Pie Fight

Home and away

While feminism has had a fair amount of success in the public sphere, not nearly enough has changed in the private sphere, argues some damn harpy at American Prospect. She's right, of course: for women, increased work opportunities in the private sphere are still trumped by continuing work commitments at home. In the conflict between public work and private work, the former continues to predominate. Only for women, of course. 

Competition as a shaper of the provision of welfare services

Does cutting taxes for the rich make the rich worse off? As Mark Kleiman says,

If public expenditure is largely on things consumed non-competitively, such as health and safety, while private expenditure is largely on things consumed competitively, then cutting taxes for the rich won't even make the rich better off.

Any quality but inequality

At CT, a basically civil discussion of inequality, mostly of the poverty kind.

CSA

The Guardian gets letters, including this one:

The deadbeat dad is a feminist myth - the CSA was founded on that myth. Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherlessness, but it is not the fault of the fathers who are excluded from their children's lives, nor of the mothers who deny contact.

It is, rather, the consequence of the rapid growth in the last 40 years of an immense state machinery of child protection, child support and, most of all, a clandestine legislature which have together undermined the role of the father and replaced him with benefits.

The majority of fathers want to be fully involved responsible parents; in the US 90% of fathers with joint custody pay all child support ordered, but only 44% pay when visitation rights are denied. In this country, a system which financially rewards mothers who deny contact and demands payment even from fathers who share parenting responsibilities equally has achieved a compliance rate of only 13% (2003-04).

Do the poor get as good care from the NHS as the middle class?

According to a research fellow at IPPR, there are some surprising inequities in the NHS's universal service:

You are 20% less likely to have a hip replacement if you are from the lowest socio-economic group. People with learning disabilities or mental health problems are less likely to access screening and blood pressure or cholesterol checks. These compound health inequalities that can reduce life expectancy by seven years, depending on where you live.

Many middle-class, educated patients have skills to navigate the system and communicate with doctors more effectively. They have better access to information on self-care and make healthy choices in their lives. So could spreading choice break this pattern and improve equality of access to health and care?

Hmm, choice the salvation of the less informed? How's that gonna work?

London pilots on choice were provided with advisers who helped them through the process, provided information and organised free transport to their provider of choice. The result? Much greater equality of choice, and fears of worsening inequalities assuaged.

Awesome. By somehow universalising informed choice, we can reduce inequities in the healthcar system. Now all we have to do is have the political will. And that'll last a long time, won't it? Does "not even till the pilot programme is over" count as a long time?

But before the pilot-evaluation contracts were signed, the government announced a national rollout of choice at the point of GP referral - advisers and transport would not be funded. The purpose of choice is now the creation of a market of providers, rather than the empowerment of disadvantaged patients. What should have been a progressive policy looks likely to leave disadvantaged patients further behind.

NCB roundup

Employment

Young people from Indian, Chinese, Caribbean and African families are more likely to have entered the middle-class jobs market by getting jobs as professionals or managers than working-class white young people, according to research by Lucinda Platt of the University of Essex that was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. (Guardian, 14 Nov 2005, p13; Independent, 14 Nov 2005, p9, p33; Mail, 14 Nov 2005, p30; Times, 14 Nov 2005, p27; Sunday Times, 13 Nov 2005, p3)

Fathers

Research by the Citizens Advice Bureau suggests that only 17 per cent of working men who are eligible for the statutory two weeks' paid paternity leave, take the time off. Many men are unaware of the 15-week notice period required by employers. CAB is calling for the notice period to be reduced, but the DTI says that 15 weeks is necessary to allow employers time to arrange cover. (Telegraph, 17 Nov 2005, p15; Times, 17 Nov 2005, p14)

