2nd June 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Dwellers in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’?

The NHS.

          I sometimes wonder if I live in the same world as today’s top politicians.  Here in Clacton-on-Sea there is an acute shortage of general medical practitioners (family doctors).   I have been served by the same medical practice since my family and I moved to Clacton in 1956 fifty-eight years ago.  In those distant days there were just two doctors. They were Dr Craig and Dr Geddes, both Scotsmen and not dissimilar to the Dr Cameron and Dr Finlay of the tv soap ‘Dr Finlay’s casebook’.  They behaved similarly too.   I remember several occasions when one or other of them visited my home late at night or early in the morning when one of my two then-young sons, or my wife or I, needed urgent medical attention.   There were no appointments.  Patients just turned up at the surgery.  They might have a longish wait to see a doctor but see one of the two doctors they always did.  And that doctor was always familiar with their medical history and could refresh his memory from written notes.

            Lots of changes have taken place since 1956.  Clacton has almost doubled in size and my doctors’ surgery, now renamed a ‘medical centre’ has doubled in size too. There are several practice nurses and a practice manager.  Both Dr Craig and Dr Geddes died many years ago.  At one point there were as many as six medical practitioners, two of them women.  There were, I think, appointments but most people just turned up at the medical centre and saw either their preferred doctor or whichever doctor was available.

            Now, there are only three doctors and one of them is only part-time.  They see patients only by appointment and it’s very difficult to make an appointment. ‘Phone just after 8.00 am’, you’ll be told by the receptionist – but the line is always engaged.  By the time you manage to get through all the doctors are booked.  I have found from experience that the only way I can make almost sure of seeing the doctor of my choice is to turn up at the medical centre fifteen minutes before they open at 8.00 am and ask the receptionist for an appointment then.  There’s usually a queue so I may need to get there before 7.45 am to be at the right end of that queue!   As I am now 94 I rarely bother!  The service provided for patients by our local doctors (the ‘front line’ of the NHS) is clearly not nearly as good as it was as recently as five years ago.   If it were much better than it had been when the coalition government took over, I am quite sure that it would be trumpeted as one of the government’s successes.  As it is, I’m not quite so partisan as to proclaim that ‘It’s all the government’s fault’.  I don’t suppose that it is – but the government, with its continual ‘targets’ and its reorganisation of the NHS so as to increase the field of local GP responsibility, has certainly played a major role in this deterioration.

            We need to attract many more qualified doctors to the Tendring Area – and this can’t be done just by offering them more money.  For goodness sake – our coast has the lowest annual rainfall in the British Isles and more than the average amount of sunshine.   It’s a lovely place to bring up children (my late wife and I have done it and I write from personal experience!) and it’s only about an hour and a half from London by road or rail.  It really shouldn’t be difficult to attract young doctors here.

            Is the new all-Conservative government taking any steps to encourage this?  Not as far as I know but, of course, they’ve only been in office a few weeks.  During those few weeks though, Prime Minister David Cameron has found time to promise that within a couple of years we should be able to consult a doctor any day of the week and all hours of the day!  Can David Cameron really inhabit the world that I do?  I, and I suspect a great many other local people, would be happier if he were to concentrate his efforts on the – surely much more easily achieved – objective of making it possible for us to see the doctor of our choice between 8.00 am and 5.00 pm on Monday through to Friday in every week!  That surely shouldn’t be too much to ask

 Home Ownership

            So the Government plans to go ahead with its determination to ‘buy votes with other people’s money’ by extending their ‘right to buy’ scheme from council house tenants to the tenants of housing associations.  They justify this by the alleged fact that 86 percent of the public have aspirations (that’s the OK word just now) to become homeowners.  Presumably this claim follows a public opinion poll on the subject conducted among those not owning or buying their own home.  If they were just asked Would you like to own your own home? I’d have expected that even more than 86 percent would have answered positively.  No-one particularly likes paying rent, having to observe tenancy rules and never knowing when and why they may be given notice to quit.  Neither do adults, particularly with young children, like being homeless or having to share with ‘mum and dad’.   Of course they’d much prefer having their own home.

