How excellent, the rough sleeping problem is solved

The rough sleeping problem was largely solved during the lockdown by putting all those sleeping on the streets into the empty rooms of closed hotels. Now that everything is opening up again a different solution is required:

An extra £85m has been announced by the Treasury to provide emergency accommodation for 5,400 rough sleepers who have been placed in hotels in England for the duration of the pandemic, avoiding them having to return to the streets when the hotels reopen to the public this summer.

The extra money will allow councils to rehouse rough sleepers in student accommodation and to find alternative spaces elsewhere until more permanent housing is found.

Dame Louise Casey, the chair of the Covid-19 rough sleeping taskforce, said she was extremely relieved the extra money had been allocated, allowing charities and councils longer to work to find long-term housing for those rough sleepers who have been staying in Ibis, Holiday Inn and Travelodge hotels at the government’s expense since the end of March.

“This will make sure that local authorities and others don’t have to put people back out on the street. I think it would be, frankly, inhuman – because we’ve given people a taste of life off the street and a taste of life where you get your health looked after. The last think we want is for anyone to go back,” she said. The funding meant she could “guarantee” that nobody would have to leave to return to a life on the streets.

Securing the funding had “taken a little bit longer than I would have liked”, Casey said. “But now we can assure people that nobody goes back.”

How excellent, well, that’s another problem we can tick off the list as being entirely and completely solved then.

Super. All the dirges about how appalling a society we are because someone sleeps in a cardboard box are now historical.

Except:

although inevitably some people might make a choice to return to rough sleeping.

This being the point we’ve been making for years now about rough sleeping. It’s not actually a housing problem in the first place. Therefore it’s not one solved by the provision of housing. It is a problem about significant mental illness and varied addiction problems meaning the solutions have to be about those, not housing. Not that this will stop the dirges.

We need bonds….just not the polyethylene kind

The micro-bead ban. The plastic bag tax. The plastic straw ban. Restriction after restriction is being levied, all in an unsuccessful attempt to eliminate the polymer that has become public enemy number one: plastic.

The problem of plastic pollution is compounding at a rapid rate, with 8 million tons of plastic entering the ocean annually. It can’t be ameliorated by policies centred on negative incentives, as these are unable to change consumer or investor behaviour in the long term. More often than not, employing negative incentives results in a fragmented, piecemeal approach, where select plastic items are taxed: barely enough to make a dent in The Great Garbage Patch. We need to look instead to policies that promote positive action, not curb negative behaviours.

One such policy is the adaptation of the green bond model to establish tax-exempt private green bonds. These would fund projects tackling plastic pollution that have a pre-certified impact. This would not only attract large investors but small scale investors too, as there would be potential for higher, tax-free returns with less risk. Apart from boosting funding, this would create an atmosphere that enables engagement with climate issues in a positive manner, encouraging the uptake of more environmentally-friendly behaviours, without the need for negative reinforcement.

The sustainability bonds market was worth $10.3 billion in 2017, growing to an impressive $18 billion in the space of just a year, demonstrating its enormous potential. However, the power of current green bonds is not being effectively harnessed in the fight against plastic pollution, with only 4% explicitly funding waste reduction.

This may be because, whilst useful investment vehicles, green bonds on the market today present numerous concerns: unpredictable returns, uncertainty surrounding the quantitative impact of the projects being funded and transparency generally, all of which dissuade investors. Tax-exempt private green bonds would fund pre-certified projects meaning that transparency and predictable returns would be guaranteed, thus removing the main obstacle preventing investment.

Moreover, such bonds could enable small-scale solutions to gain traction by eliminating one of the key barriers to growth in such technologically intensive fields: the cost of capital. Decreasing the cost of capital would increase production and cut the cost of the innovation, spurring further investment and creating a sustainable cycle of growth, benefiting both economy and environment. It is evident that tax-free green bonds are the only shackles capable of restraining this polymer, public enemy number one.

Simran Lakhotia is the runner-up of the under-18 category in our Young Writer on Liberty 2020 competition.

Fairtrade And The Rainforest Alliance

We’ve pointed out over the years that we’re not particularly in favour of the varied fair trade schemes out there. We do indeed want the poor out there to get richer and insist that it is free markets and capitalism that achieve that worthy, even noble, aim. On the other hand consumers gain utility from thinking they’re doing something useful so that makes them richer, as their voluntary spending on such schemes shows, so why not?

The gripping hand argument for us is that Fairtrade, specifically, encourages the perpetuation of smallholder farming. Or, as we would put it, the sentencing of people to an eternity of peasantry.

