You say ringfencing, I say earmarking: those billions of local authority ‘hoarded’ reserves

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Chris Game

A welcome feature of Communities and Local Government Secretary Greg Clark’s early months in office were his obvious efforts to be less interventionist and provocatively critical of local government than his predecessor, Eric Pickles. It’s not taken long, though, for it to become clear that he’s not that cuddly, and that the ghost of Pickles Past still haunts the DCLG’s Marsham Street corridors.

In early October (though largely ignored until recently by the UK media), in a party conference-pandering move straight from the Pickles playbook, Clark enthusiastically endorsed the Government’s plan to amend pensions regulations and procurement guidelines – the aim being to ban councils declining on ethical grounds to invest in or trade with companies involved, for instance, in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products, and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

So, come November’s Spending Review, it was more disappointing than surprising to hear the Communities Secretary not so much echo as anticipate George Osborne’s injunctions to local authorities to make good their grant losses by drawing on the billions of revenue reserves they’d built up – precisely as Eric Pickles was wont to do each budget-making season.

Indeed, the DCLG furnished the Chancellor – and, of course, the media – with what he deemed the convincing evidence of councils’ ability to do so, in the form of updated revenue expenditure and financing statistics (pp. 12-13, Table 6).  “Today’s figures show how they are well placed to … play their part in dealing with the deficit …, with local authorities holding £22.5 billion in non-ringfenced reserves – up 170% in real terms over the last 15 years. Now is the time to make efficient use of their assets and resources to provide the services local people want to see.” (my emphasis).

It was noticeable that Clark used neither of the inflammatory H-words – in contrast to Pickles, who in such situations was unable to stop himself sneering at the ‘hypocrisy’ of councils pleading poverty as they annually ‘hoarded’ their billions of cash reserves. But then he didn’t need to; Pickles’ media-training is by now well embedded, certainly in the tabloids.

Council reserves 1

The BBC was a touch more restrained, but statistically, at least in the East of England, about as useful as a punctured condom. “Councils across the East of England are sitting on reserves of £470m, a BBC East investigation has found”. Which might have been fleetingly interesting, had the ‘councils’ not comprised an apparently arbitrary selection of “all unitary, county and district authorities” from the East of England region and beyond, and had the figures borne any close correspondence to those just released by the DCLG, on which the ‘investigation’ claimed to be based.

Normally, none of this slapdashery would matter much, apart from irritating any viewers who resent being manipulated into being outraged at some scary big numbers and alleged mismanagement that they have no means of judging for themselves. In this case, though, it came to the attention of Councillor David Finch, Conservative Leader of Essex County Council, who understandably took the whole thing quite personally and proceeded ‘do a Hudspeth’.

INLOGOV blog readers may recall my recent account of the revealing correspondence between David Cameron and Ian Hudspeth, Conservative Leader of the PM’s own Oxfordshire County Council, in which the latter patiently and at length put the PM right on a number of misunderstandings he’d revealed about the county’s financial management and indeed about the impact of his own government’s policies. I sub-titled the exchange ‘the gift that keeps on giving’ and, although this wasn’t the form I anticipated a further instalment taking, it certainly fits the bill.

C’llr Finch had been one of numerous council leaders, in addition to the Local Government Association (LGA) itself, who protested back in November that:

“Whitehall should not be dictating how we should be managing our finances and reserves. Holding reserves is simply prudent and effective financial management and is done to ensure that in the event of an emergency or a major incident we can react without impacting other services.”