            But that’s not what they are being offered.  What they are being offered is the possibility of home ownership (you’re not ‘the owner’ till you hold the deeds of the home) after repaying a large loan month by month over a period of twenty years or more.  During that period you’ll be responsible for paying council tax and for carrying out all repairs and internal and external decoration.  If you default in making those regular monthly payments (and who knows what’s going to happen in twenty years?) you’ll run the risk of homelessness for yourself and family, and the loss of much – even perhaps all – of the money you’ve already paid. That prospect might, I think, considerably reduce the number of potential home buyers on whose aspirations the government claims to base its policies.

            As a former local government Housing Manager I have always objected to council tenants being treated as second class citizens.  But I don’t think they should be given special privileges or financial benefits either.  Most Council tenants were happy to remain as tenants until the possibility of buying their homes ‘on the cheap’ was offered them. Under former governments they enjoyed payable rents, security and reasonable tenancy conditions.  All structural repairs and maintenance was the council’s responsibility. I am sure that Housing Association tenants are the same.

            The sale to Housing Association tenants of their homes at discounted prices is  still only one of the 'intentions' of the government.  I think that they may find themselves facing a few expensive legal challenges on the way to its fulfilment.  To David Cameron and his pals in Westminster, Housing Associations and local authorities are much the same thing.  They both owned lots of rented houses in which not-well-off people enjoyed secure tenancies ‘for life’ or at least for as long as they paid their rent and observed their not-usually-very-onerous tenancy conditions.  Both provided ‘social housing’ which they had a responsibility to keep ‘fit for habitation’ and neither made a substantial profit from their house ownership.

            In fact there is one crucial difference between Council Houses and those owned by Housing Associations.   Council Houses were built with public money – from the rates and from central government grants.  It could be claimed that a more than usually stupid government had every right to require local authorities to sell them off at bargain-basement prices.  A similar case can not be made for the compulsory sale of Housing Association property. Those homes were not provided from the rates and taxes of earlier, more responsible, governments and local councils.  They were provided by charitable giving, mainly from the generosity of very wealthy and benevolent 19^th century business men, for the purpose of providing the ‘working classes’ with comfortable, secure and healthy homes at affordable rents.

            George Cadbury and George Peabody must be among many wealthy Victorian philanthropists who are turning in their graves at the thought that, for electoral advantage, the homes that they provided for the poor may be compulsorily sold off at bargain basement prices.  They probably would have had sufficient foresight to see that such homes would eventually fall into the hands of profiteering landlords – and be let at ridiculously high rents to tenants who would only be able to pay them by means of Housing Benefit from their local authority!

            If, of course, it is found that the government can legally compel Housing Associations to sell off their properties with a substantial discount, there can be no reason why they should not extend the ‘right to buy’ to many thousands of tenants who are charged unreasonably high rents, have no security of tenure, and who fear that asking the landlord to carry out repairs will only lead to their losing their homes.  They are the tenants of private landlords.  Surely the ‘right to buy at a discount’ should be extended to them to them before it is offered to Housing Association tenants who are already satisfactorily housed?

18th April, 2015

Tendring Topics……on line

Buying Votes…….with other people’s money!

          That’s how I described the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation introduced by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the ‘avaricious 1980s’.  ‘Compel to sell’ legislation might have been a more appropriate name for it.

            For almost a century prior to the advent of Thatcherism, local authorities throughout the UK had built council houses to let, in order to combat homelessness and overcrowding in their areas and to rehouse families from individual unfit houses and properties in ‘clearance areas’ that were to be demolished.  They allocated tenancies according to housing need, without paying particular attention to whether housing applicants were poor or comfortably off.  I think that, on the whole, they were successful.  Slowly but surely, slums were demolished, overcrowding eradicated and substandard houses improved or demolished and replaced. I know that in the years before local government reorganisation in 1974, while I was Clacton-on-Sea’s Housing Manager, no-one was forced to ‘sleep rough’, under the Pier of instance, for want of a roof over their head; nor did we have to resort to providing bed-and-breakfast accommodation for homeless families.   The Council had a modest annual house building programme and this, together with casual vacancies resulting from a death or a tenant moving away, prevented even temporary homelessness.   

