Randomly Selected Article or Link

Norwich City Council to pursue hairdressers with undercover agents to check they're not giving their customers a glass of complimentary mulled wine while they wait:

You couldn't make it up!

I think it's about time I started blogging more again. I recently found a quote from Lord Acton that was very apposite - "Learn more by writing than by reading". So since he was a bit of a hero of mine I think I should put his exhortation to the test.

Later this week we will be treated to the denouement of the worst kept secret in Oxford politics, likely to break this coming Thursday we are told. Two of last year's defectors from the Lib Dem group on the City Council are apparently about to take another step away from their constituents' wishes and sign up to become the first Conservative Group on Oxford City Council since 1996. The story goes that they are to be joined by a third, possibly a Green councillor, though that remains to be seen. It would make life difficult for the ex-Lib Dems, for from what I can see the only way Cllrs Sargent and MacGregor are ever going to have fancy titles like "Group Leader" and "Deputy Group Leader" is if they are part of a group of precisely two.

Obviously the political headlines at the moment are dominated by the "battle" (though one suspects it might be a "rout" when the votes are counted) for who succeeds Blair as caretaker-manager of Air Strip One. Apparently Sargent and MacGregor may have delayed their announcement by a week to avoid clashing with Tony Blair's announcement last week - though I hardly think their little local defection was ever going to compete for column inches - though that is probably how self-important they are! No doubt they will spin it that "a former chair of the Lib Dems in Oxford" and "the wife of the former constituency vice-chair" have seen the light and joined the Cameroonies. No doubt if it was the other way round, we would do the same. Defectors are always, and without exception in my experience, self-seeking, smug, narcissistic types and will do anything to give themselves a heightened sense of their own importance and the significance of their political disloyalty, usually to cover for the real reasons they defected (such as, in this case, lack of sufficient ability to get onto the Lib Dem led executive of the City Council).

But let's not forget, present occupiers of these positions obviously excepted, that chair of the city group and vice-chair of the constituency, are, in Lib Dem circles, not too dissimilar to David Horton and Frank Pickles in the "Vicar of Dibley." Cllr Sargent's own nick-name when chair of the group - "Fluffy" - kind of demonstrates the seriousness with which the post is viewed. Most recently, and including Sargent's own period of office, is has been occupied by relatively junior members of the group willing to do the thankless task of herding cats and keeping order in meetings because they generally don't have other onerous council tasks to do.

Elsewhere there are stories floating around that Cameron's Tories might join the Lib Dems in calling for Gordon Brown to hold a snap General Election to secure a mandate for his rule. Now, don't get me wrong, I do agree with these calls, as, it would seem, do 72% of people who expressed a preference so far on the Oxford Mail's current online poll (and, according to the BBC, so does most of the country). Cameron should give pause to such urges, populist though it may appear to be. In his own back yard, Oxford, it would be unfortunate for him to be crying over what was a majority at that last election, just two summers ago now, for a Labour Government and Labour Prime Minister (whoever they decide to put in that position, such is our broken and unaccountable democracy) when his only local councillors arrived by breaking their contract with their constituents and voters.

I called, in vain as usual, for them to submit themselves to their electorates in a bye-election when they first left the Lib Dems under whose banner they were elected. But at least they maintained for a while the pretense of political neutrality (some of us call it indecision). But, should they now join a party that stood candidates against them when they were elected and whom they defeated, overwhelmingly in both cases, I do hope Mr Cameron will this time join my call for them to submit now to a bye-election to prove the city wants "back door Tories". For if I were a Tory in Oxford, I hope I would be appalled now to be represented by those two in any case, and I hope I would have the conviction to stand against them in a selection contest in any such bye-election.

So David Cameron is apparently going to explain that we need to learn to understand the "hoodie culture" better - that for many it is a way not of hiding aggression and criminal intent but of "keeping your head down" retreating into anonymity in an hostile world. That instead of opprobrium youngsters need nurturing to make the correct life-choices in a fast moving bewildering (and I'd add very unequal) society.

It reminds me of Germaine Greer's "The Boy" of 2003, a book extolling the real beauty of teenage males that got her some bad press with some decrying her as a middle aged pederast. I recall not buying it myself because I felt it might feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. I heard her explain the rationale behind the book at the time though. What she was trying to do was rekindle a sense of self-confidence; that boys in particular were, through their fashion statements - baggy trousers, hoodies and the like - reacting to being constantly put down, as inherently criminal, as "thickos", as failures in a feminist world that said we can do without men.

For years we have been showered with statistics about how boys are in fact doing worse than girls, at school, at university, at life. Now sure, we've had generations, perhaps millennia, where girls and women were second class citizens, chattels, not worth the same as men, and that had to be addressed. But maybe the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Of course I'm prepared to accept that in fact women are simply just the superior being and that levelling the playing field has begun to allow that inherent superiority to shine through. But even if that is the case, it means we need to pay more attention now to boys and men, to give them the step up to realise their potentials and so on.

