Policy discourse | Alex's Archives

Tag Archives | Policy discourse

Shared ownership and the changing reality of middle income Britain

Today I participated in a conference organised by the National Housing Federation on the theme Affordable home ownership and intermediate tenure. I spoke in a session alongside Gavin Kelly of the Resolution Foundation and Owen Jones of the Independent. They discussed broad economic currents, in particular the trajectory of household incomes. They also considered the broad question of where housing policy currently features in the political universe, and how prominently it might feature in the General Election 2015. I focused more on some observations about shared ownership in this context.

The text to go with my contribution is posted on Scribd. You can also access it beneath the fold. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Curbing the welfare hate

admin / April 6, 2013 / Politics / Permalink

We’ve now had three years of the blue-tinged contingent of the Coalition perpetrating a sustained attack on social security recipients – those slugabed skivers – in the name of curbing the deficit. Yesterday’s post at the Guardian again maps the profoundly negative tone of the language that has accompanied the agenda. This has had serious consequences. It has further poisoned the debate and eroded empathy. In moving the agenda forward the Conservatives have been aided and abetted by their junior Coalition partners, at the cost to the party of many members and supporters.

Resistance to this agenda has gained limited traction. In part this is because the Government believes that when it seeks to curb the generosity of social security it has the majority of popular opinion on its side. In part it is because the mainstream media has done a feeble job in engaging critically with the Government’s agenda, or even holding the Government to basic standards of honesty. There has been very limited scrutiny of the way the high-flown rhetoric of “making work pay” and ensuring “fairness” has been matched by the squalid detail of policy implementation. And in part it is because Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has been unutterably useless at actually opposing anything.

But are there signs that the complexion of the debate is changing? Continue Reading →

1 Comment

The politics of the bedroom tax

admin / February 9, 2013 / Housing, Politics / Permalink

Let’s start with the most important point. The Coalition’s proposal to cut the housing benefit to social housing tenants who are deemed to be underoccupying is going to cause further hardship for households who are already poor and vulnerable. Reflecting on the experience of the WCA regime administered by ATOS, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the changes will make life intolerable for some.

The second most important point about the bedroom tax is that it is likely to lead to some housing associations going out of business as a consequence of rising rent arrears. This could spread the misery and uncertainty to a much wider group of households who are not directly affected by the changes to the rules on underoccupancy.

And this story is going to begin to unfold for real in less than two months’ time, unless the government has a major rethink.

But stepping back and looked at the issue from a more detached position the politics of the underoccupancy changes are interesting.

The welfare reform agenda is made up of several distinct policy changes. Some of them are genuine reforms of the system – such as the move to universal credit. Some are simply cuts. All of these changes have be criticised heavily by those close to the social security system. But only the changes to the rules on underoccupancy – the so-called “bedroom tax” – seem to have gathered any political traction. And even here the momentum behind opposition is gathering rather late in the day.

One reason for the failure of opposition to these reforms is the fact that the Government’s reworking of language – its version of fairness and its crude division of the world into skivers and strivers – strikes a populist note. It goes does well will the tabloids.

The Government has done a good job of boiling their agenda down to a few simple, divisive messages that can secure majority support. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Next steps for housing policy

admin / February 7, 2013 / Housing / Permalink

[On 6^th February I participated in the NHF South West Regional Conference “Building neighbourhoods”, held in Exeter. This is the text to accompany my presentation.]

For half a century the aspiration behind housing policy in England has been captured by the statement “A decent home for all at a price within their means”, or some variation on that theme.

Embedded in this statement are three key terms:

a decent home
for all
a price within their means.

The way in which this aspiration has been articulated may have remained broadly constant, but the vigour with which governments have pursued it has varied. The rhetoric may be the same, but the realities of the substance of policy and implementation may have differed substantially.

And the understanding of the three key terms is mutable. Over time thinking has shifted. For example, when we talk of a “price within their means” do we mean that housing costs need to be lowered so that they can be sustained on the basis of available earned income? This might suggest the need to reduce housing costs. Or should it be interpreted as meaning that we need to enhance households’ incomes so that prevailing housing costs come within their reach?

We could rehearse the history of housing policy over this period and trace out the ways in which the aspirations of housing policy have subtly, and not so subtly, been reinterpreted. But we won’t. For now the important point is that the Coalition government is, broadly speaking, holding to the standard rhetoric. But at the same time it is reframing the debate. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Tory tailspin

admin / January 2, 2013 / Politics / Permalink

It is clear, even to the casual observer, that the Conservatives are in a bit of a tangle. You could say the same about the other main political parties. But the Conservatives appear to be going through a particularly public convulsion at the moment.

