Jock's Place - Oxford - Comments

You're missing my point.

Jock — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:06:40 +0100

You're missing my point. FE delivering HE courses generally have them validated, and even sometimes taught, by universities, usually in their own area. Since you mentioned Reynard, for example, his "alma mater" is pretty well capped by local planning policies and prevented from taking terribly many extra "live in" traditional undergraduates away from home. A lot of the expansion of our numbers therefore is actually through validating and sometimes even teaching courses at sub-regional FE colleges - whose students are not likely to have come terribly far.

But as I said, I agree with your point that there is a contradiction in current policy. It is meant to widen horizons and increase social mobility. They ought not be too surprised if it actually has that effect!

Not decided yet

Charlieman — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:49:19 +0100

Jock, I work in a city with two Universities and am employed by one of them. Universities take the brightest (who are most likely to pick a far away establishment) and FE/HE take the rest. Amongst "the rest", you have have people who can do "wow" things (eg Adrian Reynard, a racing car designer).

All the same, we have to accept that the most bright youngsters move on. In my example above, Adrian Reynard lived in the right place to pursue his career. You are much more likely to become a successful racing car designer if you live in Oxford than almost anywhere else on this planet.

Yes, I suppose there is that

Jock — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:06:23 +0100

Yes, I suppose there is that existing contradiction. Although I tghink you might be surprised at how much of the additional HE is actually relatively local - HE award level courses at local franchised FE colleges validated by a local or regional university and so on. But yes, the whole policy is about encouraging flexibility and extending people's horizons.

Contradictions in existing policy

charlieman — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:22:51 +0100

Surely government policy already encourages intranational migration? The HE policy ideal is for 50% of young people to enter higher education, and most youngsters pick an institution that is not in their home town. Some stick in the city where they were educated, others move to different cities, and relatively few return to their home town. Indeed, the whole point of getting a better education was to get a job that they could not see in their home locality.

Thus we have a very basic contradiction in policy. Government wishes to rejuvenate local economies, for which it provides grants, but a different policy (HE) encourages the brightest young employees to move elsewhere.

Or even for us all to find

Jock — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:23:17 +0100

Or even for us all to find bits that interest us and add a bit more reasonableness to the ideas by suggesting ways they would not be so threatening ?

Isn't that however precisely

Jock — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:19:36 +0100

Isn't that however precisely the job of the politicians rather than the academics who provide the source material. This is not policy, not Tory policy and not our policy. It is a think piece. In the "Overton Window" scale of influencing things it is one step in from moonbattery, deliberately so.

Maybe so, but then wouldn't

Oranjepan — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 01:35:31 +0100

Maybe so, but then wouldn't be more advisable to identify and articulate the simple message behind these ideas that 'regeneration' is a cynical exercise by cynical Labour politicians to artificially rebalance the inequalities created by cynical Conservative politicians where one area of the country is favoured over another to the cost of us all - that the political system isn't broken, just that it harms everyone because the dominant forces are illiberal, and that it is therefore no wonder that the public are tired of cynical illiberal politicians!

The above comments show that there is some traction to be had in pointing out that the claims of 'regeneration' are overhyped and that this can be done effectively by calling for stronger scrutiny of the processes which justify spending money on projects where there is little evidence the benefit is not as high as the cost.

It needs to be asked with more force what additional wealth is generated by specific regeneration projects, whether certain uneconomic regeneration decisions are not actually at the cost of growth and don't therefore have negative consequences for collective democracy and individual liberty by favouring vested political interests.

As LibDems we need to argue that the political choice between wealth generation and civic regeneration is a false choice because the two are inextricably connected: to separate the two concepts is divisive, illiberal and harmful - that they can only be combined healthily by decentralising policy-making and focussing on the detail and merit of each plan while maintaining an understanding of how they each form part of the greater whole.

A centralised national policy of 'regeneration' is as much of a tax-grab and power-grab by political forces as a lack of any policy of 'regeneration' is a transfer of profit and power to corporate forces - both disproportionately reward the favoured few while punishing the deserving many.

And actually, I couldn't be

Jock — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:43:50 +0100

And actually, I couldn't be doing more for "communities affected by poverty"; in my case it's the development of Community Land Trust housing for the many people in Oxfordshire who, thanks to current planning policies, have no hope of owning their own homes. Were this policy to be implemented I'm rather glad to say I'd be able to dump that cause pretty quickly, and perhaps be able to afford one myself of these new million homes.