Politically if not personally, the Essex leader must have had a trying Christmas, not least through local MPs and their constituents having gained the impression that swilling around County Hall was not floodwater, as elsewhere in the country, but oodles of revenue reserves. He therefore wrote Cameron a three-page letter – described on his blog as ‘polite’ and by others as ‘hard-hitting’ and ‘scathing’ – setting out for the PM a few home truths. There were details of the council’s past savings, future enforced cuts, and ongoing budget pressures, but you sensed that, even more than these specifics, what really irked C’llr Finch was the flak he’d had to take about the council’s alleged reserves:

“I continue to be alarmed at central government misunderstanding, or even ignorance, about council reserves. Essex MPs have been told by the DCLG that the council is sitting on £300million of unringfenced reserves. We actually only have about £60million. The reality is we have just 23 days of available funding in our general reserve.” (my emphasis)

Like Hudspeth in Oxfordshire, the Essex leader is concerned more broadly about what he terms the “giant disconnect emerging between central government and local government” concerning local financial management (my emphasis). But the reserves issue has specific figures attached – a £240 million gap is a big misunderstanding by any standards – which means that the Essex section of the relevant DCLG table enables us to work out what’s probably been going on.

Council reserves 2

It would seem that the DCLG failed properly to explain, or the MPs failed to grasp, that, near-synonymous though the terms ‘ringfenced’ and ‘earmarked’ may be in any everyday conversation in which they may happen to appear, in local finance lingo they are fundamentally different. The DCLG distinguishes between local authorities’ ringfenced reserves, allocated specifically to schools or public health (though not housing, which is completely separate), and non-ringfenced, which are the rest.

Large local authorities especially, however, earmark often a large proportion of their non-ringfenced (sometimes labelled ‘usable’) reserves for a range of different but particular purposes. Like any prudent budgeter, they set money aside for future spending, rather than having to find it all when it suddenly becomes due by the end of the month. Common earmarked reserves are for financing future capital investment and major repairs, for PFI (Private Finance Initiative) payments on long-term projects, to cover claims made under a council’s self-insurance arrangements, to enable future savings targets to be delivered, and, not least in recent years, to safeguard against future years’ grant funding reductions.

The non-earmarked remainder – under one-fifth in Essex CC’s case – goes into the council’s General Fund, or C’llr Finch’s ‘general reserve’, which will be used to balance the budget if it’s overspent at the end of the year, but, in the meantime and more topically, will be used to pay for sudden and large cost pressures – like damage caused by exceptionally severe weather conditions.

David Cameron, who either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about these not terribly subtle ringfencing and earmarking distinctions, seems happy to fire off petulant and factually inaccurate letters to his County Council leader, and to have his MPs similarly badger their own councils.

Clark’s case, though, is different. He certainly does understand, not least because a CIPFA survey of local authority reserves only last summer spelt out the message in detailed clarity. The numerous “recent changes in local authority funding have significantly increased the level of risk being managed by local authorities” (p.2). The radical transformations in service provision on which ministers are so keen have major one-off costs, including redundancy costs, that have to be budgeted for (p.3). “Using reserves purely to support ongoing expenditure merely postpones the need for cuts and makes those cuts more difficult to deliver when needed …” (p.4).

Council reserves 3

Above all, there were the statistical findings of the CIPFA survey – that, almost precisely reflecting the situation in Essex, nearly four-fifths of councils’ reserves were not being either mindlessly or politically ‘hoarded’, but were already earmarked for specific, and often Government-created, purposes. To accuse ministers of ‘going native’ is almost a ‘Yes, Minister’ cliché and in Clark’s case probably unfair, but he certainly doesn’t seem as cuddly today as he did six months ago.

 

Chris Game - pic

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.

What’s the value of loyalty?

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Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV

In a week in which Jeremy Corbyn has sacked a Shadow Cabinet member and the party spokesman on Europe for ‘disloyalty’ and David Cameron has announced he’ll allow his Cabinet to actively campaign against his desired outcome in the referendum on EU membership – I am moved to ponder the meaning and value of loyalty.

These musings have been prompted by the spectacle of the someone who has made a career of being a maverick requiring unswerving and unquestioning loyalty from his team.

