, wonders whether compulsory water meters in the southwest would deal with the high bills. No it won’t. It would simply move around the amounts individual households pay, some paying more and some less than now. Universal metering might reduce the total amount of water used and thus the costs of the company but not by much as the infrastructure for example would be the same. The company would still have to raise virtually the same amount of total money from customers so I expect the effect on bills overall would not be significant. We need to see what the estimated effect would be.

Of course universal metering might be fairer overall than the present system though not to households with young children or sick members, but in any case it does not deal with disproportionately high water bills in the southwest.

Labour has come up with an answer that is not a solution.

The Conservatives got us into this expensive mess when they privatised water supply and sewerage. It would be good to hear some ideas from them about how we find a way through the Northwest Passage of high bills. Don’t hold your breath.

related posts

Can Cornwall’s water bills be cut? 6 June 2007

Tory water bills 6 June 2008

Another report on Cornwall county council, this from the Audit Commission. This is the comprehensive performance assessment (CPA) for 2007 and the council scores three stars and is “improving adequately.” Read it here.

Thirty seven percent of councils have more stars and seventeen percent fewer; seventy nine percent are improving better than Cornwall and none worse.
Here are two recent assessments of Cornwall county council.

Cornwall county council: the parrot is pale

One star Cornwall

None of these is excellent overall. None gets into the Vorsprung Cornwall thread. Note that these are not about Cornwall suffering from external and distant agency; these are assessments of internal works. I’m whistling to keep my spirits up.

The order to implement the unitary council in Cornwall passed on 7 February 2008 and it is now full steam ahead. You can read the debate here. A previous post is here.

The Liberal Democrats made their usual nationalist-lite points about Cornwall unitary council needing more powers than the government is giving: the minister repeated that there were “no specific additional powers” for the unitary council in the order but added vaguely to the effect that tomorrow was another day. Four of the MPs supported the order; Andrew George opposed it chiefly because, if I understood his argument right, it did not give or promise enough devolution. The Conservatives pointed out that the various polls in Cornwall showed most voting people there against the county council’s successful proposals and that only thirty two of the eighty two county councillors voted for them; the Libdems had no convincing answer to this arithmetic.

The minister said he approved the proposals because they were viable and support in Cornwall for the proposals was “sufficiently broad” which seems to give a very broad meaning to ‘broad support.’ He added of the government’s criteria for successful unitary proposals , “Our criteria of support are not, and never have been, related to whether a majority of stakeholders, local citizens, or any other interest group were in favour of the proposal.” That is clear: it means people’s views and votes don’t count much. On this official Labour and Liberal Democrat opinion seem at one.

It would be good to hear the parties explore their ideas around this sort of situation: what are the guiding principles when people and MPs/ministers disagree over a proposed measure, what is the democratic approach and answer?

Anyway, read the debate and decide for yourself.

Of more interest now are the financial claims which I am not able to judge. This is the summary worth remembering around 2011 or 2012; (a) the county figures and (b) Chisholm figures.

The savings to be made from going unitary
(a) £15.4 million a year
(b) £6-£9 million a year

One-off cost of going unitary
(a) £19.3 million
(b) £27.8 million.

“the payback period for the changes will be about two years”: John Healey, the minister in the debate.

If I didn’t have to pay the bill, whatever it is, it would be amusing to sit back and see who’s right.