Tony Blair said the Child Support Agency was "not properly suited to carry out its task" of distributing child maintenance payments. He told the Commons that solutions were being sought urgently, provoking speculation that the agency could be abolished. The CSA costs £330 million a year to run and has been plagued with problems since the Tories set it up in 1993. Writing in the Guardian (18 Nov), Polly Toynbee argues that from the time they separate every father should be forced to hand over 15 per cent of his income directly to the mother to support their children. She adds that among all the blame being doled out about the running of the CSA, how about blaming the 'won't pay fathers'. (Express, 17 Nov 2005, p27; Guardian, 17 Nov 2005, p4; Independent, 17 Nov 2005, p19; Mail, 17 Nov 2005, p22; Mirror, 17 Nov 2005, p11; Sun, 17 Nov 2005, p8; Times, 17 Nov 2005, p26; Guardian, 18 Nov 2005, p31)

Genetics

Ann Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley, has called for a ban on marriage between first cousins in the Pakistani community.  Mrs Cryer's comments came after an investigation by BBC Newsnight claimed that children born in this community account for 30 per cent of British children with recessive disorders, despite representing only 3-4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide. Dr Peter Corry, a consultant paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, said the hospital saw a disproportionately high rate of recessive genetic illnesses. (Guardian, 16 Nov 2005, p7; Telegraph, 16 Nov 2005, p9)

Jail bait
Treating young offenders as adult criminals makes them more likely to re-offend and is a waste of taxpayers' money, according to a report from the Barrow Cadbury Commission. The report says that channelling resources towards keeping young offenders away from older criminals already in the system would be more productive at preventing re-offending. (Society Guardian, 16 Nov 2005, p10)

Why has housing been the wobbly pillar of the welfare state? (Essay)

Here's the final thing, chopped and channeled and lowered and louvred to get it down to 2,000 words: Download wobbly_pillar_essay_final.doc

Here's an earlier rough draft with a few more bullet points and talking bollocks in it. This is when I thought I might be able to address whether or not its wobbliness really mattered all that much - which I think it does in terms of social exclusion. Download wobbly_pillar_essay_3.doc

For the novice student of housing, there is perhaps no more regularly encountered assertion than "Housing is the wobbly pillar of the welfare state" (Torgersen, 1987). In this essay I will seek to address three questions arising from this assertion:

• Is housing actually "wobbly"?
• If so, why?
• Should the UK try to make public housing a more stable facet of the welfare state?

For the purposes of this rather short essay, I will only look at housing in the UK; a broader look at housing's status in the welfare regime of Europe, North America and elsewhere would demand a much longer treatment than is currently open to me and will unfortunately have to remain outside my current scope.

Is housing a wobbly pillar of the British welfare state?

As Malpass notes, within the context of government provision, housing appears to be a very wobbly pillar of the welfare state indeed. At least in quantitative terms, this was not always so. At its peak in YEAR, publich housing accounted for X per cent of all UK dwellings. However, since that peak, public housing's stature as a tenure has fallen precipitously. In YEAR, only ABOUT 10 per cent of US households lived in public housing. The residualisation of the tenure has been just as marked. Despite Bevin's (?) post-WWII ideal of council housing as a the normal tenure for the majority of the population [CHECK THIS], by the early 21st century, public housing has largely become a tenure of last resort, with fully 50% of council households dependent on Housing Benefit. In housing associations, that figure climbs to 65%. Rented public housing is unpopular, with 89% of Britons reporting that they would like their children or grandchildren to become owner-occupiers.

Folk wisdom says that if you are wondering if a bird is a duck, then you should ask yourself two questions: "Does it walk like a duck?" and "Does it quack like a duck?" If so, it is probably a duck. When questioning whether or not something is wobbly, the key question is, "When pushed, does it move?" There can be no question that housing has, and that this has significant implications for its status within the hierarchy of state-provided welfare services.

As NAME Pierson has noted, in a mature welfare state, the ease with which services are retrenched is greatly exaggerated. Despite modern myth making within the Republican party, Ronald Reagan found it well nigh impossible to cut social services during what was supposed to be a small government revolution in the 1980s. Despite electing Reagan at least partly on a platform of social service cuts, the American public only accepted one year of retrenchment before realising that they had grown quite used to big government services, thank you very much. Reagan ended up raising taxes in each of the final seven years in office. [CONFIRM]

Despite her comparatively greater power, Thatcher too struggled to retrench. When she pushed Samson-like (albeit with more firmly set hair) against the pillars of the British welfare state, only housing and transport truly moved. And while the latter is still the subject of fierce, often front page debate over the appropriate level of government provision, with much of the UK calling out for more, public housing has gone far more gently in that good night.