Loyalty is widely perceived as a virtue. It seems to embody resilience, consistency and selflessness and to bring with it an aura of warmth derived from a sense of togetherness and mutual trust. Beneath that soft and fluffy exterior, loyalty drives and maintains very complex political and organizational machinery. That is demonstrated loyalty is withdrawn by followers which not only renders leaders powerless but also delivers a profound and negative judgment on their fitness for leadership. David Cameron’s decision not to enforce the traditional expectations of collective Cabinet responsibilities may be viewed as preemptive measure to avoid that that judgment being delivered on his leadership in relation to the EU issue. The extent to which he has been threatened into making such a move suggests that the followers, not the leader, have set the collective standards of loyalty – and that they are very low.

Leaders who inspires loyalty gain not only the warm glow of approval from their followers but also significant extensions to their power and influence. This may be through benign mechanisms such as the creation of a compelling vision but the extension of power through loyalty can have a darker side. The loyal fixer or enforcer who says and does nasty things to achieve the leader’s goals while protecting the leader from responsibility for the damage caused is part of the standard dramatis personae of both local and national politics.

Clearly, loyalty can be both a force for good or ill. Blind or unquestioning loyalty is has been a contributing factor in failures in leadership, governance and decision making in many types of organization – including governments.   If leaders surround themselves with loyal supporters, who will ask the difficult questions? Who will put principle before loyalty and argue for what they believe to be right even if it runs counter to the beliefs and wishes of the leader?

Are our expectation of loyalty in politics unreasonably high? Is loyalty to an individual leader, an idea, or a political party, based on deeply rooted, or even visceral emotions, governing the thoughts and behaviours of the loyal or is it the balance remaining when self-interest has been set off against the interests of a group, in the contested space between ideology and pragmatism?

Does this concession simply demonstrate that loyalty in politics is, of necessity, conditional on there being sufficient congruence between the leader and the followers? Is it possible, or even desirable for politicians to be unconditionally loyal to a leader, a party or an idea?

Perhaps the answer lies is not in loyalty but consistency? If Jeremy Corbyn made a career of being a principled maverick, defying the party whip on hundreds of occasions, then he can hardly demand that his followers give him the unswerving and even unquestioning loyalty he so vocally denied his leaders in the past. David Cameron set out a clear expectation of Cabinet unity on the ‘in-out’ referendum last year. This year he has relieved his Cabinet colleagues of that responsibility. Both, though their inconsistency, have devalued the currency of loyalty and both are likely to suffer negative consequences – not least in the damage to their personal reputations.

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Learning by Doing in Combined Authorities

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Maximilian Lempriere

At a workshop hosted in early November by INLOGOV, City-REDI and The Public Services Academy at the University of Birmingham practitioners and academics from the world of local government came together to share experiences on the current Combined Authorities and city-region devolution agenda. In the third of a series of posts Max Lempriere, a doctoral researcher studying the formation of combined authorities, reflects on the days major talking points. 

 Policy makers may dislike ambiguity and flexibility, but devolution to Combined Authorities brings with it a fair degree of both. There are so many questions that will only be answered as the result of experience and so many variations in configuration, governance and circumstances between Combined Authorities that no progress could be made without it.  The ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ is up for negotiation on a localised basis, bringing both benefits and pitfalls. The question is, then, how can we ensure that we maximise the benefits but avoid the pitfalls?

The precise answer to that question is unknown – a pitfall in itself – but leaders in all Combined Authorities need to be willing to look, listen and learn from their own experience and that of others if they are to strike the right balance. Combined Authority leaders need to be willing and able to share and learn from best practice, whether internal or external.

When looking to other Combined Authorities they must remain sensitive to local contexts. Compare those in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, for example. The latter has historic, clearly defined and coterminous economic and political geographies that lend themselves well to the Combined Authority model, whereas the former has a less clearly defined economic geography and lacks congruence when it comes to political geography. Learning to co-ordinate, collaborate and muddle-through across Combined Authorities is no easy task when there are such differences between them, especially if the implications of actions aren’t immediately clear. Their innovative nature and the variety of contexts in which they are found means that any initial institutional design will only ever be ‘good-enough’.

