STREETS PAVED WITH GOLD

Alas, the myth that the streets of London are paved with gold is a myth for very many Londoners. Alas, the envy of a pampered town showered with money that we should have rings untrue for very many Londoners. Alas, the tale that pay in London is fantastic is far from true for very many Londoners. How many?

Well, 21 percent of people living in London are paid below the London living wage.  27 percent of Londoners live in poverty (after housing costs are reckoned).

These figures come from the excellent and well-researched annual London’s poverty profile. The 2015 profile is out today. You can read it here.

It runs to nearly a hundred 100 pages but there is a helpful, brief list of key findings on page 7 and each of the ten chapters has a key points introduction.

This should be compulsory reading for everyone who thinks all Londoners are living in splendour, awash with money. Some people in London are and, yes, Cornwall and too many of its people experience poverty and serious housing issues which I highlight on this blog as in Poorly paid in Cornwall and Deprivation in Cornwall 2015. But it would be good if the Cornwall political parties and commentators took a minute to acknowledge the plight of very many Londoners and scotched the myths and tales of universal riches. We are all in it together, right?

HEART-WARMING HOUSING STORY

Housing news usually centres on questions of affordability, long waiting lists of people for housing, opposition from people comfortably housed to new house building developments, numbers and density. Difficulties, problems, only small bites of hope.

It is very good to have a story about housing, about homelessness, a story that warms hearts.

The Guardian reports it here and the Independent here.

Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs, two Manchester United footballers, have agreed to let homeless people live in their planned hotel over winter.

I honour the two gentlemen and their generous, civilised action.

RCHT JUDGED: UPDATED

See updates of 7 and 16 October 2015 at the end of this post

ORIGINAL POST 24 September 2015
Another judgement day for our Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust (RCHT) with three hospitals at Treliske Truro, St Michaels Hayle, and West Cornwall Penzance. The latest Care Quality Commission (CQC) report on the RCHT, published 23 September this year, is here. Incidentally, scroll down that page for the report on the inspection of January 2015, published 27 March 2015.

The trust was inspected on four days in June this year. Do read the report on that inspection and consider what you think. I believe it is a mixed picture though the grim and unsafe have been rightly emphasised by the media. It is a very great concern that the report says the safety of services is “Inadequate.”

A serious issue in the report is shortage at times of suitably qualified staff on duty. I should like to see the CQC well analyse the origins of the shortage at RCHT and other hospitals. Does it consider it is all due to administrative inadequacies by RCHT or are government policies part of the cause? The CQC should consider how far present issues are due to government decisions, especially about cut backs on nurses’ jobs and training places and harsh limits on public sector pay rises; both by the Tory/Libdem coalition. The present Tory government is continuing public sector pay restraint. Is the work load now so onerous that it is damaging nurses’ wellbeing and the NHS?

The RCHT will be inspected again. Let’s hope the managers can engender large improvements. Let’s hope the CQC takes a wider look.

The RCHT ended 2014/15 with a deficit of nearly £7 million. It plans a £5.5 million deficit for 2015/16: see report here.

Further reading
Head of Royal College of Nursing – Nurse shortages are life-threatening: Guardian 2 September 2015

Polly Toynbee on government spending cuts damaging the NHS: Guardian 22 September 2015

Deborah Hopkins, Labour candidate for St Austell and Newquay in May, has an interesting take on this issue on her facebook

End of original post
_________________________________________________

Update 7 October 2015
Read the telling report by Denis Campbell in the Guardian NHS leadership in crisis as running hospitals becomes near-impossible.

Update 16 October 2015
The Care Quality Commission has just published its latest annual report The state of health care and adult social care in England 2014/15. This is the full report.

In the section dealing with acute hospitals the Commission reports that that two thirds of hospital trusts are in deficit (page 11 full report) and 8 percent of inspected hospitals are judged overall as “inadequate” and 57 percent “require improvement” (page 69). The CQC now says that hospitals are being asked to make significant savings and at the same time deliver an excellent service as work increases in load and complexity.

POORLY PAID IN CORNWALL

The Office for national statistics (ONS) has today published data showing that last year there were about 53 000 jobs in Cornwall paying less than the then living wage hourly rate of £7.65 for those aged twenty one and over. This represented 31.6 percent of all Cornwall jobs.

Of the 293 local authorities in England outside London, Cornwall is at 250 where 1 is best (lowest proportion) and 293 is worst (highest proportion).

The voluntary living wage, set by the Living Wage Foundation, is higher than the mandatory minimum wage and George Osborne’s recently announced and misleadingly called national living wage.

Five of the thirty three local authorities in London, where in April 2014 the living wage set by the Mayor of London, was £8.80 an hour, had a higher proportion of jobs below the wage than Cornwall.

The estimates of percentages are based on the 2014 provisional ASHE data.

The data shows that poor wages are a lively issue in Cornwall. They underlie many other difficulties for many here, including poverty and housing and choices in everyday living. Cornwall Council and town and parish councils should scrutinise their spending to ensure their poor get a very fair share and none is wasted on frivolous projects.

