mudhook

As we glide effortlessly into the unitary set up, let me recall the present political disposition of Cornwall.

In 2005 there were elections for the eighty two county council seats and a general election for the five seats; in 2007 there were elections for the six district councils, elections for the whole council in five of the districts and for a third in Penwith. The results of these give us the present party make-up of Cornwall.

Overall nearly 800 000 votes were cast in the three sets of elections. Here they are in percentages:

General election 2005
Liberal Democrats 44.4, Conservatives 31.8, Labour 15.9, UKIP 5, MK 1.4, Greens 0.7, all others 0.9

County council elections 2005
Liberal Democrats 39.2, Conservatives 24.1, Independents 19.5, Labour 10.5, MK 3.2, Greens 1.3, UKIP 1.1, all others 1.1

District elections 2007
Liberal Democrats 36.1, Conservatives 30.7, Independents 20.0, MK 3.9, Labour 3.5, UKIP 2.5, Greens 0.7, all others 2.6.

There are caveats.

These figures do not compare the same seats over time but different seats. The aim is to give a general county snapshot using the latest figures available in the three sets.

In the county and district elections some seats had more than one councillor elected and so people had more than one vote. The percentages are based on totals of votes not ballot papers. The “others” include unlabelled candidates, Liberals (a separate party from Liberal Democrats), two BNP candidates, and Veritas. Uncontested seats are excluded.

The votes cast for a party depend in part on how many candidates stand for that party though how many candidates a party puts up reflects its organisational and membership health and its estimate of its chances.

The parties perform differently in the seats and these overall figures, which represent general averages of real votes, do not reveal those differences. A couple of very popular candidates do wonders for a small party’s total vote and percentage and make it difficult to assess that party’s general standing with the electorate. These considerations suggest that in local elections at any rate some people do not vote only for a party.

The general election throws up very different results so here are the two local government sets in percentages of votes cast, county 2005 and districts 2007, more than half a million votes:

Liberal Democrats 37.9, Conservatives 26.9, Independents 19.7, Labour 7.5, MK 3.5, UKIP 1.7, Greens 1.1, Others 1.7.

Finally, these figures are about people’s choices. Seats won are a different matter, about power.

The next elections are in spring 2009 for the unitary council.

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Bewildered in the maze of schools: Alexander Pope (1688-1744) An essay on criticism

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.

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.

Listen. Can you hear the sound of feet marching backwards? Or is it forwards?

Earlier this year there were county council proposals on the grounds of lack of money to end 24 hour cover from the fire stations at Camborne and Falmouth, the only fulltime stations in Cornwall, and provide only daytime cover.

There have been widespread protests from people here, the Labour and Conservative parties in Cornwall, and firefighters; there have been demonstrations and a newspaper campaign. There was a fire at Newquay in August which showed the problems graphically.

There have been the usual Libdem complaints that the Labour government is not giving Cornwall county council enough money and last month a council delegation failed to persuade the government to give them more money for the fire service. Now the Liberal Democrat county council executive has heard the anger and alarm among voters and decided that in January it will recommend to the full council that Camborne (but not Falmouth) fire station is kept open 24 hours a day, fully crewed.

Apparently the council has the money needed after all.

It is tempting to hail this as listening to what people say and adjusting what one does accordingly, getting it wrong and then putting it right. What we might call democracy. However, I recall that the county council Liberal Democrats did not listen to the people of Cornwall when it came to the unitary council proposals. Listening and not listening. Camborne but not Falmouth. I can’t see any coherent principle of government here. This is not a policy, it’s a shambles.

People in Scotland are getting for free a range of public services that people in England are charged for. In England prescription charges are presently £6.85 an item and only off-peak buses are free for people over sixty. In Scotland there are free eye check ups, free dental check ups, and the arrangements for free bus travel for the elderly are more generous. Tuition fees are paid by students at university in England but Scottish students at university in Scotland do not pay them (though there is in Scotland a one-off flatrate graduate fee of about £2300 payable on graduation). In Scotland there are generally shorter NHS waiting list times and smaller school classes; some drugs are available on the NHS that are not available in England; the arrangements for personal and nursing care are more generous.

