Local Government

Migration, citizenship and diversity: questioning the boundaries

/ inlogov / 2 Comments

Katherine Tonkiss and Nando Sigona

In recent decades, a significant transformation in the meanings, practices and experiences of membership in contemporary Western democracies has taken place. These transformations have challenged traditional conceptions of state membership which have typically assumed the existence of a nation-state, with a burgeoning line of scholarship challenging the significance of the nation-state in determining membership and endowing rights. This literature argues that recent trends in globalisation, human rights and multiculturalism have made state borders less important.

In this context, several questions emerge about the interplay between forms of contemporary membership, migration governance, and the politics of belonging:

  • What is the position of the non-citizen in contemporary immigration and emigration states?
  • How can the nexus between human mobility, immigration control and citizenship be best conceived?
  •  How can we resolve the tension in policy and practice between coexisting traditions and regimes of rights; and the intersection of ‘race’ and other social cleavages and legal status?

We invited four speakers to participate in a seminar series at the University of Birmingham earlier this year, to explore these issues through a focus on the boundaries between migration, citizenship and diversity. Each speaker brought a distinctly different perspective, yet some common themes emerged.

Our first speaker was Phillip Cole (University of the West of England). Phillip’s talk was on ‘unreason’ in the UK immigration debate – that is, the reluctance of people to abandon myths about immigration despite the prevalence of evidence that shows these myths to be false. He described how much of the immigration debate is imbued with ‘Heimat’ – a nostalgic idea of belonging to the nation based on an imaginary ideal of the past. Immigration is problematized because it is seen to bring change which pulls us further from this imaginary past.

Phillip’s seminar contributed insights into the politics of belonging and how emotional belonging intersects with the processes of immigration to shape migration governance. Here, such emotional belonging is seen to affect the emergence of different regimes of migration governance as a result of its effects on the political debate.

In her talk, Madeleine Reeves (University of Manchester) explored the boundaries between immigrant ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ in the context of the territory of the former Soviet Union. Her presentation provided a rich account of migration and immigration governance in what is to date an under researched region in migration studies. By focusing on passports and papers, she drew attention to the hyper-documentation of so called ‘undocumented’ migrants. Her contribution to the debate on ‘illegality’ is especially valuable because it questions assumptions around the significance of legal documents and the role of the state. By shifting the focus, Madeleine reveals the legal and historical production of ‘illegality’ and its significance in the everyday lives of migrants in contemporary Russia.

In her talk, Agnieszka Kubal (University of Oxford) examined the criminalization of migration and migrants and how the incorporation of criminal law into the immigration domain serves to demonstrate government’s firm grip over immigration. But how do migrants respond to this increasing conflation between criminal and immigration domains in the wider social context?  Drawing on in-depth interviews with 270 return migrants, Agnieszka demonstrated how migrants’ responses to the stigmatizing force of criminalisation do not always mean resistance, but quite often are placed on a continuum between the contestation and the reproduction of the stigma.

Sarah Neal (University of Surrey) was the final speaker of the series. Her talk focused on the everyday experience of superdiverstity; specifically, how do people live and negotiate cultural difference? Sarah drew particular attention to the apparent absence of ‘race’ in contemporary discussions of superdiversity, and demonstrated through her own research how race has a continued presence as a construct that shapes social relations.

Drawing on her research on ‘living multicultures’ in different urban contexts, Sarah’s talk explored some of the complexities surrounding the relationship between migration and other social cleavages such as race, and during the discussion we also focused on class as another often absent dynamic in debates about diversity. Challenges may arise when we talk about ‘cohesion’ because this fails to capture the enduring complexities of superdiverse communities.

The talks in this series, jointly organised by the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) and the School of Government & Society, raised important and timely questions of the changing relationship between migration and citizenship, and between the alien and the citizen. They revealed the power and limitations of the law, the impact of migration myths and the roots of widespread anti-immigration sentiments. They also highlighted the importance of paying attention to national, regional and neighbourhood contexts in order to understand how immigration regimes operate and intersect other spheres of public life at different scales and in different locales.

tonkiss

Katherine Tonkiss is a Research Fellow in INLOGOV. She has research interests in normative and empirical questions surrounding migration, citizenship and identity, particularly in the UK. Her first book, Migration and Identity in a Post-National World, was published in 2013. Follow Katherine on Twitter @ktonkiss.