Why has housing been a wobbly pillar?

Public housing has been a wobbly pillar for several reasons, most importantly: its commodifiability; the inablity of UK builders and governments to effectively industrialise the service; and housing's unique history as part of the welfare state, particularly in relation to World War II and the subsequent formation of the Beveridgean welfare state; is there another I want to cite?

Commodifiability

Of all the welfare services, housing is by far the most commodifiable. In contrast to other key pillars of the welfare state, such as healthcare and education, the majority of the population can or do afford to meet their housing needs out of their own pockets, with nearly seven out of ten households (69%) currently being owner-occupiers. In X, only Y were owner-occupiers, with FIGURES HERE...(SHOULD NOTE HERE OR ELSEWHERE THAT FULLY HALF OF ALL HOUSEHOLDS ON LOW INCOMES ARE ALSO HOME OWNERS.)

From a government perspective, the steep rise in home ownership over the 20th century was far from accidental or incidental: beginning in the 1920s, private subsidies brought downt the cost of building for owner-occupation, and for much of the 20th century, mortgage tax relief subsidised home ownership. Even when the Thatcher government made home ownership less attractive by revoking mortgate tax relief, however, the public's desire to own their own homes continued unabated. (MALPASS) One could argue that the heightened risk of home ownership since the 1980s, particulalry in the form of higher unemployment, coupled with the loss of mortgate tax relief, served as a test of whether or not the love of home ownership was itself wobbly. However, when pushed (by financial disincentives), owner-occupation appears not to have budged. It has stood firm as a cultural goal, with just under nine out of ten Britons reporting that they hope their own children will become owner-occupiers. (I THINK THIS IS IN POWER AND LUPTON.)

Governments have sought to extend owner-occupation further down the socioeconomic ladder. Along with other factors to be addressed later in this essay, this has encouraged the residualisation of public housing. In turn, this residualisation has furthered housing's marginalisation as a key pillar of the welfare state.

HERE A PARA ON THAT. OR ADDRESS LATER ON IN STARVING THE BEAST SECTION.

Inability to effectively industrialise the service

The flip side of so many individual households' ability to meet their own housing needs has been the government's conspicuous struggles to do so in a cost-effective manner. Here a comparison with other welfare services is useful.

The costs and complexities of healthcare and education are beyond the scope of almost all individuals. In order to be affordable by the majority of the population, healthcare and education need to be provided on mass scales, and have in effect been industrialised: provided by very large, very complex organisations, with the aim of meeting the needs of entire populaces. While everyone needs a home, housing has proven uniquely difficult to industrialise in the UK. Contrary to Le Corbusier's visions of clean, attractive, mass-produced dwellings on massive scales, industrial building in the UK has been an expensive flop. (LE CORBUSIER)

As noted by Kemeny, housing differs from other pillars of the welfare state - social security, education and healthcare - in being characterised by very high capital intensity. (KEMENY) In the UK, successive governments have sought to save money by cutting corners on quality. With the government unwilling to invest sufficient resources in high quality provision of mass housing, the mass housing that resulted was all too often of the very worst quality, with the effect of making state provision of housing appear to be a poisoned chalice. Insufficient inputs have resulted in substandard outputs. In many cases, the only people to benefit from the UK's half-hearted attempts at industrialisation were rapacious devlopers and crooked local government officials, as aptly and at times comically (or tragically) documented by Cole and Furbey. (COLE & FURBEY) Through repeated underinvestment and shortcut taking, successive UK Governments may have inadvertently developed a perfect formula for marginalising a particular welfare service. By underinvesting, they assured themselves of delivering a poor service. The public, not being blind, then concluded that this appeared to be a service that government was incapable of providing and which thus must be left to market forces. In the United States, we can currently observe a very pointed exercise in this, in all aspects of the welfare state. in a term first advanced by Presidential Adviser Grover Nordquist: "starving the beast".