The Scottish government has just started a six month pilot of free school meals in some areas for pupils aged five to eight and hopes to extend it all over Scotland. It has also announced that prescription charges will be abolished for everyone within the lifetime of the present Scottish parliament and aims to abolish the university graduate fee.

I don’t live in Scotland and it is up to people there and their government to decide what happens in Scotland.

However, these improvements are possible because the Barnett formula gives a much higher percapita amount of UK identifiable government spending on public services in Scotland than in England. The formula, leading to the higher spending in Scotland and the free or more generous services, is increasingly seen as unfair to England. For 2005/06 the percapita public spending in England (including Cornwall) was £6762 and in Scotland £8265 (and in Northern Ireland £9088, and Wales £7666). This formula is unfair and untenable. It should be scrapped and a new arrangement made for spending UK taxes in the four constituent countries.

For Labour, with a majority of the Scotland seats in the UK parliament and dependent on Scotland for its UK majority, this is an issue they will not tackle; nor will they tackle the related issue of MPs for Scotland constituencies voting for England-only issues in the House of Commons. The Conservatives sometimes rumble about Barnett unfairness but seem undecided whether to commit to tackle it. It is noticeable that the Liberal Democrat MPs for Cornwall complain about what they see as unfair public spending in Cornwall, point to the UK government, but do not mention the Barnett formula.

Slowly people in England are realising the unfairness of the present formula and the present House of Commons voting arrangements and eventually parties will not be able to ignore them.

The Times on 11 October 2007 quoted figures from the Centre for Economic Business Research that showed state spending by the constituent UK countries as a proportion of economic activity was lowest in England and significantly higher in the other three countries.

An earlier post on the Barnett formula is here.

The Liberal Democrats are doing the grievance thing again.

They are complaining that Cornwall does not get a fair share of central government money (the “formula grant”) for local government services in Cornwall, that Cornwall’s formula grant is less than the national average, that Islington gets more funding, and that Cornwall loses money by means of “damping.” I think Islington is mentioned because it can at a push be presented as Tony Blair territory.

First, the formula grant, simply.

This is basically what the money given by central government to local government authorities is called. It is made up of non-domestic rates (business rates) collected locally, pooled centrally, and then redistributed; the revenue support grant for such things as pay and services; and, now, a dedicated schools grant. The various amounts paid to each authority are worked out by formulas which aim to reflect the particular circumstances of the authorities taking account of levels of deprivation, number of pupils, the composition of the population, and so on. See here for details about the working out of the Cornwall grant. Housing and in effect police services are paid for by other funds. And on top of this central government money the local authority raises more money by levying a council tax.

Second, how much are we talking about?

For 2007/08 Cornwall county council gets a formula grant of £127.970 million. The district councils in Cornwall also get formula grants.

What is damping?

That formula grant of £127.970 million is after an amount is taken away from Cornwall county council’s central government funding for “damping.” This is a mechanism for redistributing money among authorities to ensure each one gets a minimum grant increase, in effect and intention a mechanism for minimising changes in grants received. This damping device strikes me as a civilised response, protecting people from a sudden and large loss of central government money. Cornwall gave up £6.7 million for damping in 2007/08. I should have thought Liberal Democrats in Cornwall would approve of the mechanism but apparently not.

Does Cornwall get less than the national average? I am unsure what this national average means since the grant to local authorities reflects their different sizes of populations, the different make-ups of their populations, and the different needs of their populations. Average is a problematic concept with so much reasonable variation. For the one aspect where average is meaningful the 2007/08 Budget Book published by Cornwall county council says on page 16 that the percentage increase in the formula grant for Cornwall for 2007/08 is “above the English average” increase: see here.