 

 

??????????????????????????

Nando Sigona is Birmingham Fellow and Lecturer in the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) and the School of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham. He is Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre and Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, both at the University of Oxford. Nando is co-author of Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants, Pluto Press 2014 (forthcoming) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Oxford University Press 2014 (forthcoming) and of the special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture on ‘Ethnography, diversity and urban space’, 2013. Follow Nando on Twitter @nandosigona and on http://nandosigona.wordpress.com.

Can local government govern in the digital age?

/ inlogov / 2 Comments

Paul Hepburn

The digital age continues to bring policy challenges for local government. From harnessing ‘big data’ for the public good to developing  ‘smart’ cities the policy expectation is that local authorities will deliver appropriate governance without which, it is argued, urban life in the 21st century is likely to be rendered more complicated, fragmented , unequal and potentially dystopian through ad hoc technological fixes.

All very well and Hobbesian but ‘good’ or ‘smart’ governance in this context is one where the citizen is centrally involved in the decision making process. It is questionable then if the local government institution is fit for this assigned purpose given that many commentators view it as having failed to meaningfully engage citizens during the well-funded e-government programme run by the previous New Labour government.

Since that time the social web and apps development, to name but two, have opened new opportunities for local policymaker wishing to involve citizens in the policy making process.  My article, based on empirical research into the online activity associated with the Manchester Congestion Charge Referendum, illustrates the political difficulties local government faces in turning these opportunities into effective online engagement and in doing so suggests some remedial policy responses.

The local online influence of the sad, the bad and the very rich

The promise of e-democracy is that it will renew the democratic process and enable ‘ordinary’ citizens’ voices to be heard above those that have traditionally dominated politics. This proved not to be the case during the Congestion Charge Referendum and analysis of the related hyperlink network and interviews with actors prominent in this network revealed how powerful economic businesses offline were dominating the political narrative online. Evidence collected here showed how these businesses used their offline political connections to diminish the online voices of those that opposed them.

Along with the influence of the very rich online engagement on this issue was often characterised by angry, offensive and anonymous postings which served to deter people from participating or sharing information. It also reinforced the belief of some policy-makers in the superiority of traditional forms of communication.

Local government and the online network

The role of local government during the referendum was to ensure that all relevant information was made available to the voting public and to attempt to engage them on the issue. Of course they used online media in this process but their engagement was hampered by a toxic mix of institutionalised  ‘silos’ of information, a prevailing culture of anxiety about the new media and an inability to assign any real political value to online engagement. As a consequence their tepid interventions online were often counter-productive and helped to fuel a lack of trust amongst the public in the information they were trying to impart.

Remedial policies

Some of these obstacles to more effective online intervention by local government are more straightforward to resolve than others. The modernisation of local government needs to be driven forward and the institutional structures, culture and prevailing perceptions of citizenship need to be aligned with the requirements of the digital age. How far and how fast local government will change is contingent upon a number of factors, countering the online influence of the sad the bad and the very rich is probably dependent upon how far local government climbs Arnstein’s ladder of participation.

A full account of this research can be found in my recent article ‘Local Democracy in a Digital Age: Lessons for Local Government from the Manchester Congestion Charge Referendum’, Local Government Studies.

hepburn

Dr Paul Hepburn is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Hestletine Institute for Public Policy and Practice, University of Liverpool His work explores the potential of the new digital media to enhance local democracy and local governance. He uses methods and tools for analysing and explaining the structure of online political networks. Paul previously worked in local government where he implemented an e-government programme.

George Osborne’s budget surplus: paid for by local government

/ inlogov / 1 Comment

Chris Game

In his party conference speech on Monday, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced that a Conservative Government would seek, by the end of the 2015-20 Parliament, to have eliminated completely the roughly £120 billion national deficit and be running a budget surplus. It would do so, moreover, without raising taxes or cutting capital spending. The audience and most of the business world applauded, naturally, while Labour spokespersons seemed at least temporarily stunned.  The best immediate response they could manage was that the Chancellor’s record for meeting his past deficit-elimination targets was pretty flaky, so why should this one be any different.

