TORIES EYE BENEFITS AND WAGES IN CORNWALL

The Conservatives are looking at plans to localise benefits: local councils would be given the power to set the benefit levels in their areas and the present uniform payments throughout Britain would be abandoned. The story is in today’s Observer, Tories plan to let benefit levels be set by local councils.

Many people in Cornwall gain from national standards in wages and benefits. The levels of wages for people in the public services here, like nurses and teachers, are set by national standards and comparisons not local ones. For example, Cornwall local wages are not used as comparators to decide what to pay a teacher here. Benefit levels are also set nationally and do not, with exceptions for rent for example, refer to local living costs. The Tory localising ideas would have a marked effect on the rates of benefits paid to people in Cornwall where average wages and the general cost of living are lower than in, for example, London and the south of England. Benefit levels in Cornwall would be stifled — fall or be frozen or increase at a lower rate than elsewhere, the last probably being the more likely — to align them with the different living costs here.

Would it just be benefits a Conservative government would localise? I pointed out in this post that the national minimum wage might be a target for Tory cuts: localisation would be a way for a Conservative government to stifle it, to freeze it or hold back its present progressive increases, in places like Cornwall. Once the localisation of benefits is established, the Tories might indeed come to see localism as a rational way of reducing costs and acknowledging varying local circumstances in other spheres, especially in public service pay: for example, localising nurses’ pay — in Cornwall lower levels than in London and the south of England because comparator pay and living costs are lower — is a way of tackling the costs of the NHS.

Local variations in benefits and public sector pay (and the minimum wage) might seem reasonable. After all, local living costs do vary and market pay varies. However, the Tory ideas appear not to be about topping up mandatory national payments in areas of high living costs. In practice councils of all parties would most likely seize the localising of payments as an opportunity to cut back costs and perhaps reduce or stabilise council tax. David Cameron has said a Conservative government would wish to give councils a general power of competence: it will thus be difficult to prevent the essentially arbitrary stifling of benefits or pay, a stifling with only a tenuous link to local living costs. We shall also have a contentious post code lottery, especially noticeable outside Cornwall in large urban areas where neighbours will have different levels of benefit payment and, although doing the same job, different pay. Indeed, we might have differences within Cornwall as local living costs, especially housing costs, vary within the county. I discussed these issues two years ago in this post.

Cornishing benefits, public sector pay, and the minimum wage carries large disadvantages for many people in Cornwall. There are questions to ask the Conservative parliamentary candidates and unitary councillors. Localisers in other parties have some difficult questions too.

LOCALISM AGAIN

Additamentum 8 September 2008

The King’s Fund has published a study Update to local variations in NHS spending priorities1. Details are here. This looks at the differences in adjusted per head spending by 152 primary care trusts in England on specifics such as cancer. There are disturbing variations in the levels of spending which are not fully explained yet and which I think are probably unjustified. The study reveals a postcode lottery in healthcare. In the study Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly trust is in the lowest quartile for spending on cancer and mental health and in the third quartile (the next to best) for spending on circulatory and heart problems. This is poor news for people in the first two categories who need help. It raises sharply the need for the advocates of localism to develop an effective answer to the postcode lottery aspect of localism.

The continuing news of local differences in the NHS raises questions. In what sense is a primary care trust local? How far can local people influence its decisions? Should the treatment you get depend on where you live or should there be national standards and requirements of treatment?

Original article 4 September 2008
Another example of what localism means in the world people live in: read the distressing story here and here. A man with cancer is denied expensive treatment by his local primary care trust. If he lived a few miles away he would get the life-extending medication because the neighbouring trust agrees it.

There are serious questions that the advocates of localism should answer. Is a post code lottery all right? If not, what do the advocates mean by localism?

These are my previous posts on localism:

A simple principle in Cornwall

If you can’t do it right, make it shiny

Localism in Cornwall: update

LOCALISM IN CORNWALL: UPDATE

See additamentum at end

ORIGINAL POST 21 July 2008
I have pointed out in previous posts that localism, devolving power to localities, can raise difficulties.

Two recent unconnected stories from Cornwall make the point.

In Illogan the local council has objected to new houses.

In Penzance some people have objected to a housing program for vulnerable people. The website of Providers of Accommodation and Services (PAS), the organisation involved with the Penzance story, explains that it has twenty two properties in Penwith district, housing almost one hundred vulnerable people. In the rest of Cornwall it has nine properties housing fifty nine people. Let me be clear: I think the work done by PAS (and its fellow, CTE) should be wholeheartedly supported. Penwith district council seems to have gone into constructive partnership with these organisations as a result of central government policy.

You can read more details of the Illogan story here Time has come to say ‘No more homes’ and the Penzance story here Dismay at council programme for alcoholics.