Does Islington get more than Cornwall for the formula grant? Oh yes, for 2007/08 it receives £146.776 million. Is this unfair? Well, I discussed the unfairness issue when the Cornwall Libdems complained about Islington getting a larger dedicated schools grant than Cornwall. Islington has a larger proportion of pupils on free school dinners and more measured deprivation. Again, I should have thought Liberal Democrats supported equalising help for the worst off, but again apparently not.

The Liberal Democrats in Cornwall are sounding like a party that is not in favour of redistributing wealth. Before David Cameron came along we usually called such a party Conservative.

Does Cornwall get a fair share of the money? Look at the way the grants are worked out and decide: see here. I believe it largely does; Cornwall is not bled dry by the rest of England.

For example, in the redistribution of the business rates (part of the formula grant), Cornwall receives back £102 million more than is collected from the county. This gain dwarfs the damping loss. Islington, by the way, gets back £15 million less than it collects.

Have you read about the £102 million gain for Cornwall on Liberal Democrat or nationalist websites? There’s really quite a lot of positive news for Cornwall that doesn’t get a mention on them, isn’t there?

I mentioned in the post on child poverty that the Liberal Democrats were reasonably saying that high water bills did not help in the work to child poverty in Cornwall. They are right. I added that although the Cornwall MPs mentioned only Cornwall their argument applied throughout the south west water company area.

Now the official Liberal Democrat newsletter Devon and Cornwall Update, which covers the “Devon and Cornwall region,” has printed an almost identical account to that in Julia Goldsworthy’s and Colin Breed’s websites. Almost identical.

On their websites Breed and Goldsworthy wrote on 14 and 19 June 2007 respectively:
“Cornwall’s MPs have met with DWP minister, Jim Murphy to raise the impact that the region’s high water bills are having on poverty in the county.”

The Update writes:
“The region’s MPs have met the DWP minister, Jim Murphy to raise the impact that the region’s high water bills are having on poverty in the southwest.”

Identical, even down to the lack of a comma after Murphy, except for the beginning and ending - Cornwall’s/region’s, the county/the southwest.

Breed and Goldsworthy websites:
“the minister undertook to seek representations from colleagues in DEFRA and the Treasury in order to investigate what action they are taking to alleviate the financial burden that is crippling so many Cornish households.”

The Update is identical except that the last words are “so many households in the southwest” - Cornish/southwest.

The Cornwall Labour Party blog draws attention to welcome progress in falls in unemployment here in Cornwall.

Since Labour came to power unemployment has fallen by about 9 400 in Cornwall. See here for the detailed data for each of the five Cornwall constituencies; it also explains how unemployment is measured.

The fall in the numbers of unemployed people in Cornwall constituencies is about two thirds overall. In the same period the fall in UK unemployment was 45 percent, significantly smaller than in Cornwall. The Cornwall constituencies are among the top tenth of most improved UK constituencies ranked by these percentages; we have made serious progress.

This good news seems to have been unrecorded so far by the Liberal Democrat and nationalist websites in Cornwall.

However, the Liberal Democrats here have acknowledged in Matthew Taylor’s words: “The fact is that the Cornish economy has started to turn round” since the dismissal of the Conservative government, though they claim credit for their Libdem efforts.

Of course, pay for workers in Cornwall remains problematically and stubbornly low and this is affecting negatively the lives and opportunities of many people. Progress is unacceptably slow.

Low pay also affects the funding of the NHS here and will be a factor in any move to reduce benefit levels, national pay scales, and the minimum wage in Cornwall. See this post and this on the blog.

In 2006 the median average gross pay for all fulltime, adult employees in Cornwall was £357.5 a week. This was 79 percent of the England figure of £453.3, a very modest improvement since 1997. Mean average pay is higher and so is median and mean average pay for males everywhere.