In fairness, they had cause to be taken aback. The last time a government managed what is sometimes termed an absolute budget surplus – meaning it generated more revenues, including tax yields, than it spent – was in 2001, and it’s only happened about seven times in the past half-century. Not as rare, then, as a Brit winning Wimbledon or the Tour de France, but more so than England winning the Ashes (10, if you were wondering), and excuse, surely, for another spasm of flag-waving and nationalistic celebration?

Possibly, though probably not for most of those in or reliant upon local government, for whom it’s hard to know which scenario would be more painful: the achievement of a surplus by 2020, or being forced to aim for one and not achieving it.

The problem is that this budget surplus isn’t quite the kind of target that Local Government Association Chair, Sir Merrick Cockell, suggested subsequently at a Localis conference fringe event.  He observed that a surplus could be arrived at by one of two ways – either by government planning for the public finances to go into the black following spending reductions, or through growth in the economy increasing revenues.

Technically, of course, Sir Merrick’s right. But, wearing his LGA hat, he must know that a budget surplus by 2020 is not going to be achieved under a Conservative or Conservative-led Government either by some hitherto undreamt of explosion of economic growth, or by two lines on a graph, expenditure and revenue, each moving chummily towards the other and eventually converging.  He must know, because he’ll have seen the projections, that in this instance one line, revenue, stays unhelpfully almost horizontal throughout virtually the whole of the relevant  period, leaving the expenditure line to do all the converging on its own.

game

The graph is drawn from projections published this July by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), to which local government followers of LSE’s Professor Tony Travers are regularly commended, most recently in his article in this week’s Public Finance. More specifically, the projections are from the supplementary data published alongside the OBR’s annual Fiscal Sustainability Report, of which this summer’s was the third.

 

Total Managed Expenditure (TME) covers all spending by central government, local authorities and public enterprises: both the directly controllable Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL) – the budgets set for departments, Non-Departmental Public Bodies and local authorities in the three-yearly Spending Reviews – and the frustratingly uncontrollable Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) – departmental spending that can’t reasonably be restricted to three-yearly cycles (mainly social security benefits, tax credits and public sector pensions) plus debt interest. Public Sector Current Receipts (PSCRs) are largely taxes and National Insurance Contributions.

There are two potentially deceptive features of the graph as I’ve set it out: the conflated vertical axis, and the 2010-11 starting date. Between them, they have the effect of emphasising the single-year spending blip in 2013-14 and de-emphasising the remarkable nature of the trend.

The historic trend of public spending is, if I correctly recall my Latin, prorsum et sursum, onwards and upwards. Between 1956-57, the year I went to the secondary school in which I learned that Latin, and 2009-10 there was an average growth of 3.2% a year; from 2000-01 an average of 4.7%.  We’re now in an 8-year period in which it’s projected to fall by an average of 0.3% a year, in the middle of which a small upward AME lurch is but a proverbial pimple.

Sharp-eyed readers will have detected by now that, rather disappointingly after all that earlier talk of convergence, the two main lines on the graph don’t in fact converge – in 2020 or indeed at any subsequent date. The gap – the public sector net borrowing requirement – has certainly lessened, from 9.9% of GDP in 2010-11 to 6.8% in 2013-14. But the OBR’s current forecast still shows a gap of 1.5% (around £30 billion) in 2019-20, and that, of course, is one measure of the scale of the surplus problem.

The PSCR line, having struggled up to 38% in 2011-12, just stays there, projected by the Office for Budget Responsibility to fluctuate throughout the rest of the decade by barely half a percent, presumably irrespective of the political complexion of the post-2015 Government.

So, even if the Chancellor hadn’t confirmed that the deficit-vanishing trick was going to be accomplished without tax increases, it’s clear that whatever convergence there’s going to be will have to come, as suggested on the graph, from further spending cuts – and at a time when the long-term spending pressure of an ageing population is already growing by the year.