Of course new houses in numbers should be accompanied by improvements in infrastructure (and ideally amenities and more jobs) and housing for vulnerable people should be located carefully. However, with those provisos, both stories of opposition are depressing. This is what localism, empowering communities, can mean. Those who cheerily advocate more local powers, more decision making locally, should discuss the possibility that neighbourhood values might jar.

Additamentum 7 August 2008:
See this account of 6 August of a public meeting in Penzance about the scheme: Uproar at housing meeting.
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See here for details of the organisations involved with the housing for vulnerable people

See here for the account by Penwith district council of its partnership with Charles Terence Estates (CTE) and Providers of Accommodation and Support (PAS) in housing vulnerable single people.

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A SIMPLE PRINCIPLE IN CORNWALL

Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, Cornwall says in the Western Morning News for 26 July 2007: “The simple principle should be established that decisions which affect one community and no other should be taken in that community and not by others outside it.” He was responding to the news that the government has accepted Cornwall county council’s proposals for a unitary council.

On the face of it, most people would agree with this localism. Local people should decide local issues not people far away who are do not know at first hand the issue and do not have to live daily with the decision. Even the European Union believes, it says, in subsidiarity, the idea that a decision should be taken at the lowest possible level of relevance and competence. There’s even a saw about the principle: The wearer knows best where the shoe pinches.

There are, however, serious difficulties with the simple principle. Let me look at a few.

(1) It is difficult to identify items which affect only “one community and no other.” Issues and decisions tend to leak all over the place. One of the arguments against English votes for English affairs is that of interdependence and consequential effect. As Cornwall, even a devolved Cornwall, would not be self-financing, all local decisions in Cornwall depend upon money from other communities, a point made by some exasperated people in England about the spending decisions of the Barnett-financed devolved parliaments and assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

Who pays the bills for local decisions? Not the locality, most cannot afford it. In a way all decisions affect everyone because everyone pays. (Actually not every adult pays; some people receive but do not give.)

I suppose we are talking about not absolute independence but the degree of independence and the degree to which that the decision impacts upon the daily life a particular community rather than others.

Whether and where to build a car park or lavatory and what fees to charge are suitable for local decision; their impact is overwhelmingly upon the local community (and its visitors) hardly at all on people many miles away. The cost is relatively modest.

However, building a school involves significant money in land and building costs and subsequent running costs and well-educated children matter to us all. Others will therefore have an interest.

(2) I think that by and large local people or local councils do not take as broad and long a view as people, like central government, who are immersed in complex interdependent decisions and who usually work on broadly benthamite principles. Local decisions are about the immediate practical issues and effects not universal principles, all trees and no wood.

Despite the chatter about community the localist emphasis is often on me rather than us. Local decisions are not likely to be so liberal as centralised decisions: read this depressing account of the response of the locality to the most deserving and respectable of people. Ask would any affordable housing for first-time buyers get built in Cornwall if people in the locality made the decision and there was no national insistence? What then are the prospects for any provision for the vulnerable and the socially difficult: how many rehabilative hostels would get permission if it depended solely upon locals and not national guidance? Where would one build the less desirable but wholly necessary facilities of life such as sewage works, incinerators, and factories if every local population everywhere had a veto?

(3) An aspect of (2) is what we have come to call the post code lottery: different quality of services in different areas, even some areas lacking the services provided in others, all on the irrational basis of human geography. Nothing about need, only the dictate of the most assertive and demanding of local opinions and local elbows. The sharp elbow model of redistribution, a model which in many places gives very little to a whole galaxy of people – single mothers, aspirant first time house buyers looking for affordable housing, and people living untidy lives.

If locals in Cornwall decided what priority of health money and treatment should be given to people, would not those with locally out-of-favour illnesses get little? In Cornwall with a larger than average proportion of pensioners how would HIV and alcoholism and drug addiction fare against arthritis and mobility problems? The national service sets national rules which try to ensure a reasonably fair shot for everyone.

(4) Of course by localism politicians often mean not the affected immediate locality and its inhabitants taking decisions but a broader community: the district or the county or even region rather than the hamlet. In Cornwall it might turn out to be people of Wadebridge and Bodmin deciding what happens in Penzance and Camborne, or vice versa, though this is an outcome Andrew George opposes.

(5) Localism also tends in practice to mean not decisions by the people but by their claimed representatives. And this in turn means a well-organised group can unduly influence council decisions; the ideal picture is of a community coming together to decide what it wants and in what order. In reality localism can be government by the noisy and those sharp elbows, the prejudices and preferences of local people who are assertive and articulate, rather than by the people though that applies to national government too.

A simple principle? No, it isn’t.

Additamentum 1 August 2007 Permission for the service forces accommodation at Ashtead was unanimously given by councillors today.

See also this later post: If you can’t do it right, make it shiny