Your New York policemen are wonderful

It must be difficult being a policeman in New York. A complex multi-national city - part of a country where some people worship guns more than God. And then there are the English schoolgirls to deal with. The picture above shows my daughter Rosemarie on a school trip to New York when she was at Worcester Sixth Form College ten years ago. The tolerance and amusement on the faces of the policemen is striking.

Rosemarie is now an artist and her work can be viewed at:
www.etsy.com/people/Cumella

The Great Housing Mystery

Everyone in England agrees that we are in the midst of a housing crisis. The scale of the problem is shown in the estimates for ‘household formation’ issued every year by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). These estimate that between 2012 and 2037, a total of 5.2 million new households will be created, each of which will be in the market for somewhere to live, whether purchased or rented. New households are formed not just as a result of normal population growth (the excess of births over deaths) and net immigration (families and single people who will migrate into this country minus those who leave), but because of the increasing number of single-person households. There are more of these because people live longer than in the past, resulting in more widows and widowers living alone, and because more marriages and similar such relationships end in separation and divorce, so that one household splits into two.

The DCLG uses its estimate to calculate a figure for ‘housing need’ - currently 220,000/year for England as a whole. Unfortunately, far fewer new dwellings are completed each year - only 155,000 in 2014 plus another 25,000 converted by subdividing larger properties. Since some houses were demolished, the net gain in the number of dwellings was 171,000. The result of this kind of shortfall each year is a faster rise in house prices in England than in any other country, such that the ratio of houses prices to average earnings (the P/E ratio) has doubled in the last 30 years. The great housing mystery is why are so few houses built when demand is so high?

The answer to this mystery is that the supply of housing in this country is determined by a small number of very large development corporations, each of which control all aspects of the building process, from land-acquisition, planning-permission and construction, through to sales. This is time-consuming and expensive and no money comes in until the houses are sold. So the development corporations tend to be risk-averse, and will certainly avoid building houses they can not sell. How many they can sell at any particular time depends on the number of people who are able to get loan finance and afford the deposit and monthly repayments. These factors are in turn determined by the general state of the economy. This creates an interesting paradox. The chronic shortage of houses raises their price, which increases the P/E ration, which means that fewer people can afford to buy a house. This in turn means that less are built, which further increases the price.

In the past, the gap between houses needed and houses built was filled by local authorities and (to a lesser degree) by housing associations. But government policy in recent years has instead been to secure the supply of lower-cost houses by imposing a requirement on developers that 40% of the new houses they build will be ‘affordable’. This term has usually designated houses that are rented from housing associations or are sold at 80% of market rates. The aim of this policy is to avoid segregating the population into owner-occupied and rented sectors. However laudable, this policy means that the supply of new affordable housing is determined by the number of market-priced houses that the development corporations decide to build. So in times of recession, when fewer people can afford to buy a house, the development corporations naturally reduce rates of construction, which means that the number of ‘affordable’ houses for rent also falls.

Even in more prosperous times, it pays for the development corporations to maintain the supply of new houses below demand. This pushes up prices and profits, but also has political benefits. The development corporations use the housing crisis to argue that the Government should respond by ‘freeing the market’, which means relaxations in planning controls, building on greenbelt land, and freeing the development corporations of the obligation to build affordable homes. Such measures would massively increase profits, but the arguments are utterly spurious. There is no shortage of land designated for housebuilding in England. At present, planning permission has been granted for 450,000 houses which have not yet been built, while the development corporations own land available for another 300,000 dwellings in their ‘land banks’. Other land for housing will become available during this decade as the supermarket chains offload sites because of the rapid rise in home delivery.

There is therefore no ‘housing crisis’ for the four large development corporations in England, which all report higher sale prices for their houses, increased profits and larger bonuses for their managers. The crisis is instead felt acutely by those who need to spend an ever-higher proportion of their income on renting cramped rooms and flats.