As documented by Cole and Furbey, industrial scale home building benfitted industrial scale builders and crooked politicians, but not the purported users of the service, the residents. (In this context, it is worth noting Malpass's observation that housing policy is not just a tool to meet residents' needs, and to analyse it only as such is to be naive; it has also strived to meet the needs of builders and developers - often to the detriment of residents, particularly in the case of large-scale, flat-based building projects that flew in teh face of residents' stated desires for smaller scale building in general and houses in particular, even at high densities.) (MALPASS)

Housing's unique history as a pillar of the welfare state

As Kemeny notes, the post-war establishment of the welfare state took place in the context of severe housing shortages. (KEMENY) As this shortage was at least in part due to low rates of building caused by weaknesses in the housing market, it made sense for post-WWII governments and populations to view housing as a need that could only be met with a great deal of governmental help. At this time, the now common assertion that the market meets most people's most of the time would have seemed absurd. Government provision for housing was a clear and pressing need. It could be argued, however, that while housing was a key pillar of welfare state provision at the time, once severe housing shortages were overcome, housing was free to become a less central pillar of the welfare state. In this context, Malpass notes that while  government provision of housing appears to be very wobbly, in the broader context of the mixed economy of welfare, it is far more difficult to argue that housing is a wobbly, as the UK's largely market-based approach, with owner-occupation as the preferred tenure, does appear to meet most people's needs most of the time. (MALPASS, early in book).

EXTRAS AND FINALS?

• Our healthcare needs expand with time: we need higher tech healthcare of teh sort that only governments can provide.Our housing needs are remarkably consistent, and appear to be better met by small scale production. For governments, smaller scale building projects imply smaller initial returns on investment; even one house still needs to be project managed.
• Were housing needs not first addressed as a means to a public health end, rather than as an end in themselves? Then did we make a swith to the notion that everyone should be able to have a decent home simply because everyone should hae a decent home?
• If housing had proven more industrialisable, perhaps it would be a more central part of government welfare provision.
• Most importantly, housing is a wobbly pillar of the welfare state because more than any other area, it is the one in which the marketplace can and does best meet the majority of peoples' needs.
• Is housing's historical centrality to the welfare state no more than a historical anomaly based on needs specific to the period when the welfare state was formed?
• There is also a historical argument. Commentators (cited in Malpass, ch 4) argue or imply that because of war-induced shortages in both homes and the ability of private building to meet needs, housing found itself in a sense pushed into the realm of the welfare state. Malpass argues that post-war housing policy was largely continuous with pre-war aims and plans. see esp malpass 70-2(?)
• Perhaps wobbly because historical pressures - ie the post-WWII need for housing caused it to be seen as a basic pillar of the welfare state, but as the mixed economy of welfare has developed, it housing has become less central to state welfare provision. it has, in a sense, been moving all this time: first quickly pushed in(?), then slowly but regularly squeezed outward from the centre. It's not wobbling, so much as moving.

Does it matter?

--- As mentioned by Malpass(?), while government provision of housing appears to be very wobbly, in the broader context of the mixed economy of welfare, it is far more difficult to argue that housing is a "wobbly pillar", as the UK's largely market-based approach, with owner-occupation as the preferred tenure, appears to meet most people's needs most of the time.

Many commentators, including Lupton and Power, have argued that housing would be easier to administer if the tenure could be broadened.

Continuing residualisation implies ever-decreasing interest from the majority of the population. However, as eveidenced by the national conversation about ASBOs and sink estates, we may be seeing a new public health concern-driven interest in social housing, with public health referring not to cholera but social exclusion and the disaffection and high costs (thourgh crime, prison, etc) this implies. Was this the case for the Cullingworth report and other looks at what was going wrong with social housing?

Kemeny (56) notes housing's very high embeddedness in social structure. This is a very good point.