But actually Nick, we're not

Jock — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:40:22 +0100

But actually Nick, we're not talking about "forcing people away" so much as not assuming that regeneration's only outcome ought to be "forcing them to stay". I know which appears more liberal.

Oranjepan, I just think it's

Jock — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:35:59 +0100

Oranjepan, I just think it's such a difficult and counter-intuitive idea that's it's incredibly difficult to get it across without upsetting a whole bunch of people in areas you are not meaning to criticise but that it comes across as you are denigrating them.

Counter-intuitive or just bad regional policy?

Nick Perry — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:31:49 +0100

There's nothing particularly inspiring or seminal about a report that demonstrates no understanding of Northern community heritage and advocates bad regional policy. You might think it's clever to be counter-intuitive about regeneration. Why not spend some time getting involved with a community affected by poverty. Do some qualitative research on whether people want to be forced to move away, or whether they want their area to improve. And then re-read your blog. Best wishes from Hastings!

Jock, you positive appraisal

Oranjepan — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:45:32 +0100

Jock, you positive appraisal comes closest to a lot of my feelings on the subject, but naturally much better articulated. I love the description of our beloved capital as a singularity, I guess that's what gives it its' edginess.
One question: Is Leunig being devious, being over-complicated, suffering from bad communication or a combination of all of the above?

Yeah - the report does go

Jock — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:31:51 +0100

Yeah - the report does go into some detail about the problems with Pathfinder - and especially that it has been a goldmine for speculators betting on the next place they can pick up a £20k house and get the government to pay them £80k or whatever.

The real message appears to be that we are just *so bad* at centrally managed "regeneration" (even though so many of them have local "control" it points out that in many cases this is tied up writing up the outcomes for the funders in London) that it should be given to local authorities. Some of them may well demolish and rebuild where their housing stock really is a problem - perhaps in the process reversing the trend for ever smaller houses.

I have to say I always took a different view of where the epochal change driver that is the internet would drive cities. I preferred to think that we could all one day work where we choose, whilst being physically located where-ever we get the most social benefits to suit us - if we like isolation, a fiber optic to South Uist might do us, but for many it will be the bright lights and entertainment and other opportunitites of cities, but that they would not necessarily be the place the firm that employed us was based.

But I see from this report really that that's possibly not the outcome - that this agglomeration effect does make it attractive, as the report mentioned, for Nissan to move its design people from Sunderland to London because Ford's and other manufacturers' designers are there too.

I think harder to predict are the Oxford & Cambridge issues. It is I suppose possible that in the world of global academe, the internet will be enough to bring the best brains together wherever their home institution to collaborate on the great new era of rapidly increasing innovation. But with that scenario, all we are doing is missing out on the benefit of having those brains here and having all the knowledge transfer potential here, and not in someone else's home institution on the other side of the world.

Pathfinders

Paul Lockett — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:58:58 +0100

I've been involved a fair amount with people campaigning against the Pathfinder schemes and my experience is that they are nothing short of a con trick which has, in many cases, permanently lost Labour votes in areas which would have once been considered Labour heartlands.

They were promoted as a way of improving the housing market, but were frequently targeted on areas where there were reasons to believe that the market was about to surge anyway. In Oldham and Rochdale, the lion's share of the work was concentrated on areas surrounding railway stations which were due to be converted into tram stops and would become prime commuter locations for Manchester.

I'm aware that, on more than one occasion, Pathfinder Boards have claimed to have a funding shortfall because increasing house prices in an area have resulted in scheme costs exceeding their initial estimates. The irony of needing more money from the government, because the cost of regenerating a housing market had increased due to the housing market regenerating itself, was lost on them.

The real absurdity is that once one area has carried out the Pathfinder approach, neighbouring areas try to follow suit, because they don't want to be seen as the area in the region with the weakest housing market. Bury pursued a “CPO and demolish” scheme, even though the area had a fairly strong housing market, on the basis that if they didn't respond to the Pathfinder in neighbouring Rochdale, they could end up looking like the poor relation and suffering market failure. The only logical result of that mentality is a perpetual Mexican wave of compulsory purchase and demolition.

No -I get the impression he

Jock — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:16:39 +0100

No -I get the impression he feels his ideas supercede LVT, but the whole report is based on the signals from land values in a way, so it's a natural leap to make for those of us who are!