The OBR has a whole mini-vocabulary for deflecting responsibility when particularly its longer term forecasts turn out rather differently. My addition to the graph, therefore, is what they’d call an illustrative, broad-brush projection, rather than a precise forecast. The thing is, I can’t rid my mind of the image of a black arrow, heading straight for local government.

game

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

The Butler 1944 Education Act: both milestone and millstone

/ inlogov / 2 Comments

Chris Game

A ‘Legislative game-changer’ was what we were asked for. Or was it ‘Legislative Game-changer’?  No matter; this one was both. It’s exactly a half-century since the summer of ’63: Profumo and Keeler, Philby, the Great Train Robbery, the Beatles, Sindy dolls, and my leaving the boys’ grammar school, to which I’d ‘won’ a place seven years earlier by passing the compulsory 11-plus exam, and going to university. Statement of fact, but also declaration of interest.

The 1944 Education Act more than changed my life; it shaped it. It shaped me, like millions of others, into an entirely different person from the one I’d have become, born even 15 years earlier. Its shaping of me was, I like to think, positive, and certainly I’d be judged a successful product of the Act and the educational system it established. That shaping, though, included the acquisition of a disinclination to accept even good things entirely without question, which is why this account of the Act differs rather from the ‘Can’t-we-just-be-proud-that-we-created-an-entire-education-system-in-the-middle-of-wartime?’ story my father would undoubtedly have preferred.

That 11-plus exam, my result in which was far and away the most celebrated present I ever gave my parents (who believed it a measure of the discredited Cyril Burt’s Intelligence Quotient), had a flip side. It created roughly 80% of publicly defined 11-year old ‘less intelligent failures’ – like, four years later, my younger sister.

The 11-plus (we even called it the ‘Grading Test’) and the ‘tripartite’ or effectively bipartite system to which it was the key – aptitude-differentiated grammar, secondary modern, and a few technical schools – opened up each year new social divisions and reinforced old ones. Its General Certificate of Education (GCE) exams, normally taken at 16 and 18, disqualified a majority of the nation’s children from qualifications and ensured that full participation in secondary education remained, to quote one critic, “very much a minority pursuit”.  And that’s not to mention (yet) the Act’s failure even seriously to challenge the enduring wormcans of church/faith and independent/private schools. So yes, millstone as well as milestone.

That the Act was a milestone, landmark, etc. there can be no doubt. It replaced almost all previous education legislation, belatedly raised the school-leaving age to 15, and made secondary education free and universal. It established the famous three-cornered partnership for education in England and Wales: central government (Ministry of Education), with legal responsibility to set a national framework and allocate adequate resources; local education authorities (LEAs), with knowledge of local needs and responsibility for provision; and teachers with their professional expertise and responsibility for the curriculum. In setting this framework, moreover, the Act consciously sought to address pupils’ personal as well as academic development and the needs of the wider community.

The Act’s date and milestone-ness, though, were also its problems. It was a wartime coalition measure, passed by a Conservative-dominated Parliament, and at no point, therefore, did it engage with the more progressive agendas that had emerged in the inter-war years for, for example, a genuinely unified, national, publicly controlled educational system, a single multilateral, comprehensive/common secondary school, or a school leaving age of 16, rather than 15.  Indeed, the 1943 White Paper was welcomed by some as a Tory project that could divert some attention from the more radical Beveridge Report. It was very different, then, from what a 1946 Education Act might (possibly) have looked like, yet it was treated, even by Labour, as a systemic and at least generational settlement, requiring no more of post-war politicians than possibly some marginal tidying-up.

So whose milestone was it? Received wisdom (received by me, anyway) is that youngish, liberalish Conservative Education minister, R A Butler, skilfully persuaded a reluctant Churchill that legislating for major educational reform in wartime was a good idea – which is at best only part of the story.

First, Butler’s arrival in July 1941 as President of the Board of Education was less the promotion of a rising social reformer than a sideways exit from the Foreign Office of a discredited appeaser. Secondly, much of the Act, including the main decisions about secondary education, was set out in the Board’s ‘Green Book’, Education after the War, produced by civil servants under previous Board President, Herwald Ramsbotham (less German than his first name might suggest). If we sideline the always confusing label ‘policy makers’, it was these Board officials who were the principal authors of what was more a civil service Act than a political one. The role of the chief politician, Butler, was that of indispensable legislative facilitator.