As a result there will have to be a fair degree of ‘learning by doing’, where the formal and informal rules of the game emerge as decision makers tackle different  challenges and obstacles.

However, precise institutional arrangements, devolved powers and funding responsibilities differ from one Combined Authority to another, reflecting as they do local economic and political geographies. The Mayor in Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, for example, will have more powers over housing that their counterpart in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, in another example, is currently the only Combined Authority to have autonomy over its £6bn share of NHS spending. Understanding common ground for mutual learning will therefore be difficult because it doesn’t just require political and managerial leaders to think in terms of what works but – perhaps more importantly –  what doesn’t work when translated into different  contexts. The danger, as increasingly seems to be the case, is that Combined Authorities look at what the Greater Manchester Combined Authority is doing well and try emulate that.

This kind of learning doesn’t just need to occur within or between Combined Authorities themselves. Central government must be willing and able to learn from experience on the ground, whilst remaining sensitive to local contexts. Learning from past Combined Authority successes and failures should feed not just into designs for future authorities but should form the basis of continuous, on-going institutional reform – a similar process of ‘muddling through’ and respecting ‘good-enough’ design – to fine-tune existing devolution arrangements to ensure maximum public and added value. Central Government has certainly showed a willingness to look, listen and learn itself in the case of the GMCA – shown in ongoing rounds of devolution deals, the latest of which was announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Spending Review in November 2015. The challenge is to make sure it does so with other Combined Authorities in a way that respects their successes and failures on their own merits and avoids using the GMCA as a ‘yard-stick’ against which to judge.

An effective way to encourage these kind of local and multi-level learning processes is to incorporate them into the institutional design in the first instance. Formal arrangements to encourage inter and intra-institutional feedback – whether through scrutiny arrangements, joint workshops or regular meetings of officials – can play a crucial role in facilitating feedback and fostering a culture that encourages learning, experimentation and innovation.

But how to overcome the challenges of learning across differing contexts and geographies? Part of the work that INLOGOV, City-REDI and others have been doing is directed towards understanding both the successes and the difficulties experienced by Combined Authorities with a sensitivity to local contexts. Academic insight and the application of theory to practice have potentially crucial roles in cross-border learning of this kind. Situating information-providers and independent assessors within the institutional arrangement will allow decision makers to see more clearly points of mutual comparison.

Practitioners should be willing to learn, be sensitive to what is and isn’t possible in different contexts and embrace ambiguity. Combined Authorities are flexible and incomplete. How we work towards completeness depends on our willingness to learn from mistakes, appreciate best practice and recognise that it may not always be the best idea to copy Manchester.

This series of workshops is being supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Local Government Association and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) and is led by Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV and SOLACE’s Research Facilitator for Local Government.

lempriere

Max Lempriere is a final year PhD researcher at the Institute for Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include institutional design, local government policy making, devolution, urban planning and sustainable development.

Being able to say ‘I’m sorry’ is a sign of strength – not of weakness

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Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV

Yesterday was a remarkable day in many ways. We heard a passionate but thoughtful debate in the House of Commons.  There wasn’t much of the usual ‘yah boo’ and name calling. Some very good speeches, including by Margaret Becket and Hilary Benn reminded us of the power of argument.  They also reminded me that, while there is so much to criticize in the way this country is led, I am lucky to live in a democracy where a Prime Minister cannot rely on positional power but who needs to persuade MPs both of the moral and strategic arguments for the things he wants to do. In spite of the common perception of MPs as powerless lobby fodder, it was clear yesterday that many were demonstrably acting according to their consciences, led by their reason. In many ways it was a good day for democracy, respect for differing opinions and the exercise of collective leadership.

