15 minute cities: filling out the neighbourhood

This week I noticed that the tin foil hat brigade has reached Liverpool. The city council was all set to have a planning meeting that some internet experts deemed was about bringing the all-powerful World Economic Forum’s attack on their freedom – the 15 minute city – to their doorstep. Two dozen very angry scousers brought their metaphorical pitchforks and torches to city hall, got so threatening that councillors had to leave by a secret entrance. I’ve been following politics since 1981, the discourse around the 15 minute city makes the least sense out of anything I’ve borne witness to. I don’t understand how people could find the idea of essential public services and commercial amenities within walking distance of their house to be problematic, and I fail to see how such a simple concept can be misunderstood.
I know that there is a permanent angry brigade out there, I’m interested in Liverpool and from time to time I dip into the Liverpool Echo’s website. Now scousers are known for being warm and friendly and having a sharp wit. The ones who leave comments on the Echo website aren’t though. They’re as angry, vengeful, petty and alienated as Terry23423432 or SixKindsofDave who post vitriolic comments on my local newspaper websites here down South. So the 15 minute city headbangers mean there is far more heat than light in the discourse, and they’ve got it all spectacularly twisted. Politics should never become a shouting match, where those who shout the loudest and the longest get their way. There’s a danger with a number of urban planning issues that’s what we’re heading for – LTNs, cycle lanes, clean air zones, 15 minute cities tend to be opposed by the same people who are generally part of the same demographic. They are a small, but vocal minority and there’s a danger too much weight is given to their opinions which, quite frankly stand in the way of progress when it comes to quality of life.

Downtown Houston – the Long Distance City. Extreme car dependency creates barriers of separation and the dislocation of essential services, is this a deliberate choice we want to make for the UK going forward?

What’s the opposite of the 15 minute city? The long distance city. We don’t have multiple examples of this in the UK, there are many in the car-dependent US, but if planning goes spectacularly wrong that’s what you end up with. Possibly the closest we’ve come are the amenity-free deserts on the edge of Glasgow where the ice cream wars took place. Every commercial or public service transaction requires a car journey or long bus ride. The long distance city is inherently sexist, anti-child, and ablest. It’s sexist because a far greater number of adult women don’t have a driving licence and depend on active travel/public transport to get about – walkable journeys are a priority for them in a way alpha males can’t relate to. While the gap is closing, we can see from the chart that men have always been more likely to drive, and as pass rates are largely static we’ll never reach a 100% pass rate, or 100% car ownership rate. Indeed the most recent stats show car ownership is declining amongst the young.

The anti-15 minute city movement is dominated by men, and it’s become another urban realm issue where the voices of women and children have been largely silent, or silenced

Long distance cities are obviously anti-child because they are most likely to be the victim of a road traffic accident and children can’t drive themselves. High traffic, dangerous traffic affects child health and their freedom to play in their neighbourhood – a freedom that was often enjoyed by the boomer generation who are so militantly pro-car now. Children, incidentally, don’t take part in LTN consultations, but they are the most adversely affected by rat-running through traffic in residential areas.
Long distance cities are also ablest as those who are mobility restricted would prefer to travel the shortest distance to do anything and if somewhere isn’t walkable, it’s probably not wheelchair or mobility scooter friendly either.
So the need for neighbourhoods to be walkable with a wide range of essential services on the doorstep has always been there. However the 15 minute city is a relatively new concept – what’s going on? It’s my contention that the 15 minute city concept is a response to the hollowing out of lots of residential areas, leaving them bereft of many essential services. In the past we’ve understood that towns and cities grow organically and generally respond to peoples’ needs in logical and obvious ways. A few recent trends have mitigated against that, I believe they are:

• The rise of edge-of-town big box retail, taking trade away from independent shops in suburbs
• The rise of e-commerce, going further and further up the value chain, combined with supermarket home delivery
• The cut backs and site consolidation of public services, meaning there are fewer primary schools, fire stations, police stations, post offices, dentist and doctors surgeries
  

The digitisation of services and some physical product mean certain high street staples are gone, never to return – we’re unlikely to see the revival of the video rental store any time soon. The hollowing out of physical retail has been pretty dramatic – in the past it would be perfectly normal to go into a town centre to make a big ticket purchase – take a good look at furniture or electrical goods. Now it’s surprisingly difficult to go to a physical store and talk over the options of buying a new dishwasher with a salesperson face to face – we trust the internet so much it’s now click and deliver – or don’t bother. In the past we’ve allowed shopping centres to grow and evolve naturally. Should there be political intervention to ensure that your high street has a Thai restaurant, a pharmacy and a bakery, but excludes a national supermarket chain? The precise composition of your local shopping centre matters, when out canvassing in London people on doorsteps pro-actively bring it up – Blackheath High Street – for example, is now regarded as a tourist trap by locals with too many coffee shops and not enough banks. In my local shopping centre there is a row that includes a tanning salon, a hairdressers and a nail bar, the units used to house a bookshop, a toy shop and a greengrocers. Where there are good occupancy rates that often disguises a lack of essential services. That’s become a political issue, which is why it requires political intervention to restore services down to a neighbourhood level where laissez-faire capitalism has allowed a suburban retail hollowing out process to take place over the last 40 years.

Bluewater Shopping Centre – in a disused chalk pit next to the Dartford crossings. An appropriate use of brownfield land, but has contributed to the hollowing out of surrounding towns

In the public services realm the notion of a small facility for ANYTHING is now deemed untenable. In my local area small police stations and primary schools in the countryside have been closed, I’m sure that’s typical of villages, small towns and the smallest facilities in suburbs. This is why the Welsh Liberal Democrats oppose all rural school closures. This is based on the quite reasonable standpoint that public sector cutbacks have happened across villages and towns in the last 40 years, they’ve already gone too far and we’re drawing a line in the sand.
So what does the 15 minute city mean for public services? In our modern data driven world it means that councillors and officers in a city like Liverpool have perfect knowledge of the areas that lack a nursery, a community centre, a doctors or dentists, a recreation ground and try to plug the gaps accordingly. If that means a return to more smaller facilities, that are easier to access, surely that’s a positive thing. You have to be pretty paranoid to think building a play park on the edge of a suburban field because there are no other parks for three miles is part of a Truman Show-style plot to hem you in.

