5 Feb

Power to the people!

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

Labour have never really understood how to empower people and their community groups, although they do love to talk about it. Take this recent article by Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, where they say “the right kind of state action is not a drain on individual empowerment; it can enhance it”.

Great, so why have they been party to a state that has taken ever more power away from people, replacing citizenship with shallow consumer rights? How do you get beyond slogans and soundbites to genuinely empower local people?

In a recent blog entry I wrote about the money side of the equation – how you can enable local people to directly invest in projects that will improve their neighbourhood, a topic Matt Sellwood has some interesting thoughts on. You could also use tools like participatory budgeting, made fun by the unsurpassably brilliant The People Speak, or really make the most of the Sustainable Communities Act. But what about the people themselves?

Labour have too often confused the voluntary sector with community groups. A lot of people depend on and benefit from the work of the voluntary sector – just look at the fantastic Peckham Voluntary Sector Forum, for example!

But what about those of us who would just like to be a little more involved in our neighbourhood, who would like to start a group to grow some food, or a knitting club, or a campaign to improve some cycle lanes? For us, the voluntary sector is too unweildy, slow and offputting. Who has the time to establish a constituted organisation to apply for funding and hire a venue for a public meeting? Who has all the right local contacts to hand?

Local hero Eileen Conn mentioned the idea of Community Development Officers to me recently. On reflection I think she’s spot on. You need people who can be visible at a very local level, running training events on basic organising skills, helping local people to lead rather than trying to lead them, signposting sources of support, getting them to build co-operative relationships, encouraging them to take risks, and linking them up with councillors who will make the council system work for them (as opposed to just “representing” them). London Citizens do this quite brilliantly with existing schools and religious groups.

The final piece of the puzzle is a community-run community centre. Eh? Well, a place that’s bit more like Access Space, the Rising Sun Arts Centre and CRISP than your typical council-run building with their rules, regulations and detached staff. Mix a settlement up with freecycle to provide rooms, computers & photocopiers and you’re half way there.

Real life, real local campaigns and clubs, are far more fluid than council bureaucracies. Rather than offering us false consumer choices in public services, whilst introducing timid reforms to open those bureaucracies up a little to citizens, why not do it the other way around? Give local people the skills and financial tools to make a difference their own way.

30 Jan

Telling the Green story on housing

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

How can we tell a simple, persuasive story about Green housing policy? Tom Hill sent me this challenging article about the US Democrats’ recent failure to turn solid facts into folksy stories, reminiscent of George Lakoff’s past work on their failure to frame issues correctly (read this and this).

I’ve been doing some work recently on the Green story about the recession, and what the Mayor of London should do in response. A big part of this is the Green story on housing, since the housing bubble is both a structural weakness in our economy and a negative consequence for the majority of people for whom it is far too expensive. Jenny Jones has recently published a great report explaining the downside of the story, and we’re working together on a follow-up describing a range of rather complex solutions.

So how can we tell our positive story on housing in a way that people can connect with, that will win their emotional sympathy without triggering justified intellectual cynicism? The cynicism should be dealt with by our detailed report, but here’s a first and rather long attempt at the story:

We all want a home we can afford, that we can make our own, and if possible to build up a stake in it for our retirement – a fair approach to housing.

The Labour government has tried to solve this by providing subsidies to big business builders, who offer slightly cheaper private housing that just becomes completely unaffordable later on. Everyone who struggles to afford this can get state handouts – housing benefit or social housing – paid for by the profits of big business, making us all dependent on their success.

The Green Party would hand ownership and control of our land and homes to communities. Instead of expensive short-term subsidies, we would support pensions and other long-term investments into housing that is owned and run by local communities. You could build up a financial stake in your home, and you would pass it on to the next generation at a permanently affordable price.

Does that make sense? I’d love to read any comments and thoughts.

29 Jan

Eco taxes going down in the UK!

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

I came across a shocking statistic today: environmental taxes are decreasing in the UK!

The total revenue has risen slower than inflation between 1999 and 2008; from around £32.6bn in 1999 to £38.5bn in 2008. If it had grown with inflation over that period it would have stood at £41.4bn in 2008.

As a percentage of GDP over that period it fell from 3.5% to 2.7%. As a percentage of the total taxes and social contributions in the UK, it has also fallen behind. In 99 it peaked at 9.7% of total tax revenue, then fell to 7.2% in 2008.

Environmental taxes made up a lower share of our economy and tax revenue than at any time since 1993, when the ONS records begin. So much for shifting the tax burden from income to environmental damage!

20 Jan

The cost of housing doubles in London

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , .

Halifax have published a great little fact sheet on some key housing trends over the last 50 years. The most dramatic is that the cost of buying a home has risen 273% above incomes over that period, with the sharpest rise during the 2000s when they rose by 63%.