• Housing is a more fragile pillar of the welfare state, but in most ways may be the most complex in the roles it must serve. It isn't just a service the way fixing a broken arm or even providing an education is.
• 89% of UK residents say that they hope their grandchildren will own their own homes. Under Right to Buy, a significant minority of council tenants made a move of tenure that many would consider greater in cultural significance than any move cross country.
• While almost all would agree that housing is by its very nature a wobbly pillar, few would argue that it is a fifth - ie unnecessary - wheel. Even if one believes with Thatcher that social housing should only be for the weak and the elderly, those goups are not going to disappear, so their needs must be met - and as they won't be met effectively by the market, they must be met by government, so there will always be a role fo government to play. A wobbly pillar, but a necessary one. Particulalry given that the people teetering atop that wobbly pillar are societies neediest. If the pillar collapses, so do they.
• Maybe now we should worry about the wobbliness ina different way. With its ever-increasing residualisation, social housing becomes a hot zone and breeding ground for social exclusion. In doing so, it presents concentrated problems that feed on and grow off one another. Social exclusion - is it the new wobbly pillar of the welfare state? With housing as part of that equation? A new, more intractable aim of focus for teh welfare state? Not su much a wobbly pillar as a crumbling wall.
• Some good stuff in Difficult to let housing article re how residual social housing has become - the social range of tenants has become very compressed. The problems with increasingly residualised service are an argument for making it broader - but how successful would government intervention be in the face of widespread cultural agreement and a market that appears to work for most people, even after, as Malpass illustrates, becoming riskier and less attractive over the last 30 years? And would any government want to take on this burden again? If the UK proved any one thing during the 1950s and 60s, it was that it can build an amazingly large number of homes in a relatively short period of time. What it couldn't seem to do was manage them. Outsourcing maintenance and management to owner-occupiers seems too good a deal for a penny-conscious government to pass up. So long as the costs of increasing residualisation, hot zones, and social inequality don't get too high.

How to write a dissertation

Via CT. Key advice: write at least a little every day. Even 500 words of crap. It keeps you moving, and keeps the project from expanding in size in your head.

Are services for the poor bound to be poor services - 2

Ok, here's the powerpoint presentation: Download are_services_for_the_poor_bound_to_be_poor_services.ppt . Below are my notes along the way.

What I'll do is look at service provision in three different aspects of the mixed economy of welfare. In each, I'll look at whether or not services for the poor are poor services. If so, why, and look at policy ideas regarding what can be done about it.

Housing

1. Housing known as wobbly pillar of welfare state - unlike other social services, market meets most of the needs of most of the people, most of the time. Most want to be in the private market as owner-occupiers, and government policy has historically encouraged this.
2. Because housing is interwoven with so many other aspects of social disadvantage, I will take a somewhat broad approach to this topic.
3. Show stat comparing percent in council housing at peak with now. As home ownership has reached further down into the socio-economic pool, the cream has been skimmed. This was one negative side effect of RTB.
4. When social housing building was popular, higher quality housing was built for middle class. When social housing became seen as a tenure of the working class, the financial demands of meeting this need were seens as too high, and the quality of the housing was lessened hugely. Happened after WWI, after WWII, and most obviously in 1950s and 1960s. Ronan Point, deck access blocks.
5. Residualisation of social housing has meant that those who are in social housing are poorer. Income range, eg, much flatter now than in past. Something like half of CH residents are on HB, as are 65% of HA residents.
6. Social housing accounts for 1/5 of all housing(?), but 1/2 of all houses on low incomes.
7. Show pic of our old place.
8. Concentrating the poor is a problem. More exactly, concentrating the socially excluded is a problem. In When Work Disappears, WJW argues that poor inner city Chicago neighbourhoods had relatively few problems before the collapse of inner city industry. Same thing happened here. Between 1960 and 1982, every urban area in the UK lost between 1/4 and 1/2 of its employment. And that has tremendous knock-on effects - but mostly for a residual service?
9. F Scott Fitzgerald is famously credited with saying that 'the rich are different from you and me.' (Though this is disputed.) (He also had a character, Gatsby, observe that Daisy Buchanan's voice is ''full of money.') Many would argue that while the poor might not be different from you and me, the socially excluded are. That their multiplicity of needs means that approaches that work with non-excluded people won't work with them. Not just a matter of doing more of what you do for someone who isn't excluded - you have to do something wualitatively different. 
10. And as Power and who note, neighbourhoods full of people with multiple needs lead to big problems. See p139.
11. Eventually get housing for the poor that is so poor that not even the poor and desperate want it. The difficult to let housing phenomenon, where even in times of shortage, people in desperate need are turning down the service.
12. An interesting comparison is tower blocks for MC versus tower blocks for poor. Former are very happy with them; for the latter, because of a combination of more kids - and inevitably crappier quality of maintenance and management - they are a nightmare.
13. Some of this is the fault of residents, but other is fault of bad management - the sort that government would not get away with if clients were not poor. On the one hand, teenagers are taking leaks in the elevators. On the other hand, the elevators are so poorly made that they break down within weeks. Anne's broom story.
14. Is there any way to fix those problems?