With that background though we are supportive of this move:

KitKat has severed its ties with Fairtrade, despite the organisation behind the scheme warning that thousands of farmers would be hit by the move. The boss of Fairtrade said Nestle’s decision to cut its 10-year association with the non-profit organisation was “profoundly disappointing”.

The Swiss-owned food giant said it would now source its cocoa for KitKat bars from farms on Rainforest Alliance terms instead of those working with Fairtrade accreditation.

For those not au fait with the squabbling between groupuscules the differences are explained here and here.

The major benefit of such schemes is in the egos of those doing the purchasing. We do indeed insist that increasing the consumer surplus is a good thing and so the increase in competition is to be welcomed. Those who prefer to acquire that aura of zealous morality through their purchases may now do so in at least two different ways. They are made better off by the choice. Why wouldn’t we support that?

Markets do, after all, work.

Having targets requires having the right targets

We are told that Black Britons makeup only 1.5% of those in the top positions of power. We are further told that this is disgraceful and something must be done. We might start doing something by beginning to count properly.

UK employers have been told to take “urgent action” to support workers from ethnic minorities, after a survey found the number of black professionals in leadership roles has barely moved since 2014.

Business in the Community, the group founded by the Prince of Wales to support responsible business, said black people held just 1.5% of the 3.7m leadership positions across the UK’s public and private sectors in 2019, compared with 1.4% in 2014.

We tend to prefer - not insist upon, just prefer - the French habit here. They refuse, adamantly, to count the ethnicity of the population at all. To be a French citizen is to be a French citizen and that’s all there is to it. On the grounds that it is being a citizen of France that confers the rights and privileges so that’s all that should be counted. In our case a sort of Britannicus ergo sum.

This is terribly out of step with our times of course so we should progress to the current demands. The point being, and one we’ve made before, that measuring against the total population is not the correct comparator. For it should not be a surprise that those leadership positions are rather hogged by those in a certain age group. Despite certain election manifestos we do not install teenagers to political power for example. Nor, again despite certain behavioural evidence, are companies run by toddlers.

The claim is that the Black British population is some 3.3% of us all therefore that should be the percentage in those positions of power. This is not so. For that black population trends considerably younger than the population as a whole. As ONS points out here and here. The Black African portion of the population is now larger than the Afro Caribbean too:

1.9 million people (3.3%) were from Black ethnic groups, with just under 1 million of those identifying with the Black African ethnic group (1.8%), and 0.6 million with the Black Caribbean ethnic group (1.1%)

And:

the percentage of the population from a Black African background doubled from 0.9% in 2001 to 1.8% in 2011

And:

the Black African group had a younger age profile than the Black Caribbean group, partly due to different immigration patterns – the first large wave of immigrants from the Caribbean was in the 1950s and 1960s, and most of their children were aged 40 to 55 years at the 2011 Census (accounting for nearly 30% of this ethnic group); the more recent immigration of Black Africans explains why 29% of people in this ethnic group were aged 25 to 39 years at the Census

We are indeed of the view that the initial claim about targets is wrong in and of itself. But even putting that aside if we are to have targets then they do need to be based on a certain acceptance of reality. The younger among us are not currently in positions of power and authority in our society? That’s a rather feather and fall over finding, isn’t it?

Any and every measurement of the population that does not take into account age cohorts and demographics is going to be wrong. Therefore, if we are to measure these things we’d better start taking account of age cohorts, hadn’t we?

It’s a Funny Old Way to Run the Country

Few people think the government has made a good fist of managing the country through the pandemic.  We should not blame them because even the best of governments are poor managers partly because they confuse governing with managing. The word “govern” originates from being the helmsman, someone who sets the overall direction, rules or controls the ship (of state). The managers are the others who get things done. In modern terms, government sets the rules (laws and statutory instruments), deals with other states, recruits and equips the armed forces and, through taxation, pays for whatever democracy thinks the state should provide. Management is quite another matter; there has not been anyone with significant management experience in the Cabinet for over 25 years. The last two were Geoffrey Robinson, outed for lending money to Peter Mandelson in 1998, and Michael Heseltine who fell out with Margaret Thatcher in 1986.

According to the UK government listing “Departments, agencies and public bodies”, downloaded 20th June 2020, the PM has 23 Ministerial Departments reporting directly to him as well as a further 20 Non-Ministerial Departments who you might expect to report to ministers but seem not to. Those departments harbour about 370 Executive Agencies, Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs), Tribunals, Public Corporations and other quangos. According to the listing, the numbers mysteriously grow to about (do not expect precision from the Cabinet Office) 400 when they are listed alphabetically.  For someone recovering from Covid, that number of direct reports, not to mention Mr Cummings, is a bit tough.