Again, even in the averages there is variety within Cornwall. The median pay (in 2006) for Penwith workplaces works out at about £2000 a year less than in Carrick.

See here for the ASHE income details.

Child poverty is variously defined and I think it does not make sense to try to produce a figure for Cornwall as a whole as its incidence varies vastly from place to place in the county. Child poverty in Redruth North is not the same as in Saltash St Stephens, as we shall see. So I don’t see the point of Julia Goldsworthy, the Liberal Democrat MP for the seat which includes Redruth, the other day asking for a Cornwall figure; such a figure would not help one iota in the practical reduction of child poverty and we have better, more local figures.

Indeed, from the department for work and pensions (DWP) we also have detailed tables of the household and family characteristics for children in low-income households, though for the UK as a whole: see chapter 4 of ‘Households below average income’ here.

The Labour government has pushed hard the view that people can best work themselves out of poverty. However, ‘Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2006′ by Guy Palmer et al for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation points out that half the children in poverty live in families where someone is working: see the ninth report of December 2006 here. The main cause seems to be low pay rates. See too the above DWP tables. Nevertheless, the government has made good progress in tackling child poverty though it is proving more difficult than imagined in a free market economy.

Liberal Democrat MPs in Cornwall have, however, reasonably been reminding the government that its attempts to reduce child poverty in the county could be frustated by high water bills. They have identified a possible additional contribution to child poverty in Cornwall - they mean parts of Cornwall - and, though they do not say so, parts of the rest of the south west water company area.

So how much child poverty is there here?

The End Child Poverty campaign has given figures for constituencies in 2005 which showed for Cornwall the proportion of children in families on out-of-work benefits ranged from 14 percent in South East Cornwall to 21 percent in Falmouth and Camborne. The average figure for Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) was also 21 percent. On another definition the campaign said in February 2005 that 25 percent of children in Cornwall lived in poverty.

Free school meals are a rough and ready way of measuring poverty and the Hansard data for them are on this blog here though they refer to Cornwall as a whole.

Above all, there is an index of child poverty: this is a part of the Indices of Multiple Deprivation. See the IDAC file here where the child poverty figures are given for 32 482 subwards in England including all of the Cornwall ones. This is much more useful information. It enables us to identify quite precisely where to target any remediation which is what the whole-county figures do not. It defines child poverty as people of less than sixteen living in income-deprived families, income deprivation being defined as in receipt of certain benefits.

What does this dated but very local child poverty index show about Cornwall? What every other measure of poverty and deprivation shows: much variety in the county. Some places in Cornwall have completely unacceptable high levels of child poverty and others do not - and many other places in England have more child poverty than anywhere in Cornwall.

Of the 32 482 subwards in the child poverty index, where the lower the figure the worse the poverty, the range in Cornwall is from part of Redruth North ward in Kerrier at number 485 to part of Saltash St Stephens ward in Caradon in at number 29 153. The Kerrier subward has sixty six percent of children aged less than sixteen who live in income-deprived families, an appalling figure, and the Caradon subward has three percent. That is a vast range. Over a third of Cornwall subwards are in the top half of the 32 482 England subwards, that is score better than the median average for England.

The Labour government has made significant inroads into child poverty and in the seven years to 2004/2005 there was a sixteen percent drop in Britain. Nevertheless very much has to be done still. The progress should be acknowledged and welcomed; a government with the large ambition to abolish child poverty should be encouraged, chided, goaded, and cheered towards its goal.

It makes no sense to talk of ‘Cornwall’ when it comes to child poverty but rather we should talk about the different parts of Cornwall and their different needs. We need to know where most help is needed. To help tackle child poverty effectively we should not focus equally on Redruth North and Saltash St Stephens. Goldsworthy’s comment that “Cornwall is unique” is profoundly unhelpful; it blurs the focus. In any case everywhere is unique, every child is unique. Let me say it again: when it comes to child poverty every child is unique wherever they live and child poverty is a scourge wherever it is found. We shall beat it primarily by national measures and resources focussing on the children and families who need help the most.