15. Some argue that services for the poor are not only inevitably poor services, but actually create additional poverty. The most well known proponent of this is Charles Murray. Bogeyman. I'm putting words in his mouth here, but his general feeling seems to be that social policy too often function as 'social apology', with analysts afraid to state what he sees as the harsh (but fair) truth that providing services for the poor actually makes the poor worse off, by encouraging a state of dependency. Cut them off, he argues, and after the get out of their daze, you'll see them reaching down to grab their bootstraps to give them a good tug.

16. (Interestingly,  he also argues that lone parenthood in itself is a deathknell, and says wait and see re Scandinavia. As we see in next week's readings, he was very wrong on this one.

17. Social Exclusion Unit argues that normal service provision won't work, and that people with multiple disadvantages need a 'client-centred approach', with 'individually tailored help and support than address different sets of multiple needs through a single telephone number or one-stop shop.' General public can negotiate a non-client centred service, but some people can't. This is a qualitatively different approach, and much more resource intensive than what works for those without multiple disadvantages.

18. The cost of this will be very high - services for people with multiple disadvantages are particularly expensive. And the transfer will be very vertical. (But is the Scand model less vertical than we think?) Will the average voter support this? And do you need to have the median voter on side for a policy to be supported? This brings us neatly on to healthcare.

Healthcare

1. NHS is the jewel in the crown.
2. Unlike housing, the market cannot meet most of the people's needs most of the time.
3. Unlike housing, healthcare isn't easily commodified.
4. And it's difficult to be a well-informed consumer of healthcare. For instance, we all know we're going to live in homes, so we pay attention and learn about housing - ideas of costs, values for money, we all know what we want. But I don't know what my next health crisis is going to be. Will I break my arm? Get appendicitis? Alpolecia? When one of these does happen, I don't have time to become well-informed.
5. What this means is that almost everyone in society has an interest in good healthcare. The median voter is on board. This greatly benefits the poor, because they benefit from the service - in the UK, the average poor person gets just as good healthcare as the middle class. The rich get better, but for most, it's the same.
6. In US, a different picture. There, some 45m are without health insurance at any one time. Are mostly dependent on emergency rooms and medicaid/care. This is hugely expensive, and delivers very poor service.
7. But for political reasons, the US is willing to provide very a poor service for the poor, that is more expensive than any other healthcare service in the world.
8. But here's a twist in the tale. The poor in the US actually report being happier with their jerry-rigged healthcare than do the working middle class. Show figure.
   1. here are the percentages of Americans who say they are "fairly or very satisfied" with their own health system:

      • Poor: 45%

      • Elderly: 61%

      • Everyone else: 34%

9. Some of this may be poverty of expectations. The middle class is famous for its sharp elbows and high demands - and indeed, you can argue that the demands of the mc are a key driver of improved social service provision in any nation.
10. But it also may indicates that people are happier being trapped in a poor government provided service than they are when trapped in a poor market-based service. Markets are supposed to be about choice, but most working Americans lack choice in their healthcare.
11. What about when we get very old? We all fear the crisis in long-term care for the aged. See Soc Excl report. But I think right now there's a fair amount of variance in quality. As JRF observes, "like housing... the poorest groups suffer most (because they have little or no choice)." If state provision of this becomes residualised, then the poor probably will get poor service - it's very expensive to provide good long-term care. I was looking at Social Trends 2005, and apparently the lowest paid profession in the UK is amusement park attendant, but working in a care home isn't much higher. So while your kids are off losing a finger on a poorly maintained ferris wheel, your parents will be having their jewelry nicked at their care home.
12. But because it is so expensive, Govt will need to provide the service. The median voter will have the same needs as the poor. Soc Excl Unit and JRF recs. The MC will fight to avoid losing all the assets they have accumulated, and this will mean that long-term care will be free or cheap at point of use. My guess is that in this field, the poor won't find themselves residualised.

Education

1. I should be much quicker on this, as the above two will have taken plenty of time. Need to read more on it, too.
2. In US, we have a very good case study, because local school funding is based on local property tax. Poor neighbourhoods have less tax revenues, so less money per pupil. And the schools show it.
3. In UK, the current argument is over expanded school choice. The idea being that poor people shouldn't be trapped in poor schools - that is, poor services. they should be able to choose where to send their kids.
4. Hlaf of all students in UK achieve at lest five good GCSEs, but in schools with high concentration of students from low-income families, an average of one in five do so. (JRF, 20)
5. This ignores the very sharp elbows of the middle class, and our ability to negotiate systems better. A phrase that comes up in a few of the readings is "bargaining power". The rich have enough bargaining power to not need mainstream social services at all. The MC enough to demand value for money or else. The poor, and particularly the socially excluded, tend to lack it. As noted above in JRF or SEU doc, socially excluded in particular tend to be poor at negotiating bureacracies and playing the system, so they are likely to lose out.
6. Arguing the other corner are Ruth Kelly and Tony Blair. They feel that without school choice, the middle class will opt out of state schools, and the state school system will then become residualised. It will become a service for the poor, and, they feel, a poor service.
7. Kelly was famously hooted down recently for saying that schools were being made more inclusive by becoming more open to the MC.
8. A letter in the Guardian supported this notion. Quote letter in slide.
9. But the JRF argues that schools with higher numbers of less advantaged students need to be made more attractive to students from more advantaged backgrounds. However, they say that it should be through 'giving them more resources to attract the best teachers and/or permit smaller classes'.
10. Earlier in term, Julian LeGrand said that school choice would benefit the poor if schools were given incentives to focus on the poor. An eg would be more money for kids on free school meals.

Final thoughts

1. Looking at these three models, it looks as though services for the poor are bound to be poor services - if they are only for the poor. So is universalism the key, and residualism the trap? And if universalism is the key, is this in terms of the welfare state, or the mixed economy of welfare?

2. Where housing and education is residualised, we see poor results. Does this mean the services are poor? If the goal of services is outcomes rather than inputs, then the answer is yes.

3. JFR p24 argues that agencies need to pool resources to address the complicated bundle of issues that usually surround poverty and/or social exclusion. SEU argues same.

4. The residualisation of housing has not only led to poorer housing for poorer people, but because of clustering of people with multiple needs, seems to have lots of knock-on effects, including an increase in social exclusion. As a solution, many housing commentators argue that social housing should be de-residualised so that you have a wider variety of tenants in it. This is similar in some ways to New Labour's notion of attracting the middle class into inner city schools by making them academies. The demanding middle class would then demand improved services, as we do with healthcare - and we would feel invested enough in said services to really care about them, and to support good funding for them. It would be in the median voter's self-interest.