In other ways yesterday demonstrated some of the ways in which passion, conscience and reason can be subverted to justify the worst possible behaviour.  The problem of bullying, of all sorts of people, in all walks of life, has become part of our understanding of how the world works. Perhaps the word ‘bully’ has lost some of its power because we have applied it so often to such a wide range of behaviours.  Maybe we should move away from the generic to the specific and talk about the terrible psychological damage done by ‘insults’, ‘assaults’ and ‘attacks’.  The old saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’ is the opposite of the truth. Sometimes words hurt because they exclude – ‘you aren’t one of us’, they vilify – ‘you are one of them’ or they threaten – damage to reputations and careers.

We often look to leaders to set standards, to model good behaviour and hold bullies to account. It’s hard for them to do that when they indulge in that sort of behaviour themselves or fail to deal with it in others.  Jeremy Corbyn seems to me to be a gentle, principled man but some of his more extremely left wing colleagues are using his popular support to justify criminal behaviour.  To what extent is this his responsibility?  He is the leader of his party so it’s absolutely his responsibility. Modelling good behaviour is a necessary but not sufficient element of effective  leadership. Action is also required.  If Jeremy Corbyn’s sins are of omission, David Cameron’s are definitely of commission. His words about ‘terrorist sympathisers’ makes him a bully because he was seeking both to exclude and to vilify.  We’d find that behaviour reprehensible in a child in the the playground and it is utterly unacceptable in the holder of the highest political office.

However, leaders are only human. Everyone makes mistakes under pressure, even leaders.  Its what they do then that indicates the extent to which they are really good leaders.  Willingness to admit mistakes and to apologise for them demonstrates self-knowledge and humility and those are very attractive attributes in a leader. If someone says they were wrong, we’ll trust them next time they tell us they really are right. If someone tells us they are sorry when they are in the wrong we’ll trust them next time they say they really are in the right.

Refusal to admit mistakes or to apologise for them undermines our trust in leaders. It also give followers a clear message ‘Look at me…I bullied and I got away with it. You can bully and get away with it too’. Nice work Mr Cameron. You won the vote but you diminished your moral authority. Moral authority is the currency of leadership and you’ve squandered yours in support of a vote you would have won anyway. Will that be remembered long after we’ve finished bombing in Syria?

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

The Cameron-Hudspeth letters: the gift that keeps on giving

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Chris Game

‘The gift that keeps on giving’ – originally a US 1920s marketing slogan for a new phonograph/gramophone, it’s since been applied to anything from magazine subscriptions to sexually transmitted diseases. And now, for the distraction and delectation of a local government world waiting anxiously for the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, we have the almost-too-good-to-be-true exchange of letters between David Cameron and Ian Hudspeth, Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council.

It’s just conceivable – though hard seriously to imagine how – that the correspondence might have remained private. Even leaked out in mid-September, when the exchange took place, it might have been lost in the mass coverage of Corbyn and the party conferences. But, thanks largely to the media’s hesitancy to touch anything even vaguely technical to do with local government finance, it’s oozed out almost day by day. Well into its second week as I write (November 15th), it’s still exuding, but is surely already established as the classic case of a PM going out of his way, and possibly beyond his remit, to demonstrate how little he comprehends about the consequences of his own government’s policies – until, of course, the next case comes along.

The sequence of events has been as follows:

September 14th – Cameron [MP for Witney, Oxfordshire] writes on Commons notepaper to Ian Hudspeth at his home address, detailing his disappointment “at the long list of suggestions floated in the [County Council’s 2016-17 Budget] briefing note to make significant cuts in frontline services – from elderly day centres, to libraries, to museums.” He also offers “to initiate a further dialogue with advisers in the No10 Policy Unit and yourself – please contact Sheridan Westlake [PM’s Special Adviser – No10 email address given], if you wish to take this up.”

September 22nd – Hudspeth replies with detailed 6-page refutation, and accepts the Sheridan invitation.

November 6th – Oxford Mail’s Matt Oliver writes front-page story based on the gaping divergence of views and statistics revealed in the evidently leaked letters. BBC 1’s Breakfast programme leads on the story, but without crediting the Mail, for which it later apologises.