The laissez-faire approach to town centre commercial property unfortunately has a beggar-my-neighbour outcome. In the Thames Gateway two of the UK’s biggest shopping malls exist – Lakeside and Bluewater. Both malls have led to the decline of the towns next to them. A visit to Dartford or Gravesend is depressing – lots of empty units and the decline is pretty much constant, Gravesend loses a long-serving shop or restaurant I’ve used for years every few months. The ship chandlers that was there since the 17th century, the small independent electrical retailer staffed by people with brains the size of a planet, the analogue toy store, the cafe overlooking the statue of Pocahontas – all gone.

J & R Starbuck opened in 1634, it survived until a few years ago, when it fell victim to the wider malaise surrounding retail in Gravesend town centre

I’m sure Cheshire Oaks, Bicester Village and Meadowhall in Sheffield are doing roughly the same to their surrounding areas. Dartford actually had the 2nd biggest population increase of anywhere in the country – 20% in the last decade – according to the 2021 census. Dartford has a growing population and a middle class with purchasing power but that’s not reflected in Dartford town centre. If a town with exceptional population growth looks like it’s in the doldrums that shows how the strength of out-of-town retail outweighs everything. This is perhaps not apparent to those who don’t have a US-style mall in a giant chalk pit near where they live. My personal impression is that Bluewater opened in 1999, the tone is set, and the local towns don’t really have an answer even if there’s a healthy level of housebuilding thanks to HS1 and the proximity of London. You either accept this long-term structural decline, which is not arrested by population growth, or economic growth (we had some of that just after Bluewater opened, I distinctly remember it), or town planners have to become a lot more interventionist to create a better mix of retail and public services.

Fleet Street in London – famous for housing national newspapers but has always been a bustling hive of pubs, restaurants and shops serving office workers and tourists alike

I’m lucky, I live in a village with a 50-unit shopping centre, primary school, doctors, dentists and village hall five minutes walk from my house. I don’t think it’s selfish or unreasonable to want that for others too, and I know for a fact that more and more of parts of suburban Britain lack the essential services people need. The 15 minute city is a codified concept for something that always existed and people enjoyed unconsciously, let’s return suburbia to normality.

For more detail on the 15 minute city drama in Liverpool please take a look at Richard Kemp’s blog (and follow his work more generally)

We must destroy the 15-minute city myths

Just Stop Oil: Why do they exist?

Not a day goes past without a Just Stop Oil protest, either at a major sporting event or a random location designed to cause maximum inconvenience. Because JSO is an abrasive, uncompromising organisation its existence generates more heat than light in any discourse. I want to step back from the shouting to examine JSO, and David Byrne-style ask, “How did we get here?” In the last five years JSO is one of three new direct action groups focused on the environment using shock tactics familiar to radical students in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, JSO is part of a new environmental protest culture.

Boy did we drill
JSO, XR and IB are not universally popular, in fact I know so pretty mild-mannered people who’ve had their cages REALLY rattled by these new groups. Everything happens for a reason, however, and there are many reasons why these groups have been founded. If I cast my mind back to the 1980s, as a boy I was taught about the Greenhouse Effect and man-made climate change – we’d made quantum leaps in our understanding of climate science at the time. I was also taught about the concept of peak oil – reeling from the oil shock of 1973, the developed world had a lot of anxiety about the extent of oil supplies and believed peak oil was going to be reached around 2000, thereafter oil would become increasingly scarce. Pretty much all of the predictions about climate change made in the 1980s have come to pass, the predictions about peak oil, on the other hand, have been way off. Back then were keen on coal, apparently there was 200+ years worth of coal left under Britain, but we’d have to get used to diminishing oil supplies pretty soon. What actually happened? Consumption of oil, gas and coal globally rose throughout the ‘80s, ’90’s, ‘00s and 2010s. It’s possible we’ve just reached peak coal, consumption has levelled off and hinted at a decline, there’s been little discernible process with oil and gas. It turns out the world had far more oil and gas than was estimated in the 1970s.

Fossil fuel consumption: only coal shows signs of even levelling off, all of these have to decline fast

Saudi Arabia miraculously declared their known oil reserves to increase by exactly the same amount as they’d extracted for many years. A friend of mine worked at the Bahrain Grand Prix one year, rubbed shoulders with many ex-pat oil industry workers, one said to him that Saudi has hundreds of years of oil left but it won’t let on. If it did the price would crash. States in the Middle East are doing all they can to keep the status quo going – oil dependency and a price that works for them. Their desperation is understandable, most places reliant on extractive industries rarely have a second act – just witness the fishing ports in Canada still crying out for the Grand Banks to be reopened for Cod fishing, 31 years after they closed, despite the fact that stocks are still less than 10% of historical levels.

Canada is still holding out for an unrealistic revival in Cod stocks, this happens with extractive industries everywhere

On a precipice
So we’re consuming fossil fuels at a level not foreseen 40 years ago, this is due to globalisation and reserves being far greater than first thought. Our consumption will have to fall off a cliff in all three categories for us to avoid going over the 1.5ºC threshold and trigger runaway global warming. Unless an unforeseen method of carbon sequestration comes along that can lock in gigatonnes in a short space of time, our days of mass carbon consumption are over. Past performance suggests that our progress towards Net Zero, and moving towards a post-Carbon world isn’t happening nearly fast enough. Time is running out, the new environmental organisations reflect the anger, fear and urgency that many committed environmentalists feel – they haven’t been listened to, policies move in the right direction but are half-hearted. Too many people talk of being an environmentalist in aspirational terms but own an SUV and tarmac over their front garden.