See Vorsprung 1 on this blog for particular help given to Cornwall in March 2007.

And see here for Lisa Harker’s report of November 2006 for the DWP ‘Delivering on child poverty: what would it take.’

PS 7 August 2007
Writing in today’s Guardian about effectively tackling poverty through social enterprise, David Cameron, the Tory leader, says that local authority areas are “too large to get an accurate picture of what is going on…We need a more fine-grained approach to tackle multiple deprivation at the micro-level.”

I agree entirely. The micro data is available in the index of multiple deprivation and its subsets as this post shows for child poverty. I think for measures and projects that directly and effectively tackle poverty we should drop “Cornwall” and even the districts as data-identifiers and focus on the places and people in Cornwall that need most help.

However, for economic regeneration we need “Cornwall” to qualify for EU convergence funds which reflect the EU emphasis on regions.

In recent polls around 81 percent of voters in Cornwall opposed the county council’s proposals for a unitary council. In Penwith the figure was a massive 89 percent. See this post.

Nevertheless, the Liberal Democrat county council has decided to persist with its proposals. The five MPs for Cornwall, all Liberal Democrats, supported the original unitary proposals and have supported this decision to persist in the face of vast public rejection. Incidentally, the council’s decision to persist was supported in a vote by only thirty two of the eighty two county councillors.

The MPs have consulted stakeholders in each constituency – people like doctors and school governors. I do not know how many people were consulted and replied, six or sixty or six hundred. I don’t know what questions were asked but I see on one of the websites there is a survey for the public with a series of questions which asked if they supported more decisions being taken locally by “elected Cornish representatives” rather than by “unelected authorities” in the south west region which isn’t the point as people aren’t being asked to decide on an abstract principle but on actual on-the-ground proposals. I assume the stakeholders were asked the same or similar questions by the MPs. If one asks that general question mutatis mutandis anywhere in England one can pretty well guarantee the answer. The MPs got an unsurprising majority Yes vote.

To interpret this as a vote in support of the unitary proposals would be absurd.

An MP should listen to what his or her constituents say and, if consonant with his judgement and principles, accommodate them, but listening does not necessarily mean agreeing. I think if four fifths of constituents, or even nine tenths as in Penwith, take a particular view an MP is still free to stick to his contrary view; indeed it might be seen as his duty to since an MP owes his constituents his judgement not his compliance, but he has also a representative duty to tell the government that most of his constituents disagree with him and to explain to his constituents why he thinks them wrong.

The Liberal Democrat MPs apparently believe that half a loaf is better than none and that a unitary council could lead to many more powers than are on offer at present and a de facto devolved regional assembly for Cornwall – the summa summarum for Liberal Democrats here. I do not share their conviction and for all their trumpeted meetings with the government about this the MPs are not giving guarantees about more powers, but in the long term they might be right. However, this fails to address the seriously unsatisfactory aspects of the current proposals with which we might be lumbered for many a year.

In the meantime, Penwith district council has asked the government whether additional and serious powers will in fact be devolved to a unitary council in Cornwall so we should soon know the answer to that.

To sum up. 81 percent of voters in Cornwall reject the unitary proposals. The county council and five MPs still support the proposals.

In the light of the decisive rejection of the unitary proposals by people in Cornwall, the government cannot credibly go ahead with them. To persist would be to dismiss out of hand people’s views and in a matter of local government that is absurd. The final decision should rest with the people whose local government it is.

Oh, and I expect we shall sooner or later be told by the MPs and the Liberal Democrats generally on some issue or other that the government isn’t listening to people. The Liberal Democrat MPs and Liberal Democrat county council have established - and I agree with them - that to listen to people does not necessarily mean to agree with or to obey, no, not even if it’s nine tenths of people.