Indispensable because Churchill was not so much reluctant as resistant: opposed to legislation, as a distraction from the ‘War project’, and uninterested in its content, apart from insisting that under no circumstances must it stir up divisions in the country. Butler’s singular achievement, and a huge tribute to his parliamentary and personal skills, was to get the legislative show on the road and, by evading, placating and defusing protest, keep it going through to the end.

At INLOGOV we’re hard-wired to sniff out underlying authoritarianism in any central-local relationship, and there were those who saw the 1944 Act as strengthening central control. Perhaps, but if that really were the framers’ objective, they could, like their 1980s’ and subsequent successors, have gone a heck of a lot further. Nor, surely, would they have created an LEA as powerful and potentially bothersome as the London County Council.

The Minister did have “the duty to secure the effective execution by the local authorities, under his control and direction, of the national policy for providing a varied and comprehensive education service in every area”. But she [the Act used entirely male pronouns, for pupils and the Minister, failing to anticipate the first post-war Minister being Ellen Wilkinson] did not provide and equip schools and colleges or employ teachers; that was the LEAs, the county and county borough councils. She did not set curricula or prescribe textbooks; that, at least until 1988, was the teachers.

The fact that easily the biggest section of the Act (Part II) was that setting out the how the new statutory system would be locally administered by the LEAs means, in itself, little: it might be stuffed full of controls and constraints. That’s not, though, how it reads. Each LEA would have an Education Committee of elected councillors, and would appoint a Chief Education Officer to head the salaried officers of the authority. They sound almost like self-contained mini-empires separate from the rest of the local authority, and often were. The LEAs were to build and maintain the county (state) schools and the one-third of schools provided by voluntary, mostly religious, bodies. They would usually appoint and always pay the teachers. They would allocate resources, including staff, buildings, equipment and materials.

It should be emphasised here that none of the terms and concepts mentioned in my opening paragraphs – 11-plus, selection, tripartite system, grammar schools, secondary moderns – appeared per se in the Act. It did require, however, the provision of opportunities for all pupils “in view of their different ages, abilities and aptitudes, and of the different periods for which they may be expected to remain at school”, and the tripartite system of grammar schools for the most able, secondary moderns for the majority, and secondary technical schools for those with a technical or scientific aptitude, was how it came to be interpreted.

Returning to LEAs, they would not have detailed control of the curriculum but were to “contribute towards the spiritual, moral, mental, and physical development of the community by securing that efficient education … shall be available to meet the needs of the population of their area”. They were to provide sufficient places for 5-15 year olds – and for 16-year olds as soon as the further rise in school-leaving age became ‘practicable’, which proved not to be until 1972. Within this framework, LEAs had and exercised in practice considerable autonomy, developing distinctive styles of administration and forms of school organisation, including the pioneering of comprehensive secondary schools.

The one part of the curriculum that was prescribed in the 1944 Act was religious/faith education, as a crucial part of the settlement negotiated between Butler and the mainly Christian church leaders. Like Tony Blair 60 years later, the authors of the 1944 Act – this time definitely including Butler – took the view that religious education was a public good, whose responsibility should be shared between state-run and religious schools, and they legislated an unevenly balanced ‘dual system’ to accommodate it, apparently indefinitely.

Offered the choice of ‘aided’ or ‘controlled’ status, two-thirds of religious schools opted for the former and one-third – far more than expected by either Butler or the Archbishop of Canterbury – for the somewhat greater LEA control and considerably greater cash.  In exchange, all state schools would provide non-denominational religious education, and each school day would begin with an act of collective worship.

Which brings us to Part III of the Act and Independent Schools.  If only from the point of view of my long passed word limit, it’s perhaps a good thing there was no extended debate over whether these, like religious schools, should somehow be integrated into the state system or simply abolished. In truth, there was no debate at all. The sole demanding imposition of Part III was that they be registered – and registered is what they remain today.

game

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

The Housing Acts of 1980: a watershed in housing policy

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Alan Murie and Christopher Watson

The Housing Act 1980 and the Tenants’ Rights etc. (Scotland) Act 1980 mark a watershed in housing policy.  In the aftermath of the First World War and the slogan ‘Homes fit for heroes to live in’ the introduction of exchequer subsidy for new housebuilding in 1919 resulted in sixty years of steady growth of council housing.  Council housing, along with the expansion of home ownership, had transformed the condition of and access to good quality housing.  By the late 1970s some 1 in 3 households were council tenants. But the election of 1979 and the new legislation passed in 1980 saw a change in the long established cross party support for council housing, ended the period of growth in the sector, and heralded a period of deregulation and privatisation.