5. There appears to be a law of diminishing returns, wherein the more people you help, the more difficult it is to help those you haven't helped. It's like bobbing for apples. We see this in housing, but we also see it in other services. The SEU notes that in 1999, the percentage of 'most disadvantaged' clients enrolled on New Deal 25+ was nine percent. As the easiest to help have moved out of the programme, that percentage had increased to 20% by 2002. (p98)

6. As Paul Pierson notes, retrenchment of services that the MC benefit from is actually very difficult.

7. Services for the poor might be good, but can lack political support. I can't find it, but a year or two ago I read how a programme providing antental care to poor women in US was cut, even though it was showing tremendous results, and was predicted to have huge cost savings (8:1) in long term. Here, Sure Start seems to have political support. But is also underfunded? One survey noted that 42% of Sure Start Plus advisers thought their case loads were too heavy.  (SEU 105)

8. In Scandinavian countries, it appears that everyone is guaranteed high quality child car - is it free at point of use? - and this means that the poor get it, too. There is more upward mobility in from lowest Scandinavian quintile than in UK and US.

9. On the note of funding, I'll confess that my photo was a trick. With education, the JRF and Julian Le Grand argue that more funds for schools with poor students would result in better services for those poor students. Even in housing, the most residualised of the welfare services, this might be the case. Hackney does a much better job funding CHs than it used to do - I don't know why, but I think it's a combination of stricter regulation re repairs and a better economy all round - and this estate is actually very well managed. An hour after this photo was taken, the maintenance guy would have had all this sorted. And speaking as a former tenant of this estate, this sort of stuff makes a huge difference. We assume that services for the poor will be poor. In this particular case, the services for the poor were actually pretty good.

10. Along these lines, if we think of "poor" in a slightly different sense, we see that funding does work. Poverty means being money poor. In old age, people tend to be health poor. And we throw a lot of money at that, and it helps a lot. But a difference is we all know or hope that we're going to be old one day, and we know that this will inevitably imply being health poor. We all strive to avoid being income poor - and even resent or distrust those who are, if we think they're just being lazy. So it's easier to support the one than the other. In this sense, the market works for making money (for most of us most of the time), so we aren't as comfortable with income being decommodified. The market doesn't work for combatting poor health, so we accept decommodification fo remedies against it.

11. On same lines, in terms of health, the old are poor. If we gave them a residualised service and didn't spend a great deal on it, then their outcomes would be terrible, and we could fairly rate the service as poor, even if we spent twice as much as we do on the young and healthy. Note that in the US, Medicare consumes a large chunk of thehealthcare budget and is in a sense a service for the health poor, but it is highly rated. Instead of residualising them, we lump them in with the rest of population as far as how money is apportioned, and so they get good service.

Is flextime working?

According to this article (via Drum), it is.

Today, the “Right to Request” policy is considered a great success by British businesses, workers, and the government. After the first year, nearly one-quarter of all eligible employees—approximately 800,000 parents—successfully reduced or rearranged their work hours. Out of all of the requests that were filed, 86 percent were granted either partially or in full. And the country's Association of Human Resources Managers found that most employers reported no significant problems in complying with the new legislation.

How did the British manage to take an antagonistic negotiation and turn it into a policy hailed by both employers and employees? For one thing, they cast the initiative as a cooperative venture, one through which productivity and families stood to benefit. Before the policy went into effect, the government launched a massive public education campaign aimed at convincing employers that happy employees are more productive employees. They encouraged the formation of an organization called Employers for Work-Life Balance, which allows businesses to share their solutions (or “best practices”) for flexible scheduling. In addition, the government set aside funds to give as grants to employers who want to hire a consultant to help them implement the policy. The fact that the United Kingdom has strong labor unions and universal health care played a major role as well.

By requiring employers to explain in writing their reasons for declining a request for flexible work-time, the initiative also leverages a powerful social force: shame. Now employers must publicly state what they would prefer to keep quiet and unsaid. It's one thing to believe that business goals are more important than employee schedules; it's quite another to state for the record that you'd rather Jane didn't pick her children up from school because you prefer holding staff meetings at six in the evening. By throwing daylight onto some of the unreasonable burdens that have been placed on employees without any debate and without their agreement, the initiative creates a real dialogue between employers and employees.