Game

Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) publishes, as part of its budget consultation, some “more background information to help people understand our budget position” – including a funding graph, showing how (contrary to Cameron’s assertion) the council’s “overall funding is going down, and the balance between local and government funding [of local government] fundamentally changing”.

November 7th – 9th – Despite the BBC coverage, the story is largely ignored by the national media over the weekend, though picked up on the Monday by the Mirror and on subsequent days by the broadsheets.

November 11th – The Guardian’s George Monbiot writes the first really detailed and documented story – “The PM hasn’t the faintest idea how deep his cuts go. This letter proves it”.

November 12th – Labour finally realises this could be not just a ‘PM clueless’ or ‘PM’s hypocrisy’ story, but a ‘PM flouts Constitution’ one. Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, Jonathan Ashworth, writes to Cabinet Secretary asking for a ruling whether Cameron, in apparently conflating his roles as minister and constituency MP, has broken the ministerial code. The code says: “Ministers are provided with facilities at government expense to enable them to carry out their official duties. These facilities should not generally be used for party or constituency activities.”

As I said, it’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving. Stand by for a Clintonesque Lewinsky defence: “It depends what the meaning of ‘generally’ is”. This, though, is a local government blog, interested primarily in the two letters’ core contents. It’s not easy to summarise Hudseth’s long, detailed missive – explaining, as Monbiot put it, each issue gently, as if to a slow learner – but I’ll try, using the leader’s own assertion-refutation format, to convey something of both its explicit substance and (in italics) its implicit spirit. It’s also worth adding, that, according to the DCLG English Indices of Multiple Deprivation 2015, Oxfordshire is ranked 9th least deprived of 152 upper-tier local authorities (File 11).

Assertion: “Oxfordshire’s spending has actually increased in recent years …”

Refutation: Only if you believe your government’s own ‘spending power’-driven propaganda, ignore the council’s additional responsibilities – particularly public health and the new burdens related to adult social care – and forget that additional Better Care Funding for adult social care is not new money, but has been at the expense of funding for NHS services (see also https://inlogov.com/2015/01/21/the-fairness-or-otherwise-of-the-2015-16-local-government-finance-settlement/).

OCC’s employment (excluding schools) has fallen by 37.4% since April 2010; and, according to the DCLG’s own figures, grants from central government (excluding housing benefit and other service-specific grants) have been cut by 36.3% overall in real terms, and local authorities’ total revenues have fallen by 19.9%.

Assertion: OCC is not following the best practice of other Conservative councils.

Refutation: You seem to have no better understanding of the circumstances of the area you represent and of your electors than you do of local government finance. OCC’s reducing budget starts out from a low base – under £300 per capita from the UK taxpayer (excluding fire services), compared to an upper-tier/unitary average of around £500, and £900+ for authorities such as Westminster. If the Council Tax referendum threshold had permitted us to make the planned modest increase of 3 – 3.75% over the decade, we would be facing £50 million less of required savings.

As a thriving economy, growing more quickly than London since the recession, our overall population is projected to rise over 13% between 2009 and 2020. The elderly population, who generate the largest social care demand, will grow from under 15,000 to over 20,000 in the present decade and more rapidly still thereafter, generating cost pressures of £30 million in the annual budget. The other big area of cost growth has been children’s social care. We currently have 574 children in care at an average cost of £49,000 p.a., and relevant budgets have increased by 60%, from £40 million in 2009-10 to £64 million.

Assertion: The £204 million your briefing note said had been taken out of the budget since 2010 is a cumulative figure that includes efficiency savings from cutting waste.

Refutation: (No italics required) “I cannot emphasise enough that £204 million is NOT a cumulative figure. Rather, it is the amount we have saved annually by 2014/15. The cumulative savings since 2010/11 are in fact £626 million.”

Assertion: I would have hoped that Oxfordshire would be following the best practice of Conservative councils across the country in making back-office savings and protecting the frontline.