Diplomacy in Dreamland

Last night I dreamed of Vladimir Putin. I had left my home, as usual each morning, to walk to the village shop to buy my newspaper. I remembered that our village fete was being held that day. When I returned, I found Vladimir Putin and various other people inside my bungalow. Putin was very genial and told me that since he now lived in England he would need a home for his disabled father. He believed my house was suitable. I demurred, suggesting that my bungalow is too small, but recommended that he apply to Fortis (the local housing association) who would probably be able to find a very nice flat nearby. As the neighbourhood volunteer for Citizens’ Advice, I would be able to help with the application. Putin seemed very pleased with my comments, and left with his entourage. I reflected that since this probably counted as work for Citizens’ Advice, I would need to keep this referral confidential and would not be able to tell my wife when she returned. Fortunately, it was all a dream, and I could tell her of my unique role in improving Anglo-Russian relations.

See also: Living the Dream

Going to the Outdoor

I was born just after the Second World War in Shirley - once a village but by then a suburb of Birmingham, on the edge of the countryside. At the time of my birth, home confinements were still common, and so I came into the world in lodgings behind a shop on Haslucks Green Road. My life until the age of 11 was spent almost entirely within about half a mile of that shop. I remember playing with the curtain that divided our lodgings from the shop, and being brought home in a car from hospital after I had had my tonsils removed. Then, at the age of 4, the family moved to a rented semi-detached house in Stroud Road. This had (it seemed to me at the time) a very long garden which ended in a sandpit. Behind the garden was a track and waste ground. In the distance was the railway line from Birmingham to Shirley. At the age of (just) 5, I started at Haslucks Green Primary School, which I would walk to myself when quite young. I would return home at midday for dinner, cooked by my mother, before walking back to school for the afternoon. When I was aged 11, my parents bought a semi-detached house in Haslucks Croft, where my mother still lives. This coincided with starting secondary school in Birmingham, and my life as a commuter began.

The shop that was my birthplace now sells fish-and-chips, but was then (I think) a grocer. It was therefore one of a great many types of shops that have almost entirely disappeared except in the smallest market towns. Down the road was a greengrocer and a butcher, and a post-office/tobacconist/newsagent. The strangest local shop was the outdoor. This sold alcohol, which could not be consumed on the premises. It was bare but clean, and consisted of a wooden counter on which were pumps for beer and a barrel of ‘wine from the wood’. Customers would arrive with jugs to be filled with beer. The shop had a distinctive smell of beer and vinegar, which I can still summon in my memory. The name ‘outdoor’ presumably derived from the back doors in pubs at which you could buy beer for home consumption. I would go to the outdoor to buy sweets rather than beer, which I do not remember my parents ever drinking.

A rival to the outdoor was home delivery, by a firm called Davenports. This had a large brewery in Birmingham and delivered to households in lorries painted bright red. There were daily home deliveries of milk (from the Co-op) and bread (from Hawley’s Bakery). Both used quiet electric vehicles. Coal was also delivered, but coalmen were regarded as untrustworthy, and I was always told to count the number of bags delivered.

This kind of retailing was all replaced by supermarkets, which began to spread in the 1970s. These were cheap because they offloaded some of their work to their customers. Instead of customers asking the grocer to collect their order and pack it, customers in supermarkets wander round the lengthy aisles themselves, selecting the goods they need (and some they do not need). Customers then pack the goods themselves and, increasingly, also check them out with a scanner. Much of what they ‘save’ (ie spend less) is cancelled by the cost of driving to and from the supermarket. Now of course, this is changing. People can select goods through the Internet, which are delivered to their homes by the supermarket companies. This has become so popular, that it is possible to imagine the supermarket buildings eventually becoming vast ruined cathedrals of commerce. In the meantime, I propose to take my jug round to the village pub and see if the landlord will start an outdoor service.

See also: What we ate and what we called it

A shared life

On Tuesday last week, I spoke to the All-Party Disability Interest Group in Parliament about shared-life communities for people with a learning disability (intellectual disability). This was organised by the Alliance for Camphill. For the record, I include a synopsis of my talk, on the research evidence for shared-life communities.