            All that was changed by ‘right to buy’.  Local authorities were compelled to sell homes to sitting tenants at bargain basement prices.   Many of the better off (and least troublesome) tenants took advantage of the legislation and bought their council provided homes.   Some of them took advantage and sold them on directly they were able to do so.  Some of those houses were bought by speculators and again let – but this time at a much higher ‘market dictated’ rent.  Councils were told not to let homes to people who could afford to buy or rent privately.  Tenants could not expect a home for life – tenancies were for a short fixed period, and were not renewed if the circumstances of the tenant had changed.  The government made clear that ‘social housing’ should be a temporary provision for the poor or, as Mrs Thatcher preferred to put it breathily, ‘for the genuinely needy’

Inevitably Council Estates deteriorated. Tenants had no incentive to tend their gardens, redecorate their rooms or take any pride in their homes.   Former tenants who had bought their homes sold them directly they were able to do so, taking advantage of accelerating house price inflation, and moved on to a better area.   Councils no longer had any incentive to build homes that they knew would have to be sold on ‘on the cheap’ after a few years.  Nationwide demand for homes vastly outstripped supply. Inevitably both rents and house prices rocketed and the housing situation that we have today developed.

            Those extra votes that ‘right to buy’ undoubtedly won were very dearly bought indeed.   But extra votes, from former tenants who had bought their homes ‘on the cheap’ at their Council’s expense, they certainly did buy.

            Now, with the general election only weeks away, the opinion polls indicating that the Conservatives and Labour are neck-to-neck, the Lib.Dems. nowhere in the polls, and Ukip and the Greens threatening both the main parties, the Conservatives are hoping that they can pull off the same trick a second time.

            Local authorities were not the only providers of ‘social housing’.  Housing Associations also housed thousands of folk who couldn’t aspire to home purchase (I say ‘home purchase’ rather than ‘home ownership’ because, as many home purchasers have discovered, no-one becomes a home owner until he or she has paid off the final instalment of the mortgage loan)   Prior to ‘right to buy’, Housing Associations provided a much smaller proportion of social housing than local authorities.  However during its decade of power New Labour did nothing to repeal the pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation and Ed Miliband actually apologised for the fact that his party had opposed it!  Consequently Housing Associations have provided a steadily increasing proportion of the UKs social housing.

            Evidently hoping that his proposal will buy as many votes as Margaret Thatcher’s did back in the ‘80s David Cameron has  promised that, if the Conservatives form the next government, tenants of Housing Associations will enjoy the same ‘right to buy’ as council tenants.  The government’s costs will be recovered by compelling local authorities to sell off their most expensive housing when it becomes vacant and thereby, so they believe,  raising £4.5 billion a year.  (This is, of course, the same government that claims to believe in loosening the power of the state and putting local matters in the hands of local people!)

            Will it work for a second time?  Will this ploy be as successful in buying votes as Margaret Thatcher’s was in the 1980s?   Possibly not; prior to the 1980s central government did not dictate housing allocation policy to local authorities.  Many –perhaps most – authorities allocated tenancies on the basis of need for accommodation.  The applicants’ financial circumstances were a minor consideration. Certainly neither of the authorities for which I worked as Housing Manager in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s barred any applicant on the grounds that they could have found private rented accommodation or could have bought their own house.

            Consequently when Margaret Thatcher offered all council house tenants the ‘right to buy’ their home with a substantial discount on the actual value, there were hundreds of council tenants eager and able to become home buyers and take on the responsibilities, as well as  the privileges of ownership.   That was a long time ago.  Since then social housing has been allocated only to unemployed or low waged people with few resources and often large families.  A great many of them wouldn’t be able, or wouldn’t wish, to take on the responsibilities of home ownership no matter how large a discount they were offered.    I doubt if many will respond positively.