Refutation: You really don’t get it, do you! Our significant savings over recent years have included taking as much from the back-office as possible through our in-house shared service arrangements. From this July, ongoing savings in this area will be secured via our new partnership with Hampshire County Council. In addition, we have undertaken a major review of our management structures across the council since 2010, making significant cost savings through cutting 40% of our two top tiers of management and 50% of our third-tier managers.

I trust you’ll have got the gist; if not, there’s another five pages or so in much the same vein. My guess is that, while he may just keep his place on the Camerons’ Christmas card list, Mr Hudspeth probably won’t be joining them for New Year’s Eve karaoke and ‘dad-dancing’.

 

Chris Game - pic

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.

Pro-Christian, Anti-Muslim or Anti-Refugee? What is behind European politicians’ statements favouring Christian refugees?

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Vivien Lowndes and Roda Maziva

In the midst of what has come to be known as the worst refugee crisis of our generation, the wrench­ing images of a toddler lying dead on a Turk­ish beach emerged as evidence of a reality that cannot just be captured in words. This has seen many calling for the need to shift the debate away from borders and security and towards asylum, solidarity and responsibility. Yet, in the midst of this humanitarian talk, a new rhetoric is emerging which suggests that the lives of some refugees have more value than others. In particular, the anti-Muslim rhetoric by some politicians in Australia and other European countries such as France, Slovakia, Poland, the UK and many others have widely been judged as discriminatory and a perversion of liberal values especially hospitality, compassion and inclusion.

The Polish Prime Minister, Ewa Kopacz was cited as saying “Christians who are being persecuted in a barbaric fashion in Syria deserve Christian countries like Poland to act fast to help them”. The former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott had reportedly been under pressure from the Coalition Members of parliament who pressed for the need to prioritize Christian refugees from the Middle East as they were perceived to be the “most persecuted in the world” and therefore “the most needy”. In France, a Member of Parliament and Mayor, Yves Nicolin, was heavily criticized for vowing to only accept refugees in his town on the condition that they were Christians and not ‘disguised terrorists’. While such sentiments may imply a welcome for Christian refugees, there seems to be a gap between rhetoric and practice in the absence of a well-defined protection plan or selection process, not least because distinguishing between Muslim and Christian refugees is not actually a clear-cut process.

Our research with Pakistani Christians suggests that processes to determine refugee status do not map onto any clear distinction between welcome Christians and unwelcome Muslims.  Indeed, Christian refugees from Muslim-majority countries face special difficulties in putting forward their asylum case, and in negotiating community relationships.  Like thousands of Christians fleeing war and Islamic State in Syria, Pakistani Christians come to the UK under fear and trauma. They are seeking to escape discrimination, persecution and harsh blasphemy penalties in the context of the Pakistani government’s limited action to prevent religiously-motivated violence. For those who have fled and managed to reach the UK for safety and protection, arrival in the UK is not the end to their traumatic experiences, as our interviews, focus groups and case reviews demonstrate.

Ironically, Pakistani Christians’ experience of seeking asylum in the UK is characterised by a putative Islamophobia.  Like Pakistani Muslims, they are frequently received with suspicion as an unwelcome population of a particular ethnic and national origin, with an ascribed Islamic religious identity. In the context of Islamaphobia,  perceptions of Muslim extremism are associated with particular bodies and nationalities. Thus, the conflation of nationality and religion has seen Pakistani Christian asylum seekers being invariably treated as suspects first and ‘welcome-Christians’ second (if at all).  The assumption seems to be that all migrants from Muslim majority countries, by virtue of their place of origin, are potentially dangerous and therefore unwanted.  The refugees we worked with were traumatised by the experience of double-discrimination, often backed up by actual or threatened violence – in Pakistan as Christians and then in the UK as presumed-Muslims.

In seeking asylum on religious grounds, our respondents reported that their testimonies often fell foul of understandings of Christianity that were ill-suited to the Pakistani context from which they had come.  In addition, our respondents alleged that Home Office translators of similar national heritage, but from the Muslim majority, were ignorant of appropriate language to describe Christian experiences, and even undermined or manipulated accounts in a discriminatory fashion.