I should like to see the parties in Cornwall responding positively to the issues raised in this post and in my post of the other day Deprivation in Cornwall 2015 and to the risks of increasing poverty for children that I discussed in the post Assaulting poverty or the poor – that is, responding to the issues (not to me) with specific and material ideas for at least mitigation of distress. Let’s hear the clarion from Labour, Liberal Democrats, Mebyon Kernow, and the Greens here in Cornwall, and, yes, the Conservatives and UKIP here too.

NOTES
ASHE: Annual survey of hours and earnings (ONS)

The ONS explains that the jobs are for employees aged eighteen and over paid at adult rates of pay; the coefficient of variation (cv) shows that the Cornwall figures are “precise”.

DEPRIVATION IN CORNWALL 2015

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has just published the latest measures of deprivation for small areas in England with an average population of around 1500. These areas are called lower-layer super output areas (LSOAS) and the deprivation measures are called the indices of multiple deprivation (IMD).

There are 32 844 LSOAS in England now.

The IMD is made up of various components of deprivation such as income and employment and housing and an aggregate figure, the IMD. You can see the IMD 2015 here. It is largely based on data from 2012/13 and is an update of the 2010 IMD.

The House of Commons Library has very usefully recast the 2015 IMD data for LSOAS into data for each of the 533 parliamentary constituencies in England. Click here for the detailed Constituency data table and an explanatory note Deprivation in English constituencies 2015.

The Library data includes much more and especially a comparison with the 2010 data showing improvement or deterioration in each constituency relative to the others. Rank 1 is most deprived, rank 533 is least deprived.

I put here the data for the six Cornwall constituencies

Constituency: 2015 rank/2010 rank

Camborne and Redruth 141/153

St Ives 179/188

St Austell and Newquay 184/214

North Cornwall 197/226

South East Cornwall 242/285

Truro and Falmouth 284/277

Only Truro and Falmouth has improved its relative position in 2015 against 2010.

The data shows that around at least a quarter of the England constituencies have more relative deprivation than the Cornwall ones; more than half are worse than Truro and Falmouth.

Cornwall is various

Of course different parts of a constituency experience different levels of deprivation: the DCLG site provides data for each LSOA which shows the clusters of deprivation inside a constituency. In Cornwall those clusters show ranges from a rank of 414 to 26457 (where 1 is most deprived and 32 844 is least deprived). That range is vast and brings me again to the point I have made often: Cornwall is various; we should focus with effect on those parts of Cornwall where people experience serious deprivation.

ASSAULTING POVERTY OR THE POOR

David Cameron, the prime minister, promises “all-out assault on poverty” in his Tory conference speech 7 October 2015. I welcome that warmly. But wait, look what the experts at the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies and Resolution Foundation say.

The Resolution Foundation issued a press release on 7 October 2015 about its research on the Tory July 2015 budget and the poor: Summer Budget changes will push up to 200,000 working households into poverty. The full Resolution Foundation report is here.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has published research on the net effect of the Tory welfare and tax changes on different income groups. Its report An assessment of the potential compensation provided by the new ‘National Living Wage’ for the personal tax and benefit measures announced for implementation in the current parliament (IFS September 2015) is here. NOTE: Figure 1 on page 4 summarises the net effect of the changes for different income groups.

See too my post Robbing the working poor on the IFS view.

Whose take are we to believe? That of the Tory politician or two independent research organisations?

JARROW AND REDCAR

In October 1936 185 men made a month-long walk from Jarrow to London, the Jarrow Crusade. They were drawing attention to the plight of the town: mass unemployment and consequent poverty and higher-than-average mortality and the responsibility of government to help effectively.

The Jarrow marchers did not persuade the Tory-dominated coalition government to help. The crusade failed: it did not secure government help for Jarrow from the government. The Tory prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, refused to meet any of the marchers.

Yet in an important way the Jarrow march succeeded. Along with the hunger marches, it raised awareness of the lives of the poor and promoted the view that government had an active and creative part to play in people’s wellbeing. In 1945 people voted in an activist Labour government.

I am writing about Jarrow now because October is the month when the march was made (and one of my family was a Jarrow marcher); and the recent events at Redcar steel works are a disturbing echo.

What is government for? To keep people safe and to enable us to live our lives as amply as possible. That means matters like decently paid work, a secure place to live, food, schools and hospitals and libraries and even public lavatories. We can debate exactly how and who should provide the components of civilised life, but I believe the government must either provide them directly or ensure they are provided effectively and step in if others fail. I suppose that is a divide between socialists and Tories, the role and range of the state.

The Jarrow Crusade asked the government to step in when private endeavour failed. It didn’t. In Redcar the government is not unresponsive as at Jarrow; it is helping in a way. It cannot fund a British steel works facing Chinese steel deliberately underpriced and cheap in response to difficulties in the Chinese economy, but has set up an £80 million fund to help the workers retrain and hopefully secure new jobs.

The government may have to do more: there appears to be a question of the steel company and business rates that affects the income of the local council and thus its capacity to provide services: see here and here.