            Anyway if they’re wise they’ll remember that it will only happen if the Conservatives win an overall majority in the general election.  If I were a Housing Association tenant I wouldn’t be getting too excited about the prospect of home ownership just yet.  I wonder if David Cameron has ever thought of extending the ‘right to buy’ to tenants of privately owned properties?  Probably not; private landlords are almost certainly Conservative Party supporters.

Is ‘Ironic Fate’ waiting in the wings?

          I once had a colleague with a firm faith in what he called ‘Ironic Fate’ (or I.F. for short)     I.F. was continually on the look-out for humans who took the future for granted, and handed out an appropriate punishment.  He believed that the fate of the Titanic was sealed when the Captain declared that ‘God himself couldn’t sink this ship’.   Hitler did the same thing by promising Germans ‘a thousand year Reich’. My colleague took this conviction to extremes.  He would never, for instance, put up the new office calendar on 31^st December, because that would have been taking for granted that we’d survive into the New Year.

I don’t personally believe in an ironic fate waiting to catch us out but I have thought a lot about I.F. or Nemesis as the election campaign gathers pace.   There are all these politicians making firm commitments for the future.  One promises umpteen  million pounds for the NHS, or for Education, or for affordable homes.  Another says that there’s no way, except by taxation, borrowing or even more savage cuts than we have already experienced, that  that promise can be realized.  One politician is going to give us four brand-new state-of-the-art nuclear submarines (just what you've always wanted?), another a new airport for London, yet another a north/south rail link.

Is it just possible that, perhaps while the election results are still being evaluated, nature will demonstrate its supremacy over all things human and mortal with another tsunami, this one closer to home, a burning all-consuming drought like those recently experienced in Australia, a gale of the strength of the typhoon that recently devastated an island nation in the Pacific, or extreme weather such as they have experienced recently in the USA and elsewhere.

All the party leaders (except perhaps Nigel Farage) accept that climatic change is taking place and that human activity is its principal cause.   They all, again with the exception of Nigel Farage, accept that urgent action is needed – but, as far as they are concerned, not just yet.  They’ll oversee the extraction of the last barrel of oil from bowels of the earth and ruin the countryside by ‘Fracking’ for shale gas, before they take serious steps to find and develop renewable and clean sources of energy, and put combating climate change as the very first item on their manifestos.

I wonder if, when climatic catastrophe strikes, anyone of them will think. ‘That’s exactly what that Green woman, the one with an Aussie accent, what was her name, warned us about during the  election campaign – but at that time we all had much more important things on our minds.

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Week 36.10 7th Sept. 2010

Tendring Topics…….on Line

Policy Options!

Probably you have never heard of ‘Policy Exchange’. They’re one of those mysterious ‘think tanks’ that spend their time considering Government future policy. When the Prime Minister or any other member of the Cabinet comes up as, often they do, with ‘a brilliant new idea’ to solve this that or the other national problem the chances are that the idea will have originated in one such ‘think tank’. I am told that Policy Exchange is very influential and close to the present coalition government.

I hope that I’m wrong about that, because to solve the national housing problem to which I referred a few weeks ago, they have come up with two of the most outrageous ideas that I have ever heard. Should these ideas ever became official policy I would expect the collapse of the government to follow. If Nick Clegg and his Lib.Dem. colleagues were prepared to endorse them, they could surely say farewell to any remaining shred of credibility.

Britain, so Policy Exchange rightly claims, needs many more affordable homes to house those who need them and to help bring down the prices of existing housing stock. They don’t, of course, suggest the repeal of 'right to buy' legislation and the encouragement of local authorities to build homes for letting. They believe that local authority reluctance to give planning permission for new homes in their areas is a major cause of the problem.