What of the Green Establishment?
That we have new groups, and they are militant, says a lot about the green lobby establishment. I believe groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are caught between two stools. On the one hand they are not new and fresh with ground breaking ideas, on the other hand they’re not using their familiarity and reputation for being responsible to work with major landowners. The green establishment should have built up long term relationships with Britain’s major landowners – the Churches, the MoD, the National Trust, the Crown Estate, the RSPB etc to improve habitats on large tracts of land. If they had, we wouldn’t be the most nature depleted country in the world. This week sees an interesting development – Britain’s largest corporate landowner United Utilities embarking on the phase out of grouse shooting on its land, hopefully this land will be rewilded and cleared of lead shot. Notice no mention of any establishment environmental bodies in its decision.

Good news on habitat restoration, but was the Green establishment involved at all?

If Greenpeace and FoE were really effective lobby organisations we’d have seen 15 – 20 announcements by major landowners like United Utilities over the last few years. The green establishment has had a tendency to document and articulate the facts and figures surrounding climate change, biodiversity decline and habitat loss without working on projects to counteract any of it. What are ordinary people supposed to do if they’re not offered any solutions? I received a leaflet from a local wildlife trust that mentioned the decline of a few species of wildlife in Kent. It said nothing about buying land or starting any breeding programmes, or any achievements in habitat restoration in the past. Perhaps I’d have donated if they had a track record or a well-thought out plan, but they didn’t.
The messaging and the methods of the green lobby establishment weren’t nearly good enough, it created a vacuum and the founders of XR, JSO and IB have stepped into that vacuum.

How do we stop Oil?
Now comes the life affirming bit – transforming our habits to make fossil fuels peripheral to our lives will take some effort but technology exists to substitute just about every aspect fossil fuel use. All forms of ground transport can be electrified – cars, vans, buses, motorbikes, trucks, earth working machines. We’re not talking prototypes, fully working models exist for everything. Battery technology is moving fast, the United Bank of Switzerland, those well-known bunny huggers, stated in a technology investment report that the life cycle cost of electric cars had come down so much there was no need to buy a combustion engined car on economic grounds after 2024. Low carbon or no carbon tech is being developed for everything, the UK, for example could go 100% renewable as we could tap into all eight major forms of renewable power – wave, wind, tidal, hydro, biomass, biogas, geothermal and solar. Not every country is as lucky as us, but every inhabited place in the world could use at least one renewable. The renewable world is a far more equitable one, in terms of energy resource, than the hydrocarbon one. Net Zero isn’t just about electricity and transport, however low carbon methods are being developed for a lot of raw materials production – low carbon cement, steel, glass and ceramics. Renewable heat is one of the biggest game changers. The Ukraine – Russia war has been a major catalyst to ending Natural Gas use, we’ll see millions of heat pumps installed across Europe in the next 20 years. Many old houses aren’t suitable for heat pump installation, perhaps district heating systems will come to the fore in heritage areas. Decarbonisation will take a lot of work and lot of investment, but the technology exists, and in many cases it’s cheaper than its fossil fuel equivalent.

Germany has a very sophisticated STEM sector and a comprehensive plan for Net Zero. Germany is way ahead of the UK in many respects – more trees, more recycling, more active travel . . .

The counter narrative
This week we’ve seen a surprise result in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by election. Labour was expected to win this, but the Conservatives held it by the skin of their teeth. It’s been interpreted as a big win for the anti-Green movement, a middle-fingered salute to the ULEZ roll out across outer London. For the right wing press this is part of a wider anti-Green agenda. For years they were against renewables, now they’re anti-EV, anti LTNs, anti active travel (remember big Auto advertises more in newspapers than big Shoe) and anti clean air measures. Never mind that IB is trying to save you money, never mind that JSO is trying to save your lungs and never mind that XR is trying to save the planet. The freedom of the Sun, the Times, the Mail and the Telegraph is to drive where you damn well want, park where you damn well want and concrete over everything, even on a flood plain. The propaganda of the newspapers must, to an extent be working. The fact is that upon implementation only 10% of cars and vans would be liable for the ULEZ charge and that figure would drop away to near zero within five years with normal replacement rates. Someone vox popped in Uxbridge said, “All my friends drive and all of them were going to be hit by the ULEZ charge,” he either has an exceptional social circle or he’s talking rubbish. Where are the mainstream politicians taking a lead and making the case for the ULEZ, correcting and clarifying all the misinformation? Again there’s a vacuum, the Conservatives exploited it as an issue even though it’s their policy and Labour have suddenly become very divided on it. This timidity in the face of a very determined right wing media smear campaign is why JSO, XR and IB exist, you can’t rely on the establishment Greens and you can’t rely on mainstream politicians to gain enough attention and stand strong at a point of reckoning.

Just Stop Oil at Wimbledon – these peaceful but disruptive protests will continue ad nauseam until more meaningful progress is made on fossil fuel dependency

What do I make of the ULEZ? I went to school in Dartford, a school friend suffered from chronic Asthma and Eczema all throughout school. I mentioned this to my best friend’s mum, who was a school nurse, and said my friend lived in Greenhithe, right on the river. She replied, “Oh I’m not surprised, all the pollution blowing out of London down the Thames estuary causes Asthma and Eczema in places like that.” The anti-ULEZ agenda played on class connotations, with people lining up to defend the working class who apparently couldn’t afford a 13-year old third hand car that would be ULEZ complaint. In my experience distinctly working class places like Thurrock, Tilbury, Pitsea, Benfleet, Dartford, Gravesend, Erith and Slade Green have been dogged by London’s pollution blowing over them for decades, with very little concern shown for their welfare. Turn ULEZ into a class issue of you want – you’ll have me and my friends in the Thames Gateway to answer to. I’m happy to make the case for all the clean tech, and pro-clean air policies, I’m aware of the right-wing counter narrative. I also know that there’s only a handful of voices in the mainstream media supporting the green agenda – Chris Packham, George Monbiot, Joanna Lumley. Even as I type this blog #ClimateScam is trending as a hashtag on twitter – measurable, provable scientific fact that is consistent with the predictions made in the last 50 years is apparently forever up for debate. That’s not good enough, until we make more progress on fossil fuel use and the green voice is louder within the cultural mainstream JSO will continue to do it in the road.