This is the increasing cost of housing adjusted for increases in income; or adjusting for inflation to state rises in real terms, for economists. Imagine if food or heating bills rose that quickly compared to incomes!

Whilst the property-owning journalists hail this rise in house prices, more and more people are squeezed out of the market, or forced to sacrifice huge chunks of their salary to repay mortgages.

Jenny Jones published a report on the housing crisis in London recently. She shows that over the past decade the cost of buying a home doubled in London, well above the national rise of 63%. This makes the misleading boasts of our Tory Mayor – as he fails to even meet his own modest housing targets – all the more sickening.

Unless we double the number of homes we build, which is pretty unlikely, or we make a radical shift away from home ownership, this trend is set to continue for another decade. But our Labour government and this Tory Mayor are both  committed to mostly building homes we have to buy, with a very small minority available for affordable rent, almost no land being held by communities to keep it affordable, and pretty much no support for alternative models like co-operatives.

11 Jan

Might eco-nagging encourage more shopping?

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

Here’s another reason not to try and terrify people out of conspicuous consumption, aside from the basic flaws in the “eco angel” approach and recent evidence that moralising is putting people off ethical consumerism.

Some interesting research by Swiss psychologists found that warnings about death has the ironic effect of making some smokers want to smoke even more! The reason? They derive a self-esteem boost from smoking; warnings about death sent these smokers to a trusty source of self esteem to overcome that downhearted feeling – death-bringing cigarettes!

So next time you tell someone that buying too much crap might cause planetary collapse, it’s fairly likely that your nasty nagging well send them running for a standard Western self-esteem boost: shopping.

7 Jan

Snow in The Gardens

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

Oooh I couldn’t resist, how we English love our slight dusting of snow!

7 Jan

Can the community regenerate Peckham?

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

Can a local community pay for its own regeneration instead of relying on developers with tall blocks of flats and massive government grants? I got thinking about this again after reading a jargon-fuelled paper on urban rights and renewal sent my way by local hero Eileen Conn. The author writes about communities owning, or controlling, their urban environment, and being able to determine how to spend “surplus value” (Marxist terminology for capital that rich people and governments accumulate off our backs). How could local people in Peckham, for example, decide how money is spent in the area?

Here are two quick steps that are decidely practical compared to the ivory tower academic paper.

First, give people more control over the property and land in Peckham. At the moment you either buy a home and the land it sits on, or you rent from a landlord, or you rent from the council/a housing association. So you’re either wealthy, or at the mercy of somebody over whom you have little control. If all new housing in Peckham was built by mutual housing associations – where the association builds the house on a corporate loan, and as a member you pay a monthly amount to buy equity in the association so it can service the loan – we’d have the choice of gradually building up equity (like owning a house) in an affordable way (like living in council housing) and have the advantage of having a direct voice in how the co-op runs the homes. To seal the deal, the co-op could own the land through a community land trust, making it permanently affordable.

Second, enable people to invest their savings in local improvement schemes rather than abstract bank accounts. Use Southwark Credit Union and community finance co-ops like the Wessex Community Assets to directly invest local people’s money in good schemes, like helping shop keepers do up their shop fronts, investing in new mutual housing schemes, or helping Peckham Power bring renewables to our buildings.

We’ve plenty of money in Peckham. Not the mega-bucks that big developers could bring, or major government regeneration schemes shower on consultants. But enough to revitalise the local area, if we take more control over our local area.

4 Jan

A dangerous and remarkable delusion

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized.

Cometh the General Election this year, we can expect most political parties to keep harping on about the national debt crisis. The way the media and politicians collude, you’d think we’re about to become a third world country, cutting services left, right and centre to appease the IMF.

Is it that bad? I’ve been reading a few really interesting papers that show the problem is massively exaggerated.

First, how big is government debt? In a fairly readable report, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research calculates that it will increase to 93% of GDP by 2015. This, as I wrote earlier, is a good deal lower than in the US, Japan, Germany and Italy.

The main problem with government debt is that you have to service it, which means both paying the interest and trying to reduce it when it’s too high. This means that, short of incredible “efficiencies”, we have to cut public expenditure on useful things like schools and nurses or increase taxes to balance the books. But as the NIESR further point out, this is only really a problem if the debt is unusually high (which it isn’t) and if the interest rate is greater than the rate of economic growth (which it is unlikely to be in the medium term). So economic growth will provide the extra taxation which means we can probably afford to pay off our historically moderate debts without too much pain.

The other problem to receive a lot of media attention is the claim that we might lose our credit rating. The NIESR give this short shrift and points out that “historically, since the country has managed levels of debt higher than those in prospect, it is hard to see why the market for UK debt should be affected by rating agencies’ views”.