Their report suggests that the power to grant or refuse planning permission for the building of new housing estates should be withdrawn from the local authorities. Instead, it should be decided by referendum of the community where the development will take place – a simple majority of the vote deciding yes or no. Those with knowledge of these matters may find this an astonishing suggestion. Experience suggests that village communities are much more likely to refuse planning permission for new housing estates in their area, than a borough or district council whose members have to consider the interests of the entire district.

Policy Exchange has a brilliant idea though. They believe that such local resistance could be overcome by the offer of cash incentives to local people by the developer. ‘If a village decided to increase in size from 2,000 to 3,000 households there could easily be a £10,000 cash payment to every householder in the village!’

Alex Morton, the former civil servant who prepared the ‘Policy Exchange’ report, says that such payments shouldn’t be regarded as bribes – the money might perhaps be used to provide a park or similar amenity. Yes, I suppose that it might – and pigs might fly! Who needs a park in a rural village? If villagers are to be persuaded to vote against their natural instincts, they’ll each want their own bribe, cash-in-hand, at the close of poll!

I wonder if Mr Morton has considered the possibility of leaving matters as they are and bribing the existing councillors instead. That, I think might well prove more cost effective and wouldn’t be all that much more outrageous! Yes, I know it would be illegal as things stand. It would though, be a government-backed scheme – and hasn’t the government promised to sweep away pettifogging regulations that impede progress?

But that’s only the half of it!

Modestly, Policy Exchange doesn’t suggest that that one ‘big idea’ would solve all Britain’s Housing problems. They have another one – surely a real clincher!

Such houses as Councils still have left in their ownership should not, when they become available for letting, go to those in greatest need. They, for some reason, are not considered to be quite so needy, or perhaps not so deserving, as others. Any such tenancies should, first of all go to the severely disabled. That sounds fine – except that the severely disabled housing applicants whom, as Housing Manager, I have rehoused (I wonder if Mr Morton has ever actually met any?) wouldn’t consider it much of a privilege to have first call on the tenancy of a third storey flat, or a house with an upstairs bathroom!

When the severely disabled have been satisfactorily disposed of, tenancies should be allocated to those housing applicants who have been waiting the longest or who have the greatest local connections (I hope he means 'associations' and not 'influence'). There’s no mention of the local authorities that actually own these properties, having any say in this allocation. Perhaps, as part of the ‘power to the people’ that David Cameron is so keen on, all Council owned housing would, in the future, be controlled directly by central government.

Policy Exchange clearly thinks so because they also suggest that all Housing Association stock should be handed to the government and could then be sold off to tenants who wanted to buy. New houses would be built by issuing bonds to be repaid out of rent. This would enable 100,000 extra homes to be built and the Treasury would make £2.64 billion a year from house sales.

(Just imagine the, quite justifiable, outrage there would have been if it had been suggested that a Labour government might seize all privately owned tenanted homes – and use their rent to build new Council houses! ‘Neo-Stalinist snatch of our homes’ would have been among the more moderate headlines in the popular Press)

The present financial crisis was triggered by the folly and cupidity of leading bankers, first in the USA and later in the UK and elsewhere. There is a certain irony in the fact that among the victims of the proposed act of highway robbery would be the Peabody Housing Trust, which currently provides homes for some 50,000 Londoners. The Trust was founded in 1862 by George Peabody, an American Merchant Banker who settled in England and whose philanthropy, particularly in the field of public housing, earned him a burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral. I hope that the Cathedral’s foundations are sound, because he’ll be turning in his grave!

No, it hasn’t happened yet, and probably won’t happen. Surely Messrs Cameron and Clegg have sufficient sense - and integrity - not to pursue that course.. It is worrying though, to know that this is the kind of poisonous drivel that is being dripped into their ears!