"Public policy in the UK has sought to attain a fulfilling life for people with a learning disability by placing them in dispersed housing schemes after they leave their family home or hospital. These are houses or flats mainly in urban settings, with support staff employed by private and voluntary-sector agencies to work in the home or visit on a regular basis. This became the dominant type of accommodation for people resettled from the former mental handicap hospitals, although some were also placed in ‘residential campuses’ of homes managed by the NHS on the sites of the former hospitals. By contrast, few former inpatients moved to intentional communities based on shared-life principles. These are a diverse group of settlements and networks in which ‘co-workers’ (Camphill) and ‘assistants’ (L’Arche) are motivated by a personal calling to work alongside people with a learning disability, sharing their homes and family life. Shared-life communities of this kind vary in size and location (rural, small town or urban).

"However, research which has compared the quality of life of people with a learning disability in different types of housing has found that shared-life communities have similar outcomes for their residents as dispersed housing schemes. In some respects (especially friendships with other people with a learning disability, employment and personal safety), shared-life communities are superior. Shared-life communities also provide a better quality of life on almost all measures than the NHS-managed residential campuses, even though both characteristically comprise clusters of small houses dispersed across a shared landscape. This indicates that the size of a residence and its location is less important in determining quality of life than the pattern of social relationships within each residence or network.

"Studies which have explored the distinctive pattern of social relationships that exist in shared-life communities have found that residents appreciate the diverse range of employment and leisure opportunities, their wide friendship network with other people with a learning disability, and their sense of being part of a community in which they have an important part to play through shared decision-making and rituals. Friendship is facilitated by the availability in the community of several other people with a learning disability and by the sense of personal security it provides. Living in extended families with co-workers/assistants enables people with a learning disability and their supporters to acquire and build skills in each others’ pattern of communication - the essential step if a person with a learning disability is to learn of the world and express choices about what they want to do in it.

"Shared-life communities are therefore an appropriate option for people with a learning disability who prefer this lifestyle. The choice of how and where to live has in the past often been denied to people with a learning disability, but is defined as a right under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. It should therefore be respected by public agencies in how they assess, commission, fund and regulate residential support."

See also: Denying disability

The perils of being nice

When I was at school, we were warned against using the word ‘nice’ - a word, we were told, which was milk-and-water, signifying the bland and the inoffensive. Being told to ‘Have a nice day’ was therefore hardly a blessing, which may explain why most English people wish you have a ‘good day’ instead. Nevertheless, niceness is a real and important phenomenon which shapes day-to-day behaviour, particularly in large organisations. The most important part of niceness is an extreme reluctance to say anything which might possibly cause offence to another person, and a corresponding fear of being the subject of complaint by another. Niceness consequently means remaining silent when people do something wrong, refusing to challenge another person’s opinions however wrongheaded they may be, and avoiding any action that might possibly be attributed to you personally.

Niceness is often confused with good manners, but they are different. The core of good manners is consideration and respect for others. This means that you take the opinions of others seriously, disagree where appropriate, but do so in a way that does not humiliate or intimidate. The difference between niceness and manners can be shown in this example. Some time in the 1990s, I was asked to give a presentation at an NHS conference in Birmingham on ageing in society. I was due to speak in the morning session after several other speakers. There were the usual rules in such matters - 15 minutes for each presentation, followed by five minutes for questions. All the speakers kept to these rules until the one before me - a woman who had recently completed a PhD. Her presentation was a description of her research, set out at length, with one tedious detail after another - all spoken in a dull flat voice. Before the talk, she had placed a sheaf of paper copies of her overheads on each seat, and the audience realised after half an hour that she was still less than half way through her intended talk. Despite this, the chairman failed to act until a member of the audience (the local political activist Dave Spilsbury), asked “Mr Chairman - when is this talk going to end? Some of us would like to hear the next speaker”. The chairman, with obvious reluctance, asked the speaker to draw her talk to a close. She droned on with no sign of concluding for another five minutes, until he finally told her to finish. There were of course no questions. It was then my turn. I spoke for ten minutes in as punchy a manner as I could manage. After that, the audience inevitably applauded with great enthusiasm.