The Housing Acts operated in the context of reduced public expenditure on housing and introduced the ‘Right to Buy’, the ‘Tenants’ Charter’, a new subsidy system for council housing and changes to the Rent Acts.  They led directly to the decline of council housing, rapid growth in home ownership, a new and enlarged role for housing associations, and an eventual revival of private renting following a century of decline.

The Conservative Manifesto at the General Election of 1979 echoed ‘Homes for heroes’ in its emphasis on ‘Homes of our Own’, ‘The Sale of Council Houses’, and ‘Reviving the Private Rented Sector’.  While the primacy given to home ownership was not new, the specific policies designed to achieve it marked a break with previous policy and were a challenge to local autonomy.

When the Conservative Party won the 1979 election, they saw their housing policies and the ‘right to buy’ in particular as factors contributing to their electoral success.  Throughout the subsequent period the government continued to regard its initial policy stance as an electoral asset.  It was also advantageous fiscally – delivering the largest capital receipts of any privatisation programme: though none of the capital could be spent on replacing the council housing that was sold.

The right to buy in 1980 did not introduce the sale of council houses for the first time as discretionary powers enabling sale had always existed.   These were replaced in 1980 by a statutory RTB.   It applied to almost all secure tenants with three or more years’ tenancy and to almost all properties where the landlord was a council, a new town, or a non-charitable housing association.  A statutory procedure for sale was laid down to limit local variation over implementation and the Secretary of State was given very strong powers to monitor and intervene in local administration.   Generous sale discounts were introduced, rising from 33% of market value to a maximum of 50% depending on the length of tenancy; and these were further increased under later legislation, to 60% for houses and 70% for flats.

The RTB was highly publicised and made more attractive to tenants because of a related policy to steadily increase council rents.  After some initial nervousness on the part of building societies and other lenders, these institutions adopted the RTB with enthusiasm and more than nine out of every ten sales under the scheme were financed with private sector loans.  By 1990 some 1.8 million council, new town and housing association dwellings had been sold into owner occupation in Great Britain and sales continued thereafter, making it the most successful privatisation ever.  With reduced funding for new council housing the sector went into sharp decline.

The 1980 Act was a game changer not only in its own right but also for the future changes it signalled.  Despite many protests, the Act subjugated local government to the will of central government.  In this respect, the government’s approach was brazen, unlike the less transparent later attempts at privatisation in health and education.

The decline in the proportion of council housing from 33% in 1980 to 8% today has speeded the residualisation of the sector, moving council housing towards an American-style welfare housing sector, as intended by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s.  The decline of council housing has been made more dramatic because of the transfer of a large part of its role to housing associations: in many parts of the country, associations now are more important housing providers than local authorities, further weakening the direct role of local government, especially district councils.

But with the combined housing stock of housing associations and local authorities, we still have a social rented sector in the UK which, at 18% of the stock, remains one of the highest in the world and which would now be difficult for governments of a neo-liberal persuasion to further challenge, especially in today’s situation of housing shortage.

The Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 were criticised by some for their continuation of the policy of council house sales but their encouragement of the further transfer of council housing to other registered providers (ie housing associations) has served to protect the provision of social housing, even if at the same time it has further weakened the direct role of local government.  For these reasons, it can be concluded that the long term consequences of the Housing Act 1980 have profoundly changed the role and responsibilities of local government and weakened the position of council housing within the UK housing system.  What remains, however, is a tradition of publicly provided not-for-profit housing and an organisational structure which continues to provide an essential alternative to the private housing sector.

Alan Murie and Chris Watson are former Directors of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Birmingham.  Alan Murie is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Studies and Chris Watson is Honorary Senior Lecturer.  Both are members of the Housing and Communities Research Network in the University’s School of Social Policy.