The NIESR also explain a third problem that you don’t read a lot about. Put simply, people invest their savings in three ways: productive capital (like shares in a company perhaps via an ISA); fixed assets (like a house, or technically the land); and government debt. Only productive capital fuels useful economic growth. If we have a much higher national debt then proportionally more savings will be invested in that government debt, taking it away from useful productive capital investments. This means you get a short-term boost from the spending that causes the rise in debts, but future generations are lumped with a less healthy economy in the long-term. The NIESR reckon that this effect will reduce the nation’s stock of income-producing assets by about 30% of GDP. Now that is bad!

To the rescue come the Green New Deal group’s second report, The Cuts Won’t Work. They elegantly explain how public expenditure in the right areas will provide a major economic boost, almost covering the cost of the debt incurred. It will also help stimulate areas of our economy that the Government has so far failed to support, which handily are a good long-term prospect, unlike short-term consumption boosts such as car scrappage.

So we learn that our public debt isn’t that massive; servicing it won’t be that hard; it shouldn’t case a credit rating catastrophe; and that a fiscal stimulus could create long-term benefits to offset its potential drag on the economy.

A final word on priorities. While the Conservatives and Labour harp on about public debt, the NIESR point out that there are much larger burdens being heaped on future generations. Housing, something I wrote about recently, is an obvious one. The above-inflation price increases amount to “a powerful integenerational transfer” from the young (who can’t afford it) to the old (who own most of it). The Tory/Labour vision of an economic recovery on the back of rising house prices supported by cuts in public spending is, they suggest, “a dangerous and remarkable delusion”.

22 Dec

God bless you, lucky home owners

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

You don’t often see national newspapers celebrating a drop in house prices, despite the fact that they rose twice as fast as average incomes in the past decade. It’s much like the coverage of any strike that might affect a journalist’s holidays plans.

Most journalists and commentators are wealthy middle class home owners, so they are heavily invested in maintaining this trend of above-income-inflation house price rises. There are two main reasons for this trend: first, house building supply never came close to meeting demand; second, cheap credit created a bubble that massively over-inflated the value of homes.

Here in London, households with incomes up to an incredible £74,000 are soon to become eligible for “affordable housing”, which you can buy up bit by bit. Us paupers on a mere £74k are no longer able to buy a home otherwise.

In the past year this trend has very slightly eased, with falling demand matching a slight recovery of housing building numbers after the recession kicked them off a cliff. That’s Labour’s reaction to the recession – not a Green fiscal stimulus, but at least not cuts followed by a depression. Still, this slight reversal doesn’t please Geoffrey Dicks, chief economist of Novus Capital Markets, who warned in The Times that recent trends are “exacerbating an emerging supply-demand imbalance”. Cripes!

But just before you got too upset, Dicks evokes Tiny Tim to cheer on the possible return of above-income-inflation house price rises. God bless us, every one! Perhaps after being adopted by Scrooge, Tim would have reason to cheer on the rise of grossly unfair home ownership.

17 Dec

TaxPayers Alliance accidentally show we need more eco-taxes

Posted by Tom Chance in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

If you read beyond the squeals of indignation from the latest TaxPayers Alliance “research” you find an interesting conclusion. The taxes we pay on measures aimed principally at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are much lower than the cost of those emissions to the economy. So we should be putting more tax on carbon dioxide, and perhaps less on good stuff like work!

The TPA, better known for their corporate tax avoidance and personal tax evasion than robust research, have really gone to town on environmental taxation. So here are two fatal flaws and an interesting conclusion for those worried by the headlines.

First, they pit these taxes against the cost of carbon dioxide emissions. But by their own, buried and obfuscated admission, these taxes do a lot more than just reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Fuel and vehicle excise duty, which make up the bulk of the taxes, also address congestion, air pollution, service maintenance and help to suppress the level of driving generally. Landfill tax targets the waste of good land being used up for rubbish, and forces councils to get a move on with decent recycling facilities for residents.

The real cost of the taxes that specifically target carbon dioxide emissions is much smaller than they suggest.

Second, they chose a completely misleading figure to estimate the cost of the carbon dioxide emissions. They use an estimate which takes the cost to society of the emissions, then deducts the immediate benefits. They pretend this low figure is representing the gross costs. If you look at the costs based on the Government’s shadow price for carbon, the costs come out – shocker – three and a half times higher.

This real cost of the emissions is actually higher than the real cost of the taxes that directly address those emissions. Nice one, TPA.

The other interesting nugget is in their analysis of who these taxes affect. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with plenty of public investment in public transport, energy efficiency programmes and good recycling facilities, the cost of these taxes is far lower for you. So the best thing is to, er, live in a green area! Nice one, TPA.

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