When I was a councillor it was a very common complaint that there were "gangs of youths" just hanging around, intimidatingly, frightening old ladies going about their ordinary business at the local shop, the chippie or whatever. Cameron is right certainly in one respect - Labour's, and society as a whole's it seems, response to this has been to criminalise them, with ASBOs, curfews, banning their attire from public places in the name of a surveillance society that wants to record our every move, Big Brother like. It seems sometimes that it's not a case of if you offend, but when you offend, we will be able to spot you (and, by extension, punishment will be swift).

The axiom that if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide is Labour's mantra for centralising control of our lives and is making people feel that their privacy is under attack. And if you're young and perhaps just a little bit naughty (weren't we all? As DC should know!) and you don't quite have a full understanding of your rights you are going to be tempted to retreat into anonymity.

A friend of mine took a bunch of kids from his council estate on a couple of overseas trips to Oxford's twin cities of Bonn and Leiden last year. Some of them had ASBOs. Whatever he allowed his name put to in his Labour election leaflets this May (he lost anyway) it made him realise that ASBOs were not really the answer to many of these problems - that a little bit of TLC was what they needed to settle down and make the right kind of choices when faces with them. To have some self-confidence.

And then there was Tom Conti's contribution to "This Week" a couple of years back where he speculated that if we throw huge investment at education, that if we make schools, especially in the early years, places of respite from a hostile world, and, in some cases, hostile home lives, with class sizes of just half a dozen in the most formative years so that the environment is more family than cattle-market, that we will foster a sense of personal responsibility that will eventually feed through into massive savings in currently state provided services (especially health and social services related).

Can we afford not to address these issues? And do it better than criminal sanctions? Respect does indeed begin at home, and when prominent, and one presumes well brought up for want of nothing, young political campaigners have so little respect for the "little people" in the council estates that, when caught short, they feel no compunction about pissing in the alleyways of someone else's neighbourhood, maybe the example from the very top could be a bit better!

Whatever the answer, the youngsters of today are our future. They are ours (well not mine personally you understand - no chance of that!), a part of our communities. If our communities are outlawing them in the formative years, what resentment are we storing up for our future? And boy, do we need more people like this to change things.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, education, young

Depending on what side of a fractious political divide in Oxfordshire you sit, news that the South East Regional Plan as amended by Whitehall will next week recommend a review of Oxford's Green Belt and the development of 20% more new housing over the next twenty years than proposed at Oxfordshire Structure Plan level will be seen as victory or worst case scenario.

Whilst some, such as City Council leader John Goddard quoted in the linked Oxford Mail article, point out that we are looking at developing just 1% of Oxford's Green Belt, the true story is that the total number of new housing units demanded of the county in the next twenty years is more than an entire new city the size of Oxford. The fact that it appears that most of the additional units recommended by Whitehall planners seem to be destined for edge of city development, the grandiosely termed "Central Oxfordshire Sub-region", suggests that the city itself will be required to grow by at least 20% in twenty years. A handful of land owners will each trouser nine figure windfalls for their land currently worth about one hundredth of that.

The existing Green Belt, the nation's second oldest only after London, took forty years to agree - talks began in the late 1950s and the boundaries were only finally fixed in the Oxford Local Plan 1997. So, unless the process of redrawing the Green Belt boundaries is going to be railroaded through with all the attendant risks of riding roughshod over dissenting opinion, it seems highly unlikely that development would be able to start on any of these major sites inside a decade at the very least.

Now, I'm no great fan of the protectionist Green Belt policy in the first place - it has just as often worked as a "choker" than a belt. In Oxford's case, its main raison d'être was to preserve the historic character of Oxford. And I have often observed that the real, human historic character of Oxford, of "poor scholars and clerks" here to study and the attendant infrastructure that makes the city's very purpose in the world possible, is itself compromised by making housing unaffordable to those very people. I have also consistently pointed out that fulfilling even the government's latest plans for three million new homes over twenty odd years would require just over half of one per cent of England's non-urban land so this is not a NIMBY or "BANANA" anti-development rant.

Mistaken interpretation of needs data.

But I do rail against inappropriate development wherever it surfaces. And I completely believe that this "Central Oxfordshire Sub-regional Growth Zone" is inappropriate. And unnecessary. For a start the housing need data on which it was largely based are just plain wrong - well, more wrongly interpreted I suppose. In 2004 Fordham Research produced a Housing Needs Assessment for Oxford City Council that concluded that 750 units of additional affordable housing were required every year for the next decade just to stand still. Delivering such a requirement with the current maximum affordable-market priced housing quota of 50:50 would imply development of 15,000 new homes in a decade, which is clearly not even in the thinking either of the City Council's planners nor of the South East Regional Plan, even as amended by Whitehall.

However, that figure of 750 affordable units is naively misleading at best, utterly mistaken at worst. For 75% of all the people represented by that annual need are currently housed in the city. And whilst some of them are in unsuitable or overcrowded housing and by definition all of them in unaffordable housing for their incomes, it equates to an overcrowding rate of around 2% of households. Whilst anything up to about 40% of housing if it follows the national pattern is underoccupied. The naive extrapolation from these figures, which is what has been pushed as the "growth zone" option, is that most of that 750 a year requirement can only be met by creating net additional housing units as near as possible to that 750 figure. But, since 75% of them are already housed in the city, such a solution in reality means not merely housing those in housing need in the city, but growth of the "greater Oxford" population to the tune of 20% in twenty years.