As I let the room for lunch, I heard one woman say to another: “That man was so rude”. She meant Dave Spilsbury, not the nice and ineffective chairman, who had failed to exercise the very simple task of keeping a speaker to the allotted time and had therefore shown a lack of respect to the audience and to the next speaker. His behaviour was therefore an example of bad manners combined with niceness.

I had even worse experiences at two other NHS conferences, when the chairmen allowed the speaker before my presentation to drone on for twice their allotted time and then asked me whether I could possibly shorten my talk “because we seem to be running over”. The three ineffective chairmen at these conferences were all senior managers in the NHS, and their niceness may have been a factor in their career success. Niceness was indeed the dominant culture in NHS management and the other public sector organisations in which I have worked, and those who conform to the dominant culture tend to be the most successful.

When I worked in the NHS, one general manager (who later rose to great heights) would look concerned whenever disagreement broke out in a board meeting, and then immediately suggest that the issue should be considered by a subcommittee. This ensured that a nice atmosphere could be preserved at the meeting and that all disagreement (or difficult decisions) could be avoided. One consequence of this tendency is a preference for reacting to events rather than anticipating them. In this way, conflict can be avoided and decisions presented as fait accompli. When I was a member of the same management board, the monthly accounts at the start of the financial year showed a substantial operating deficit. I pointed this out and suggested we start planning how to re-organise services to reduce costs. But this view was dismissed, the deficit accumulated until at the very end of the financial year the general manager announced to staff that the board had reluctantly been ‘forced’ to close a ward.

A second consequence of niceness in organisations is a futile obsession with secrecy. Since criticism is to be avoided at almost all costs, all decisions are inspected for any possible embarrassment they may cause, and a major effort is put into keeping them secret. Keeping things secret is thereby given greater priority than challenging incompetence and dealing with abuse. Staff who abuse patients or clients are therefore quietly re-located instead of being dismissed. The culture of niceness among staff means a lack of respect for those in their care.

See also:The rudeness of strangers

The original sin of babies

Many years ago, I worked as a social worker in Scotland. I lived in a pleasant village in Clackmannanshire under the lea of the Ochils, and I worked in a miserable town in West Lothian. But in both places I heard several parents say the same thing about their babies: that when they cry, they should be left to do so because it helps ‘break their spirit’. I do not know how common this view is in Scotland or whether it is unique to Scotland, but it seemed to me then to incorporate a strange and harsh idea of the nature of children and how best to respond to their needs. It is harsh because it seemed to attribute a baby’s act of communicating distress or discomfort to a desire to manipulate and control its parents. It is, in other words, a belief in original sin.

This belief, as conventionally developed by Christian theologians from St. Augustine onwards, is that human beings inherit sin from Adam, who committed the original sin of disobedience (ie eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge) in the Garden of Eden. All human beings are therefore deemed to be depraved in their nature from birth, and to lack the freedom to do good or respond to the will of God unless they receive His grace. The idea of original sin was especially favoured by the first Protestant clerics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, but would seem to have little to do with the expressed statements of Christ or the Book of Genesis.

Three of the Christian gospels have similar texts in which Christ tells his disciples not to prevent children coming to see him, and saying that “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18: 1-6). He therefore regarded children as innocent beings, not as innately depraved.

The Book of Genesis reports that God punished Adam and Eve and their descendants for their disobedience, but the punishment comprised the pain and suffering of toil, childbirth, illness and death (Gen. 3: 16-19), with no mention of the inheritance of sin. According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden to prevent a challenge to God who said: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”. (Gen. 3:22-23).

Sin therefore arises because Adam and Eve’s acquisition of knowledge provided them with the capacity to choose rather than act on instinct. This choice created the possibility of helping or harming others, and it is a choice we have all inherited because of our intellectual capacity as human beings. That we can choose evil is emphasised in the following chapter in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel.

The doctrine of original sin involves a distinctly pessimistic view of human nature - of children as well as adults. It leads some parents to see their children as innate sinners who must be disciplined from birth, rather than innocent and curious souls driven to respond to the attention and love of their parents.

See also: No sympathy for the devils