Star Spangled Tories: the 2024 election strategy

Do you remember anything special about November 26, 2021? Me neither, but it could turn out to be a momentous date in British politics. It was the day that the Conservatives lost their lead to Labour according to aggregate polling data on the Politico website. Labour is 20 points ahead today and has led in the polls for 19 months now. It’s my belief that the next election will take place some time between June and October next year, Rishi Sunak is holding out for a remarkable reversal in fortunes but won’t call an election in the Winter because Tory activists hated campaigning in the cold, wind and rain last time. If I’m right, the next election is 11 – 15 months away, so the Government has been behind in the polls for a longer period than they have left.
It’s highly likely that the Conservatives will lose the next election, judging by the lack of campaigning activity in the Local Elections and next week’s by elections a lot of Conservative members have given up and are resigned to their fate. What of those that are still left and flying the Blue flag? A few things are noticeable in terms of the current narrative – we’re seeing an unending stream of diversionary tactics to distract people away from the Government’s record because it’s so bad, and there’s an increasingly American feel to the party’s customs and habits.

Deflection strategy – doomed to failure
When do you think the UK took a step down the road to identity politics? Northern Ireland has always been wrapped up in identity politics, but mainland Britain took that step in 2014 with UKIP’s breakthrough in the European elections and the Scottish referendum. All of a sudden both Scotland and England were awash with nationalism. Once identity politics takes hold real world every day matters such as public services, economic performance and quality of life issues matter a whole lot less. That’s great for dysfunctional mediocre governments such as those led by May, Johnson, Truss or Sunak. The challenge for the opposition is to snap the electorate out of identity politics and create a different narrative altogether – that’s difficult as in most cases when identity politics starts, it’s very difficult to shift. It’s entirely possible, however, that we’re seeing the death throes of it, as the real world outcomes are so profoundly bad they outweigh the psychologically satisfying elements of it.
What’s the charge sheet against this government? There are so many failures it’s difficult to know where to start – anti-depressant use up by 80% in 10 years since 2011, 7 million people on NHS waiting lists, NHS dentistry broken people are carrying out backstreet tooth extractions with tools from Homebase, a massive public sector building repairs backlog – 1 in 3 school buildings deemed unsafe, the lowest payments from the Welfare State since 1948 leaving 11 million in food insecurity. The economic record is miserable, since 2010 we’ve had the longest wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, it’s possible this full parliamentary term might see 1%, possibly 1.5% GDP growth. That would be the worst five year peacetime record since before the Industrial Revolution, back to the early 18th century when high society men were judged on the quality of their periwig and the machinations of Charles II were still a painful memory.

John Somers was leader of the Whig Party in the 1700s, the last time economic growth was this bad

The reasons to stick with the Conservatives are slowly being plucked off the daisy – I live in a very safe Conservative seat, loyal Tories are ubiquitous. I know that during the Coalition years and in the elections after that people were very pleased with low inflation, low interest rates, freezes in Council Tax, freezes in fuel duty and rising house prices. Only the freeze in fuel duty remains. The low taxes, however, matter a whole lot less as my neighbours are now hot and bothered about food, utility and property cost inflation.
Things could be about to get a whole lost worse, and in parts of the country where the Tories have the most to lose – as you can see from the map below it’s London and the Home Counties that are most exposed to mortgage rate, and by extension rent rises. The slow drip, drip, drip of people being hit by a mortgage rate hike could lead to massive protest votes across the South, leading to a transaction of seats of the same magnitude or greater than we saw in the Red Wall in the last election.

The Blue Wall will be hit particularly hard by rising Mortgage rates and rents

Hands across the Ocean
What’s been the Conservative response? It’s not to look for effective solutions to real world problems, it’s a set of measures that are gimmicky, punitive, vengeful and increasingly American in nature. The ghost of Thatcherism is being exhumed, not so much in a radical departure from the consensus, more in terms of an unapologetic, cold-hearted, aggressive and abrasive style. Punish people on benefits with more and more sanctions, punish the sick for missing a doctor’s appointment, punish asylum seekers by deporting them to Rwanda, punish peaceful but disruptive protestors by locking them up, punish migrant workers by taxing them to pay public sector wages.
All of these measures appear to be popular with the right wing print media, the problem with that is their power and influence is waning, with circulations dropping by 5 – 10% a year. Britain’s media landscape is changing, it’s aping some of the worst aspects of American culture, but that’s not necessarily good news for the Conservatives. I was reminded the other day that the partisan TV news culture in America hasn’t been there forever – it started under Reagan. It’s created a toxic environment where America is a divided nation, Republicans and Democrats don’t trust or respect each other, they wouldn’t date each other and they don’t want to live next door to each other. This hasn’t always been the case. Intriguingly enough, most US partisan media content is pro-Republican, this hasn’t stopped the Democrats from winning the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, however.
We’re seeing the same trend in the UK with TalkRadio, Times Radio, GBNews and Talk TV. Certain networks, by labelling themselves as entertainment and not news, are bypassing political impartiality laws that apply to broadcasting. If America is anything to go by, the progressive left will agonise and complain endlessly about the content on these stations, but their existence will be more of a hindrance, than a help to the Conservative cause. If blanket exposure and populist gimmicks really worked Trump would still be President or the ‘stop the steal’ narrative would’ve been an absolute zinger in the US mid-terms.