Direct Payments Act 1996: a legislative game-changer on a slow burn

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Catherine Needham

Some legislative game-changers have a high-profile passage through Parliament, with much media fanfare about how things will never be the same again: gay rights legislation, for example, fits into this category. Other game-changers proceed more quietly, with their immediate implications limited to a relatively small number of people. This latter type can be characterised as ‘valve’ legislation, in the sense that once passed there is no going back, even if this is not fully appreciated at the time.

The Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996 is an example of valve legislation. Its passage followed from the persistent and passionate campaigns of people with disabilities to gain more control over their support. It made legal the transfers of cash to people eligible for local authority funding. Some local authorities had been finding ways to make such payments for years, with a wary glance at the apparent ban on such activity in the National Assistance Act 1948. But the passage of the Act gained little media interest beyond the Society Guardian, and it was assumed by government that the payments would only be taken up by a minority of younger people with physical disabilities. Indeed people over 65 weren’t eligible for the payments. The Act gave local authorities the power but not the duty to grant the payments, meaning that access to them was heavily dependent on a supportive social services department.

Nearly twenty years later the English government is committed to getting a direct payment or managed budget (where the local authority or third party holds the money on your behalf) to 70 per cent of people receiving local authority-funded social care – more if possible. In a succession of modifications to the law and its regulations, direct payments are now expected to be the default funding mechanism for people with physical disabilities, learning disabilities, older people and people using mental health services, and are available to carers. They have expanded to parents with disabled children and are being proposed for children with special educational needs and for adoptive parents. They are being introduced for aspects of NHS care as personal health budgets, which constitutes a radical change to health funding albeit on a small scale at present. The policy has cross-party support, being pursued as assiduously by the Coalition government as by their New Labour predecessors.

Why was the 1996 legislation able to trigger such a systemic change? Here are four suggestions.

  1. It was a simple idea: give the money straight to the user. Although the implementation has been enormously complex, it was an easy idea to explain, helping its proliferation and popularity
  2. It fitted the political mood, both to expand choice to people as consumers of public services (seeing that as the best way to improve outcomes) and to break down barriers for people with disabilities on rights basis. Governments since the 1980s have promoted both strands of legislation, even though there are tensions between them.
  3. It didn’t seem to cost anything, since money was simply being allocated differently. This aspect of the policy appealed to the Conservative government that first introduced the policy and to subsequent New Labour and Coalition governments. It is particularly appealing in a period of public spending austerity. Evidence for cost-savings has been harder to establish in practice, however.
  4. It created a wedge that could be used by policy entrepreneurs to push for further change. Once the principle was established that disabled adults under 65 were eligible for such payments it was very hard to argue on a principled basis that they should not be extended to other people in receipt of local authority support. Organisations such as In Control pushed at the boundaries of the legislation to broaden its range and built national alliances of supporters to agitate for its extension.

All these factors created a permissive legislative and policy context in which devolved budgets have come to be seen as the way to respond to a whole range of social issues. However behind the simplicity and potency of the idea lie two challenges which have not yet been resolved, and will continue to pose issues for future government.

The first is implementation. The simple insights of personal budgets and direct payments have proved very difficult to apply to a hugely complex, variable and underfunded social care system. Personal health budgets may help to integrate health and social care provision but it is difficult to do this when social care funding is means-tested and health funding is not.

Second, there is a normative challenge: if people are better at spending their own money than the state is at spending it on their behalf, what is the state for (aside perhaps from channelling money from rich consumers to poor ones)? This vision of a voucher state has long been cherished by some on the right of the political spectrum. Raising questions about the need for a welfare state was not the vision of any of the advocates of the Direct Payments Act 1996 but such debates affirm that the full consequence of that Act are not yet known.

needham

Catherine Needham is Reader in Public Policy and Public Management at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, and is developing research around public service reform and policy innovation. Her recent work has focused on co-production and personalization, examining how those approaches are interpreted and applied in frontline practice. Her most recent book, published by the Policy Press in 2011, is entitled, Personalising Public Services: Understanding the Personalisation Narrative.