Our research raises serious questions of whether the current Christian/Muslim binary discourse could simply be a political cover for both Islamophobia and refugee-phobia.  Such rhetoric needs to be seen in the context of a highly controversial political debate over the policy measures that Europe should adopt in order to protect the humanity of thousands of uninvited, yet desperate migrants arriving daily on its shores.  Not all refugees arriving from the Middle East are Muslims. Christian refugees arrive daily from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iran.  Among Syrian refugees, there are also other religious minorities including Druze and Yazidis.

The unfolding refugee crisis has been characterized by the European Union’s struggle to get its member states on board to address what is, in reality, a shared problem.  The UK has refused to engage with the transnational project of coordinating access and settlement, yet against the backdrop of an overwhelmingly expression of sympathy for the refugees from its publics. The Home Secretary, Theresa May’s infamous speech to the Conservative conference in October 2015 stated that a ‘chosen few’ Syrian refugees would be identified in refugee camps through the UN High Commission for Refugees.  They would then be processed under conditions which spell out the point that those who benefit are the lucky recipients of a gracious favour rather than a right under international humanitarian law.

The British government, to its credit, has not proposed any religious selection criteria in its (highly restrictive) refugee policy.  But its intention to take refugees directly from camps in Syria could have serious side effects.  Due to religious discrimination in Syria, this policy may be particularly disadvantageous to refugees from non-Muslim backgrounds.  One of our research participants, with extensive experience of working with Christian asylum seekers from Muslim majority countries, explained that:

‘The way the UK government plans to get refugees from Syria is very likely to be detrimental to Christians. Because they plan to get people from the refugee camps, as Christians don’t feel safe in a refugee camp, so they tend to hide, seek for routes to escape where possible or just stay where they are no matter how hard the situation is for them. So they’re among the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, but they would actually be missed by the government’s approach’

In addition, the Director of the Migrants Rights Network has pointed out that the system that the UK has put in place represents a sub-standard version of refugee protection as temporary status. The future of all Syrian refugees largely depends on ‘safe return reviews’. This in turn leaves government authorities with the power to repatriate Syrian refugees whenever it is deemed safe to do so.

Our research suggests that the term ‘Muslim’ is increasingly being used as synonym for ‘Refugees’ or ‘Migrants’ or ‘Unwanted persons’, especially in the case of the Western member states that are either unwilling to admit refugees of whatever faith or seek to minimise the numbers of refugees they can settle into their territories. We have also found that expressing a preference for Christian refugees may simply be a way of deflecting responsibility for refugees in general, rather than reflecting any serious engagement with the complex experience of Christians fleeing the Middle East. These types of policy pronouncements are actually a disservice to refugees of all religious backgrounds.  Religion should play no part in the selection of refugees (directly or indirectly), but asylum claims based upon religious persecution need to be taken seriously.

The authors Vivien Lowndes (INLOGOV, University of Birmingham) and Roda Madziva (University of Nottingham) and  are researching the experience of asylum seekers as part of a Leverhulme funded programme ‘Making Science Public: Opportunities and Challenges’, led by the University of Nottingham.

Vivien Lowndes photo

Professor Vivien Lowndes is involved in research, teaching and knowledge transfer on local governance and public services. She is particular interested in partnerships, citizen participation, and gender issues. Currently Vivien is working on the development of Combined Authorities in the context of devolution, local government responses to austerity, Police and Crime Commissioners’ gender policies, and the use of evidence in migration policy. With colleagues at INLOGOV, she is also engaged in comparative research analysing innovative governance institutions in the UK and Brazil.

roda

Roda Madziva is a Research Fellow working on the use of evidence in public policy as part of a Leverhulme funded programme, ‘Making Science Public: Opportunities and Challenges’, led by the University of Nottingham.