Playing the God card – will work in America, but not in Western Europe

Britain is forever being bombarded and influenced by American culture, so it makes sense that our political culture would adopt some American characteristics. Lately I’ve spotted some new agendas being pushed for the first time that spectacularly don’t make sense. You may have noticed the National Conservative conference in London last month. This event attracted several high-profile MPs, I can only assume they’re comfortable with the Nat Con agenda. This is the latest in a string of events held across the world established by Yoram Hazony, described by David Aaronovitch in his excellent review of the conference as a ‘a far-right Israeli political philosopher and Bible scholar’ in Prospect magazine. The National Conservative conference is the mouthpiece for the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), set up by Hazony and mostly endorsed by Republicans. In the future if you see EBF in the UK media you’ll understand it’s swivel-eyed fringe Conservatism and know not to take it seriously. I say it doesn’t make sense in the UK, why is that? In America the evangelical agenda will always gain some traction, there are more of them, or people vaguely like them. As the map above shows, however, religious belief is far less strong across Europe and that’s not about to change any time soon. Most Conservative voters aren’t even that religious so not merely does the Nat Con event has very little crossover appeal, there’s much hardcore support appeal either.
The other particularly Americanised campaign from within the Conservative movement recently was the short-lived London mayor candidacy of Daniel Korski. That’s now stuck in reverse thanks to sexual harassment revelations, but while it lasted Korski pushed an exclusively pro-car agenda. It’s traditional for Conservative politicians to favour motorists over public transport users or active travel. Korski didn’t even pretend the others existed or mattered, it was all about the car for him. Again what’s striking about this is it would work in America, or indeed in Canada, Australia or New Zealand where travel to work is dominated by the car, but not in London. Here’s a few international comparisons:

One of these English-speaking cities is not like the others. During the pandemic the percentage of car users went up, but that will be a short-lived phenomenon because new roads and new parking spaces are not being built in central London and there’s slack in the public transport system that will be filled up again in the next five years.

Former Trump advisor and propagandist Steve Bannon has been working hard to set up an American-influenced far right political infrastructure across Europe

Korski’s campaign seemed to embody a particular brand of Conservatism in 2023, divisive and insulting to opponents, targeting a small and dwindling base, ignoring the fundamental issues that face the country, drawing on an American playbook while glossing over its own record. There’s been times in the past when US and UK right wing politics have been in sync – the Thatcher/Reagan era with the move to low taxes, deregulation and shinking the state, as dreampt up by William F. Buckley. It was a radical departure at the time, most people didn’t really understand the consequences. Initially people in the UK liked the tax cuts, making a quick buck out of share issues and buying a council house at a huge discount. In the end the financial deregulation came back to haunt us in 2009 and the privatisation of utilities with markets rigged in favour of the producers is hurting the UK economy right now. Let’s see how the next chapter of Americanisation works out, I can’t wait to see the results of the by elections on Friday morning!

David Aaronovitch’s article about the National Conservative event can be found here:

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/61787/david-aaronovitch-national-conservatism-conference-london

Loan to income ratio data has been highlighted by Neal Hudson, he can be found on twitter at: @resi_analyst

Lib Dems Education Policy: could do better?

A few weeks ago Munira Wilson gave one of the most important interviews by a Lib Dem MP since the last General Election. It was for Schools Week magazine, as our Education Spokesperson she iterated the main tenets of Lib Dems education policy, something that hasn’t been expressed in full for several years. Now is a good time to look at our Education policy, I’ll be responding to Wilson’s main points, but there’s a lot more going on – It has to be stressed that the Schools Week interview is set in the context of a general ratcheting up of rhetoric on Education by the party – Richard Foord has been very vocal about securing new school investment for his constituency. Our research dept has put in FoI requests unearthing shocking stats about the state of school buildings. Subsequent to the Schools Week interview Tim Farron introduced two bills to the House of Commons – the Outdoor Education Bill and Higher Education (Duty of Care) Bill. Both of these are aimed at the health and wellbeing of schoolchildren and students.
Combined with our biggest USP for the schools sector – extension of Free School Meals – Tim Farron’s bills have the beginnings of an overarching holistic approach to education. This has to be brought together into one coherent narrative by the party. That hasn’t happened yet, not surprising because we’ve only just got started in terms of setting our stall on education again. For a few years we’ve simply not been that vocal about the Education sector, I believe this is because we’ve been firefighting the Populist agenda ever since 2014. For populists education doesn’t really matter, save the fact that teachers have too many qualifications, are too unionised and are too ‘woke’ for their liking. We need to snap out of a call-and-response dynamic with the populists and move beyond that, the country deserves better.
What do pupils and parents actually want from the education system? Surely it’s that children are taught in a safe and attractive learning environment and the approach to education equips them for the 21st century world as best as it can be anticipated – soft skills (hello English and other modern languages, relevant to the latest tech trends (hello Computer Science) and playing to our strengths as a nation in sectors such as creative industries (hello Arts, Music and Drama).

Liberals have a proud tradition of implementing free school meals, and that continues today

Flagship policy – free school meals
Back in the 1900s the reforming Liberal government introduced free school meals – Education (Provision of Meals) Act 1906 – ever since we’ve been looking to extend the provision of free school meals. Polly Toynbee’s book Unjust Rewards from 2008 explains how this is one of the best ways of addressing poverty and inequality so it is only right and proper that this not merely Lib Dems party policy, but it is a priority for us too. This is what Schools Week says about our policy, “The Lib Dems introduced universal infant free school meals in 2014 and under Nick Clegg championed extending it to all primary school children. Wilson is ‘still committed’ to free school meals for all primary pupils, and secondary pupils whose families are on Universal Credit.
But she has been ‘particularly focused’ on extending them to families of children on Universal Credit – a recommendation from the 2021 National Food Strategy.” So far so good, it’s also stated that the policy is costed at £500m and this would be paid by increasing the surcharge on Banker’s profits. Could we go further in terms of health and wellness? I’ll give you a little insight into the room for improvement: back in the mid-2000s I was Editor of the Building Schools Journal, at the time there was set to be a massive increase in school building activity. New school buildings were aligned to a change in teaching methods and a far greater use of IT. The health and wellness agenda had just got started with the Jamie’s School Dinners campaign. Sport and play were poor relations to changing nutrition, however. Once I called up the DCSF press office and asked them if they had a playground strategy, because pupils spend far more time in the playground than in the sports hall or on the playing field. I was worried about how lunch hour times had been cut since I was at school and I wanted that reversed. I was told, however, that the DCSF didn’t keep stats on the length of the lunch hour and how much children were active during breaks because that ‘didn’t matter’. As a nation we’re the fattest we’ve ever been, and in terms of international comparisons, only Greece has higher rates of obesity in Europe than the UK. Some of the measures introduced in the 2000s stopped the increase in obesity rates, but we can go a lot further. I propose that we should have a policy of increasing the lunch hour back to levels seen in the 1980s – my school lunch hour was 75 minutes. It’s not necessary to increase the school day length and pay more, just get rid of the compulsory morning worship – have a roll call and go straight into lessons – if you’re not willing to find extra money to enable children to burn off their lunch properly.