Capitalism has difficulties as great as socialism has. Keen practices by some enterprises, while bringing down the cost for industry and consumers and sharpening the talents of challenged management and producers, can undermine lives by putting people out of work. There is a role for governments: they need skilfully to encourage innovation, efficiency, and cost reductions but ensure workers do not suffer loss of work and income, a loss felt by their families and local enterprises where workers spend their money, a loss to the national economy. Governments need to cooperate to these ends.

What is government for? I believe we are not helpless onlookers at this disaster. Redcar isn’t Jarrow…

ROBBING THE WORKING POOR

Faced with low pay and employers unwilling or unable to pay a real living wage, the Labour government introduced tax credits, a means of topping up unlivable low pay with taxpayers’ money. A civilised and sensible approach, it seriously helps very many people, who also receive other financial benefits such as help with rent.

The Tory government now wishes to move away from state subsidy for low pay and dependency on benefits. It considers employers should pay their workers decent wages, hence Osborne’s compulsory “national living wage” of £7.20 an hour from next April for workers aged twenty five and over, and this, with other measures, the Tories say enables a reduction in tax credits to the low paid. The current real living wage is £7.85 an hour outside London and that rate applies to workers aged twenty one and over.

I heartily agree that all workers should be paid at least a real living wage: workers should have the proper recognition of their labour and the simple dignity of earning enough to live decently, even well, and provide good security and stability for their families. A proportionate reduction in state subsidy to low pay should then follow. The question is: have the Tories got the arithmetic right, does their simultaneous give-this-take-away-that of their July 29015 budget add up? The independent expert Institute for fiscal studies (IFS) says it doesn’t and that around 3 million low paid families will overall lose as much as £1300 a year from the Tory changes. I gather individuals will learn of their quantified losses in December, the month of Christmas. The IFS damagingly describes the budget as “regressive”.

Sensible proposals have been suggested, by Frank Field among others, to mitigate the presumably unintended losses but David Cameron has insisted there will be no loss of income for the poor and his government will not change anything in their plans.

Well, that confirms the Conservatives as the stupid party – and the nasty party. I think the stupidity will tell against them most.

The risks for the government are so big that I believe there will be mitigating changes. It will be interesting to see how Cameron explains that.

And

On 6 October in a platform speech at the Tory party conference Boris Johnson, mayor of London, and known to fret genuinely about those 3 million losing families, said of the government welfare changes: “we must ensure…we protect the hardest working and lowest paid: the retail staff, the cleaners…”

TOWARDS FAIR AND JUST PAY IN CORNWALL

Today the minimum wage goes up by 20p to £6.70 an hour for those aged twenty one and over. That is well below the real living wage*, currently £7.85 an hour in Cornwall and elsewhere outside London, but nevertheless a welcome move in a progressive direction. The minimum wage was introduced by Labour in 1999 and has improved life for very many low paid workers. Next month a new real living wage rate will be announced.

Today’s rise comes shortly after Morrisons, the supermarket, announced it was to pay its workers a minimum of £8.20 an hour from March 2016, though with some loss of pay perks. Lidl had announced a rise to £8.20 an hour from this month.

This spring Cornwall Council began paying the living wage to its direct employees. Slowly, very slowly, we are becoming a real living wage county. I’ve noted the heroes in other posts and here note and praise Mother Ivey’s Bay and St Merryn holiday parks as living wage employers.

What is happening is that pioneers in various sectors – retail supermarkets, holiday businesses, care homes , local government, banks, insurance – are showing that paying decent wages is possible across the economy. There are still employers to persuade; there are still on-board companies with off-board contractors.

Oh, that asterisk * on the first line. By living wage I mean that determined after research by the Centre for research in social policy (CRSP) at Loughborough University and Living Wage Foundation, the real living wage. Not George Osborne’s “national living wage” which is currently less, will apply only to those aged twenty five and over, and is misleadingly named.

NEW PARENTS IN CORNWALL 2014

The Office for national statistics (ONS) has published the data for live births for 2014 for each local authority in the UK.

The data for Cornwall is in fact for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly unitary authorities combined; the very small numbers of mothers and children in the Scillies raise questions of confidentiality. The ONS data is in Table 1 here.

There were 5447 live births in Cornwall/Scillies in 2014. Never mind the bald figures: an analysis by ONS shows a significant change in our relationships.

More than half of all the live births in 2014 were to people neither married nor in a civil partnership; however, 51 percent of all the births were joint registrations by people neither married nor in a civil partnership. These are the figures:

(a) Total live births 5447

(b) Live births within marriage/civil partnership 2414, 44 percent

(c) Live births outside marriage/civil partnership 3033, 56 percent

Of the 3033 in (c), 2360 were joint registrations from the same address; 406 were joint registrations from different addresses; and only 267 were sole registrations.

What we see is people in committed relationships and neither married nor in a civil partnership; we see strong commitment happens outside a formalised, ceremonised relationship. It is bracing that only 267 live births outside marriage or civil relationship were registered by solely the mother.