No consensus on large scale city growth.

And the one thing we have not had is a debate about whether such overall growth is justified or necessary. In fact, the whole debate, driven as it has been by high housing costs for people already in the city mainly (and quite rightly in many ways - for that is the pressing problem) has not really discussed growth so much as an imperative to get housing costs down for existing residents. For a start, such a rapid rate of growth is likely to cause all sorts of demographic and other social problems that cannot be planned for through mere spatial planning policies. Oxford does have a shortfall of resident working age population compared with the number of jobs in the city, but in the context of a county town in a predominantly rural county that is actually a good thing. If we suddenly meet the employment requirement within the city or on its near borders we risk the economy of the rest of the county insofar as it relies on people earning money in Oxford itself and thence able to support the smaller county towns and villages.

The cost of urban extensions.

Further, concentration on developing virgin edge of town land and new additional housing abandons existing housing to its inexorable decline. One of the most naive, I feel, enthusiasts for the Whitehall changes to the South East Plan, Labour City Councillor Antonia Bance, who positively whooped with joy in her blog the other day when the news broke, represents a ward, Rose Hill, that illustrates quite nicely both the pitfalls of the growth plan and the better solution to the housing need. Tagging new estates onto the edge of the city is no great answer. As Rose Hill shows, such marginal land housing tends to be taken up by the least well off, people who actually could do with being closer, not further, from centers of employment and social interaction.

One can only imagine the potential effects of plonking another 3,500 homes on the edge of the most deprived wards in the city. Optimists will say that it will drag up the fortunes of its neighbours, making it more likely that that whole swathe of post-war development on the edge of the city will attract the infrastructure is still needs to become prosperous and desirable. But the history of such developments tends to prove the pessimist more likely to be right. Indeed, the same was said of what is now Northfield Brook ward - that the new mixed tenure housing of the eighties and nineties in Greater Leys would pull the whole area of the Leys up out of the doldrums, yet just a few years on and Northfield Brook has made its mark as being the newest most deprived area of the city. At the very least, it proves just how long it takes to create new, vibrant communities - a generation and more.

Redeveloping existing urban areas the better alternative.

So, if we are likely to take a decade to get started on these new developments if everything goes well in the Green Belt review, and in the process negate the very ethos of Green Belt - that it should be as permanent as possible and not seen as a stock of land on which the city can call every few years, we should also make attempts to look at other mechanisms for delivering more affordable and more appropriate living spaces for the current needs of the city first and foremost before we plan for topsy growth.

And here, Antonia's ward also proves that it can be done. The Rose Hill redevelopment program proves that where there were 138 housing units of very low, almost derelict, standard you can provide 238 brand spanking new homes better matched to today's household composition and importantly energy needs. Of course I believe it's been badly handled - handing over nearly half of them all to private sale is the equivalent of enclosing half of what up till now has been land held in trust by the council for the people off Oxford, and the resulting housing will not be what it could have been in terms of 21st century energy efficiency. But the principle is correct - and all over Oxford we have lots of twentieth century housing that is not now, or will soon not be, appropriate or efficient in an era of high energy costs.

What Fordham showed was that we need to make around 600 existing units of housing more affordable each year, plus plan for more modest demand of about 180 units a year for people who aspire to move into the city. We can achieve this without wholesale estate building, by redeveloping existing estates (including the private inter-war housing estates in the inner suburbs), But to do that we need to transfer our property tax from taxing both land and buildings to taxing just land. This will relatively penalize underoccupancy and encourage redevelopment of areas that are below the optimal density. In the process more of our existing housing land will be equipped for that low energy 21st century living. And the additional units that can be incorporated by increasing densities will mean that newcomers slot into existing mature communities.

LVT the 21st century radical key to urban regeneration/redevelopment.

Much of Oxford's development in the nineteenth century was the work of Liberals and Radicals through vehicles such as the National Freehold Land Company which, amongst other things, was a mechanism for enfranchisement of the working classes before universal suffrage was enacted. It was a model for social change built, if you pardon the pun, on the idea that land ownership was what made a person free and give them full citizenship. What we need now (and what more fitting a tribute to the recently late Brian Hodgson who a few years ago got the county to investigate LVT's effects on a part of the city) is for that Liberal-Progressive coalition at the Town Hall to demand the right to try out this approach which has recently been making such a vision as I have given here possible in cities across the United States, such as Philadelphia and Harrisburgh, before the bulldoizers move into South and West Oxfordshire and land owners pocket several hundred millions of pounds at our expense.

Finally, if none of that works, I will consider supporting some edge of town new development if we find a way of using the land owners' unearned increment from their rent seeking to create a light rail service from Shipton right round to the Cowley works, taking in all the proposed new estates and employment growth areas such as the Oxford Science Park and the Oxford Business Park. Only with such a piece of infrastructure will these potential new estates be anything other than marginal. At the moment it takes over an hour to get by bus from Kidlington round to Headington for example. Such travel times are unacceptable for estates that would be intended to supply housing for workers in the main employment areas of the city.