Art, music and drama teaching have all suffered in recent years, despite being popular subjects and Britain having world-class creative industries

What’s to be done about fee paying schools?
Wilson was quizzed about our policy towards private schools, in the context of a radical Labour policy which might involve removing charitable status and imposing VAT on school fees. I must say I have very low expectations for how the status quo of our school landscape – private, state selective and non selective – might change. The Lib Dem policy is far more modest than Labour’s, but would represent some change – to earn their charitable status, fee paying schools would have to open up and share their facilities and have far closer links with local state schools. Schools Week says, “Wilson wants more ‘partnership working’ between private and state schools – ‘not just a tokenistic “we’re giving away a few bursaries, or doing a bit of charity work”’. For example, she is passionate about broader extracurricular activities and giving pupils at least two hours a week of access to PE. Private schools could be compelled to provide sports facilities to neighbouring state schools as part of their partnership work, she suggests.” While this policy would represent progress in an education landscape that has been ossified for more than 40 years, let’s be brutally honest, the UK is one of the most unequal countries in the industrial world, the education status quo with 7% of pupils at fee paying schools, and only 5% at Grammar Schools is a goldilocks situation for fee paying schools. They face some competition from the state selective sector, but it’s small enough not to disrupt their passage into Oxbridge or business/media/political elites afterwards. The Lib Dems could do a lot more to disrupt this status quo and if the charitable and tax status is not to be challenged there is more around access to fee paying and Grammar schools that needs to be done. We inhabit a country where only 140 pupils on free school meals in England and Wales get straight As at A Level, roughly the same number that get the same grades at Eton every year.

Will the axe fall on Ofsted?
Let me set my stall out about our education inspectorate – I remember growing up with a Thatcher government in the 1980s with ministers regularly talking about changing the law to make it easier to sack bad teachers. They never talked about sacking anyone else in the public sector. Ofsted’s existence is politically-motivated and inherently unfair, all other public services are not subjected to the same level of official scrutiny and publicly disclosed ratings. There are no ‘good’ ‘bad’ or ‘average’ prisons, police forces, fire brigades, army regiments or RAF squadrons. Ofsted does not make schools improve, hectoring and lecturing teachers just creates a recruitment and retention problem, and the retention problem is huge – there are more ex-teachers of working age than there are teachers. I would no more support the continued existence of Ofsted in its current form than I would support the continued existence of chimney sweeps. Outdated, anachronistic and cruel. In the context of a one-tier education catchment area (i.e. no Grammar Schools) variations in exam pass rates can be explained by differences in socio-economic demographics, not variations in teacher quality, especially with a National Curriculum in place. Ofsted cannot compensate for the root causes of these variations so why bother with it? The Lib Dems have rowed back from a policy of abolishing Ofsted, I don’t know why. Wilson is proposing a root and branch reform instead. In Schools Week Wilson says Ofsted is, “far too high stakes. It needs to be much more holistic in its approach…and critically, when schools perhaps do badly… there needs to be a supportive body working alongside them to address those shortcomings.” We haven’t seen much detail about these reforms yet, but they better be phenomenally good, and transformative to the point where Ofsted is unrecognisable.

To have a full health and wellness strategy you need to go out to bat for playgrounds and allocate enough time in the school day for unstructured, unsupervised activity

Righting other wrongs – school buildings and who governs?
While the party has developed a keener eye for deficiencies with school buildings it’s never had a particularly detailed policy. One quick win for improving learning environments would be to abolish Toby Young’s dreadful Free Schools policy (the worst policy implemented across the public sector in my lifetime). Free Schools often converted other buildings into schools (hotels, offices, care homes), this in practice would mean minimal playground space, no green space and a thoroughly inappropriate internal layout involving narrow corridors and spiral staircases, a breeding ground for bullying and violence. While this would be difficult to do instantly, the Party should propose a gradual phase out of Free Schools, to be replaced by Local Authority controlled schools that are actually purpose built – I.e. using the wealth of academic evidence that exists for how to create a genuinely well-functioning learning environment.
I’m pleased to see that Wilson wants to reverse another pointless ideologically-driven policy for schools, taking management powers away from Local Authorities. Handing schools over to Multi Academy Trusts just smacks of change for changes sake and excluding working class graduates that are keen on going into public administration. There would be a pendulum swing back to councils, as Schools Week explains, “As champions of devolution, the Lib Dems have pledged to give local authorities the power to act as strategic education authorities for their areas, including responsibilities for admissions, exclusions and opening new community schools.
Wilson believes the way exclusions and admissions are currently managed has ‘unintended consequences where schools are acting independently of each other’, with the problem acute in London because of falling rolls. Councils should also have ‘more locus’ by “participating in governing bodies and having a seat at the table in terms of how academies are governed”.
I’ve always been uncomfortable about school management being handed over lock, stock and barrel to Academy chains (I’m also against council housing being transferred to Housing Associations or other similar ALMOs), so this is a step in the right direction. I hope this can be augmented by new schools that are in LEA control in the future.

Bold and innovative architects such as dRMM redefined what a British school could look like. Often these new school buildings were linked to huge rises in attainment. Kingsdale School in Southwark enjoyed huge success

In conclusion I give two cheers to our Education policy. It’s on the right lines, but it doesn’t go far enough – this isn’t surprising in the context right wing ideology being implemented in schools and colleges over such a long time. There’s been the imposition of market-based solutions on school services – we’ve seen an orgy of outsourcing and let professional services sink their teeth into the sector. There is so much that is rotten and nonsensical about the way our schools are run. It will take more than one parliamentary term to reverse the most pointless and counterproductive reforms, but a focus on child welfare and a cessation of open warfare towards teachers via Government oversight is a good start.