A New (mini) Supermarket

I was sorry to see the closure and demolition of The Black Bull in Clacton’s St Osyth Road. It was my ‘local’. I had watched it being built, I had had an occasional meal there, either alone or with a companion or companions (at one time they did a very good lunch, with an adequate menu and very competitive prices). Occasionally too, I had strolled down there in the evening for a nightcap and a friendly chat. Such conversations had sometimes been the genesis of items in Tendring Topics (in print!) that I wrote for the Coastal Express for twenty-three years.

I would have thought that, with competent management and some professional publicity, it could have continued to serve the neighbourhood in which I live for many years.

However, it was not to be. I watched its conversion into a Tesco Express mini-supermarket without enthusiasm – though I had to concede that it seemed that an imaginative and attractive conversion was in progress, and the builders were certainly getting on with the job.

Well, as those who live in my neck of the woods know, it is now open. I paid my first visit there last week and must say, a little reluctantly perhaps, that I think it is going to be an asset to the neighbourhood. It is bright and welcoming, well-laid out inside and, considering its size, carries a very wide range of stock. Not, of course, such a wide range as Morrisons where I expect I shall continue to do my main shopping – but very useful for a quick foray, perhaps after normal closing hours or for items forgotten on the shopping list!

It has a ‘self-service’ check-out that I found a little daunting. However, a friendly assistant operated it for me and promised that, if I dropped in when they were a bit less busy, he would introduce me to its mysteries.

It is not far from my home and well within what was once my ‘walking distance’. Now though, I am glad to be able to park my mobility scooter (I like to think of it as 'tethering my iron horse') immediately outside its entrance. And, of course, it is ‘open all hours’. Not quite all – but 6.00 am till 11.00 p.m. should meet most people’s needs!

‘No new thing under the sun’

A few weeks ago the Government’s Housing Minister suggested, as his own brilliant new ideas, facilitating exchanges of tenancy between council tenants in different parts of the country and encouraging – or forcing – tenants to move into less roomy accommodation when their families grew up and left home. These measures, he thought, would reduce ‘waiting lists’ for council tenancies and generally help the housing situation.

I pointed out in this blog that in Clacton, and no doubt elsewhere, both those policies were pursued in the 1970s, though without either the element of compulsion, or the extra layer of bureaucracy involved in setting up a national exchange agency. My personal experience was, of course, BC (before computers) and thoroughly out of date. My idea of advertising a desire to exchange was limited to the local press and cards in tobacconist’s windows. Now, I am told, there has for some time been a web site with no other purpose. I didn’t know that. Nor, it seems, did the Housing Minister.

Staff of Public Libraries feel particularly vulnerable to Government cuts. Most of them have experienced a marked reduction in public use in recent years. Moreover they mainly serve leisure and cultural interests. We haven’t yet quite reached the state of mind of the late Air-Marshal Hermann Göring ‘When I hear the word “culture” I reach for my revolver’, but in the brave new economic world of the 21st century, activities that aren’t ‘wealth creative’ can hardly expect generous government support. And, of course, those that are, don’t need it!

We have a Culture Minister (in George Orwell’s 1984, there was probably a Minister of Freedom!) but I suspect that Ed Vaisey’s main job is to find ‘efficiency savings’ that will reduce spending on matters as non-creative as leisure and as ephemeral as culture. Recently I understand, he has been explaining how money can be saved by improving online library services. He has also been extolling ‘the scope for savings in reducing the number of library authorities through voluntary alliances’.

It might have been imagined that he had been inspired by just such a voluntary alliance as What’s in London Libraries? (WiLL) which had been running since 2003 in the London area. Using WiLL, readers were able to search, on line, the catalogues of all 33 London Boroughs' Public Library Services. Having located the book or books they wanted to borrow, they could do so through the inter-library loan service, thus saving both time and money.

If WiLL was Mr Vaizey’s inspiration it can be so no longer. The web site is no longer available. Queries to London Libraries, the body set up to create and run WiLL produce the following message: ‘Due to financial constraints WiLL has now been discontinued. To access individual authorities’ library catalogues please visit their respective websites’. Who, one wonders, imposed the financial restraints?

So much for encouraging voluntary alliances and on line services!