They seem to have misplaced 20% of their opinion poll support over the course of 2012. Many of those potential voters appear to have transferred allegiance to UKIP. On the basis of opinion polling, some commentators are already declaring UKIP the third party of British politics, overtaking the Liberal Democrats.

Paul Goodman posted a piece at the Telegraph on the weekend arguing that the rise of UKIP was one of four factors which pointed to the conclusion that the 2015 General Election is already lost. The piece generated a rapid response among the right wing commentariat. Both Tim Montgomerie and Iain Dale argued that while a Labour victory in 2015 looks likely, the result isn’t inevitable. There are steps that David Cameron can take over the next year that would revive the Conservative party’s fortunes. Grant Shapps waded in on New Year’s Eve to castigate anyone declaring that the election is already lost. This is just, in his view, being defeatist.

The question, of course, is what Cameron should do to turn things around. Inevitably, views differ. About the only point commentators seem to be closely aligned upon is that Cameron needs to make his long-promised landmark speech on Europe, with some serious substance, some time very soon.

For much of last year the Conservatives’ right wing backbenchers were making a nuisance of themselves both in the House and in the media. The clamour is for isolationism and turbocharged neoliberalism. A decisive swing to the right is claimed to be the way to see off the UKIP threat and encourage wavering right wing voters back into the fold.

Over the New Year it was the turn of the centre-right moderates and the modernisers to make an alternative case. This is a case we hear being made much less frequently. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Osbo’s poverty trap and pinging the elastic of reality

admin / December 16, 2012 / Politics / Permalink

Since they entered office the blue-tinged contingent of the Coalition has been engaged in a systematic process of stigmatising those in receipt of social security benefits. Great emphasis has been placed upon the undeserving and the fraudulent. There is support for the hard working strivers, but condemnation for the skivers. The spotlight has been on the most extreme cases of households receiving substantial financial support from social security in order to create a smoke screen for cuts in benefits to the poorest. The Tories are convinced that welfare “reform” – particularly the overall weekly benefit cap – is their most popular policy. Yet many of the components of this policy have yet to be fully implemented. The general public has yet to grasp their full impact. It may transpire that once they do, the Tories will feel they acted precipitately in drawing such a positive conclusion. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Stabilising the Overton window

admin / May 22, 2012 / Politics / Permalink

What determines the size and location of the Overton window? What types of proposals for government action are viewed as acceptable or sensible? Which proposals are viewed as popular enough to make their way into policy? And which proposals are outside the window – viewed as too radical to consider seriously? Even more fundamentally, which proposals are “unthinkable” in the current context?

One answer is “public opinion”. A more sophisticated answer is public opinion as mediated to politicians through a range of focus groups, political advisors or media representations. Clearly there is plenty of scope for a gap to open up between these two versions of public opinion.

Looked at from the other direction, public opinion is itself a product of similar forces, in particular media representations and debate. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

The Queen’s Relaunch. The Coalition’s Speech … Oh look, Tractors …

admin / May 10, 2012 / Economics, Politics / Permalink

There was a bit of social media sniping yesterday that, despite David Cameron’s protestations to the contrary, the Queen’s Speech didn’t contain much of any substance to help the ailing UK economy.

That doesn’t seem to me to be entirely fair, for two reasons. First, there were some useful measures in the Speech – on banking or energy market reform, for example – that have the potential to make a difference to the performance of the economy. Second, it’s not obvious that the Queen’s Speech is the place you’d expect to find a menu of measures designed to stimulate the economy. If the Government wanted to get serious with the economy then much that it might consider doing can be achieved without the aid of new primary legislation.

So maybe we need to look back to the Cameron-Clegg relaunch event on Tuesday to get a better idea of policy action on the economy. After all:

The primary task of the Government remains ensuring that we deal with the deficit, and stretch every sinew to return growth to the economy – providing jobs and opportunities to hard-working people across Britain who want to get on. Continue Reading →

2 Comments

… but words can never hurt me

admin / January 20, 2012 / Politics / Permalink

The Coalition’s big economic idea is that significant cuts in public sector employment will be more than compensated by a veritable blossoming of the private sector. Displaced public sector workers will find themselves rapidly migrating to new private sector jobs.

There are plenty of reasons for thinking that the economic reasoning is flawed. And there is precious little evidence that it is happening. The public jobs are disappearing sure enough. But the promised private sector expansion is rather slower in arriving. That is not in itself great surprise, if you read the economy more plausibly.