Housing: what Lib Dems are doing

There’s been a fair bit of discussion about Lib Dem housing policies and our record recently. It’s become obvious to me that many members, especially Young Liberals, don’t appear to know what our national housing policy is, or our track record. I’ll comment on the national policy in another blog, our track record of building and enabling housing, and market intervention is so multi-faceted it deserves a stand-alone blog. The examples below are not a completist or definitive statement of our record in Local Government, the Lib Dems now lead 65 councils. Hopefully, at least, this will give people a good indication of the main types of policies that are being pursued, and particularly good examples of them, at that.

Eastleigh – developer extraordinaire
The Lib Dems have been in control of Eastleigh Council since 1995 (having been the largest single party since 1987). It’s used its lengthy time in office to become an exemplar council when it comes to the built environment. It can point to a record of building 3,500 houses with no doubt many more in the pipeline. Bear in mind Eastleigh has a population of just 136,000, you’d have to build 28,000 houses in Birmingham to get the same number per head. How has Eastleigh managed to do this? Firstly the desire is there, it’s decided to take on a role that goes far beyond most Borough councils. Secondly it’s been sensible and competent with its finances – the council has made a number of property investments, but mostly in industrial and office space, avoiding the ruinous investments in retail made by several Conservative councils in the last 10 years (funny how many transactional mistakes the Conservatives make when they claim to be arch-capitalists). Eastleigh has taken its investment income, bought land, and built houses of various tenure types, with an accent on affordable housing. It’s done this on a scale that few other councils can match and it’s clearly taken the public with it as the current composition of Eastleigh is Lib Dems: 35, the rest: 4. To find out about Eastleigh’s housing record in more detail check out this discussion between Keith House and Mark Pack from earlier this year:

https://www.nevermindthebarcharts.com/e/how-to-build-houses-and-win-elections/

Eastleigh – building at a rate few other councils in Britain can match

Portsmouth – council house buy back
Thatcherism – aren’t ya sick of it? I grew up in the 1980s and bore witness to a wholesale redefinition of the role of the state and a rush to sell off state assets. This continued during the 1990s and 2000s with more and more asset disposals, this often went under the radar as a local council selling off wasteland is less important than the sale of Jaguar, BP or British Aerospace. The transfer of 10s of billions of £s worth of public assets to the private sector over 40 years conditions you to expect the public – private property nexus to be all one way. A few councils such as Portsmouth have bucked the trend, however. Portsmouth builds council houses, but in the context of limited land availability it’s also pursued a council house buy back policy. Buy back schemes aren’t without their critics – most property in the South of England, even ex-council housing, is valued at such a level it should be cheaper to build a new house. However I would argue that if Housing Associations can afford to buy houses that were never in the public sector, councils should be able to buy ex-social housing too (this has happened in my home village). I’d much prefer a council to intervene in the market, bring properties up to standard, and to be held accountable than the alternatives.

Are you looking to sell an ex-council house in Portsmouth? If so, the council is interested in doing business with you

North Norfolk – the rural home enabler
What positive change can you bring to your district when large tracts of land are subject to very restrictive planning classifications and you’re not pulling in money from Business Rates or other public sector bodies? This is the challenge facing North Norfolk. It wants to see more housing so it’s looked at planning work arounds – the Eastern Daily Press recently observed, “A recent Rural Housing Alliance survey found NNDC was among the top five English councils for the number of affordable homes built in rural districts for 2018-2021.” North Norfolk Council is making this happen through by widespread use of rural exception sites – these are often single-plot developments that are built by Housing Associations that are then offered for rent to local people. The pro-housing inclination of the council is backed up by Lib Dem Cllr Wendy Fredericks who says, “Please come forward with land and ideas.”
Back when I was studying politics in the 1990s it was said that Local Government was on its knees and councils had taken on a passive role as ‘enablers’ – this was then used as a pejorative term. However it is important that North Norfolk can be a better enabler of rural housebuilding than, say Tory-run Breckland or Fenland, and most certainly better than Mid Suffolk where the Greens have been voted in on an ultra-NIMBY ticket. North Norfolk doesn’t have the brownfield sites, or grants from Central Government that other councils have, but it’s playing the cards it’s been dealt better than its East Anglian neighbours.

North Norfolk is looking to work with SME builders and landowners to maximise housebuilding across the district – Image from Eastern Daily Press

Vale of the White Horse – Community Land Trust
This Oxfordshire council has been working for a few years towards establishing CLT housing and its first development was handed over to residents this week. Eight flats at Crofts Court, Botley have rent so low they can be afforded by people on Universal Credit. The strength of Community Land Trusts are that the properties are held in trust and can’t be part of any Right to Buy scheme, they are rented to locals, who form management teams to maintain the buildings and any public realm space held by the CLT. The scheme has been part-funded by Vale of the White Horse Council via Section 106 contributions. It must be noted that Botley is on the edge of Oxford but is surrounded by Oxford’s green belt. Developments like Crofts Court, which are relatively small scale and clearly benefit the community, are far more likely to get planning approval and buy-in from the public on the fringes of the Green Belt where building to scale is rare. Oxfordshire Community Land Trust is looking to build more schemes across the county, with Lib Dems in power everywhere outside of Oxford excluding Cherwell, we can be cautiously optimistic that this is the start of a fruitful partnership.

Crofts Court in Botley, hopefully the first of many Oxfordshire CLT developments

York – yes to self build
While the Lib Dems have just handed power over to Labour in York City, the party has laid foundations for a good housing policy. A plan to build 600 homes with a mix of private, council and self build dwellings included. Property makeover shows and in particular the self build show Grand Designs has stoked interest in a concept that is peripheral to the UK housing industry but has been mainstream in Continental Europe for a long time. Despite the popularity of Grand Designs the number of self build, or to use the industry term custom self build (CSB), house completions has barely increased. This is because developers and major house builders have the market largely sewn up. Building on a single plot is dwarfed by the largest schemes (here in NW Kent within 15 miles of me are the following masterplans: Hoo Peninsula 12,000 homes, Swanscombe/Ebbsfleet 15,000 homes, Bexley Riverside 6,000 homes, Thamesmead/Abbey Wood 20,000 homes). If you take a laissez faire attitude to CSB it barely makes a dent in the market and you need Central or Local Government intervention to progress it. Good to see York, therefore, include an element of CSB in their plan and I hope this becomes a more widespread practice for councils in future.

Self Build in York – progressing nicely as part of a well-balanced plan

Sutton – working with a big name architect
London Borough of Sutton is a longstanding Lib Dems controlled council, so longstanding that council housing was still being built across the UK when we assumed power in 1986. Thatcher and Major soon stamped that out, but Sutton, like other Lib Dems councils has restarted a council house building programme for the first time in a generation. Whenever the public sector does infrastructure for the first time or returns to it after a long hiatus there are question marks about the capacity of the client, and the construction industry’s ability to deliver. When I reported on the school building sector, the Government was looking to ramp up building from 25 secondary schools p.a. in 1997 to 400 p.a. by 2010. That involved a lot of contractors and architects getting involved in the schools sector for the first time. That led to teething problems. The same potential pitfalls are there if councils build houses after a long break too. Cost overruns and time delays have dogged Croydon’s public corporation Brick by Brick, for example. Sutton has to an extent sidestepped those problems by working with an experienced and well-respected architect – Curl la Tourelle – who has designed community centres and primary schools in the borough before. Following a feasibility study carried out by Curl la Tourelle, nine urban infill sites were earmarked for 44 houses.
A Curl la Tourelle spokesperson says, “Sutton had identified a number of opportunities for infill development. Often occupied by rundown garages, many of the sites were hidden in inhospitable places. We visited nine very different sites during our research. Some were tucked behind high street shops or occupied an unbuilt gap in a residential row; others were interstitial areas on the edges of estates or unused plots backing onto neighbouring gardens. Rather than working remotely, we spent time at all of them, making sketches, talking to dog walkers and other passers-by.”

Curl la Tourelle was asked to transform dead spaces into council housing across Sutton

Bath & NES – office to residential conversion
Often Lib Dems win in places where planning restrictions are huge. Bath & NES is one such place, Bath has a city-wide conservation area covering 1486 hectares. This makes any new building difficult, however the council has the same progressive urges as other Lib Dems groups so has gone down the office-to-resi conversion route to kickstart its council house programme. The council converted a Victorian office, Newbridge Hill, into seven council flats, and is the start of a programme to deliver 58 homes (the low number perhaps indicating how challenging it is to identify sites in a conservation area). The converted flats represent the first council housing in Bath & NES since it was sold off in 1999, and priority will be given to local NHS workers. Tom Davies, who was cabinet member for housing at Bath & NES, said last year, “We have got aspirations to do hundreds of council houses if needed, thousands in due course. The first phase that we were looking at was to use council owned assets that the council did not need any more and use these as the first council homes.”

Newbridge Hill – a thorough office-to-resi conversion

Westmorland & Furness – dealing with the tourist housing trap
This new unitary council takes on large expanses of sparsely populated upland Cumbria where a long-term housing shortage caused by various planning restrictions (Lake District and Yorkshire Dales National Parks and North Pennines AONB) has been made worse by second homes and Airbnb. Locals are priced out, then communities are hollowed out. This is something that local MP Tim Farron has been very vocal about for a number of years now. Due to all the planning restrictions newbuild options are limited, but policy instruments do exist to try and mitigate the impact of asset inequality. Westmorland & Furness was the first council in the UK to suggest levying a 100% Council Tax surcharge on second homes. An ITV report on Westmorland & Furness’s debut budget as a newly formed authority said in March, “The council states its decision to double the council tax charge on second homes was taken alongside other decisions intended to help the council tackle the affordable housing crisis in the area. These include a 200% premium for properties kept empty for more than five years, and even higher charges from April 2024 for properties kept empty for more than 10 years.” Cllr Andrew Jarvis told ITV, “Housing is a huge local issue and one that we are prioritising. We want housing to be available for local people and we don’t want homes wasted, lying empty for years. The additional income we generate from these decisions will help fund work to tackle the housing challenges that we face in our area.”

North Pennines AONB – a UNESCO Global Geopark – but with great beauty comes chronic asset inequality that we must tackle

Colchester – all singing, all dancing
If York has pursued the most balanced, multi-faceted policy, Colchester arguably has the boldest housing policy right now. In 2018 Colchester was straight out the blocks when rules changed for Local Government housing finance, with the cap on the Housing Revenue Account lifted. A LGiU report stated, “Once the cap was lifted they were able to pursue those more ambitious plans, including over 100 affordable units over four sites and four former garage sites with between 35 and 40 affordable units at social rent, redevelopment of an existing sheltered housing scheme, and using borrowing along with Right to Buy receipts to buy back properties offered back under the Right to Buy covenant.”

New homes in Colchester’s Military Road, to be built by local SME housebuilder TJ Evers

Overall Colchester’s housing plan includes:

• Building eight new homes on a vacant site at Military Road
• Building 16 new homes on former garage sites at Hardings Close, Buffett Way and Scarfe Way
• Buying back 50+ former Council properties using the ‘Right to Buy Back’ clauses 
• Purchasing 100+ properties on the open market
• Redeveloping the sheltered housing provision at Elfreda House (increasing numbers and improving quality)
• Delivering 120+ affordable homes (30%) within developments totalling 400+ homes across sites at Creffield Road, Mill Road and St Runwald Street being developed by Colchester Amphora Homes Ltd
bringing forward more garage sites before 2024 in a third phase of development sites

Note that Colchester’s plans go one step further than Portsmouth, buying private housing that was never in the social housing sector. In total it plans to deliver 350 new council homes by 2024.