Government should focus on governing and get out of management. Amongst the 370 NDPBs and whatnot, are 17 museums and a dozen parks and gardens, all good things but do they govern us? Public corporations, like the BBC and the Bank of England, are a step in the right direction.  The shareholder is the state but government does not interfere in day to day operations. Arguably the best thing Gordon Brown ever did was to step away from interfering in the Bank of England.  Amongst the 400 Executive Agencies and NDPBs, quite a few should be public corporations, notably NHS England which would do an even better job if it was given the chance to do so.

The interesting question is who should be the shareholder in UK public corporations if it is not the government? The Royal Parks, unlike the 17 English parks above, are owned by the Crown Estate but the responsibility of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and yet not managed by them nor a NDPB because they form an independent charity.

Adult social care had a bad pandemic because it is chronically poorly funded; that is because no one is in charge. Local government is directly responsible for adult social care but lacks the funds. The Care Quality Commission, which usually checks hospitals, monitors it without regard to funding issues.  One might imagine that the central funding comes from the Department of Health and Social Care but that is not so; the Ministry of Housing and Funny Walks provides the moolah and also, clearly being expert in the matter, directions on how it should be spent.

Confusion still reigns over devolution. Downing Street pandemic briefings sought to convey that the messages were UK-wide even though health is constitutionally devolved.  The listing of Whitehall public bodies noted above contained 35 Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland NDPBs. And MPs from those nations can still vote in the Westminster parliament on purely English matters.

Parliament itself could use some streamlining. In 2011, parliament recognised the inequity of constituency sizes (the biggest have twice the number of voters of the smallest) and voted to reduce the number of MPs from 650 by 8%.  Scotland and Wales are, ironically in view of devolution, over-represented and would reduce by 10% and 18% respectively compared with 6% in England.  France and Germany have 50% more voters per constituency than the UK so an 8% shrinkage, you might think, is modest.  MPs however share turkeys’ dislike of Christmas and managed to postpone the necessary boundary changes first to 2018 and then sine die.

One also might expect a little more enthusiasm for reducing the numbers in the House of Lords, currently 778. It is the only upper chamber in the world which exceeds the lower chamber in number. The average age is 70; the oldest is 95. 26 of them are Lords Spiritual of the Church of England – tough cheese if you belong to another nation or faith. 26 is more than twice the number of Christ’s disciples and three times the proportion of the UK population attending C of E churches. The House of Lords Reform Act 2014 was truly radical: it allowed those who did not turn up to lapse their membership.

Many people believe the UK has no written constitution but that is not the case.  It was written, by Lewis Carroll, in the 19th century but, Britain being an old country, no one can remember where we put it.

Joking aside, government, and the PM especially, really does need to focus on governing, streamline today’s incoherent structure, farm out public corporations and step away from management. How can that be done? Certainly not with another Royal Commission led by an elderly judge.  Lawyers are responsible for most of this mess and the least likely people to get us out of it. Far more important is political consensus: we must not have this changing every election.  Maybe the party leaders should meet for a good lunch, when social distancing allows, to hack out a rough solution. Sir Humphrey should take the minutes but otherwise remaining silent.  I’ll pay for the lunch.

Can we all agree now that fast fashion is a good thing?

It wasn’t that long ago that we were all being told to abjure cheap clothing - fast fashion. We were, apparently, just consuming, as if that were a bad thing. So, the story went, we should buy fewer clothes, made more locally, at higher cost, because this would be, in some manner, better.

Then we saw that fast fashion industry disappear for a bit:

Surviving on a bag of rice: plight of Bangladeshi garment makers

Clothing factory workers in Bangladesh were hit twice by Covid-19, once when their factories closed, and again when global retailers cancelled orders

The absence of it is worse. As it was always obvious it would be for it its existence didn’t make things better then why and how did it come into existence? Or, perhaps, why did we voluntarily call it into existence by spending our money upon it?

Nazmin Nahar, a 26-year-old garment worker and mother of two in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is living on borrowed rice. She hasn’t had the wages to pay for food or rent for more than two months.

Even though the hours were long and the targets relentless, Nahar had been happy working at Magpie Knitwear, where she earned £150 a month, making clothes for UK brands such as Burton and H&M.

In that time and place that £150 a month is not far off what a private sector school teacher would get for educating to A level standard. And is more than a state sector teacher gets although they also gain accommodation.

The reason wages are generally at that low level is because Bangladesh is still a poor place even as it is getting richer by leaps and bounds. Poor places simply do have low wages as Paul Krugman has explained.

So, fast fashion. It makes Nazmin and another 4 million like her in Bangladeshi factories better off. It makes us better off as we get to consume more clothing. Can we therefore agree that it’s a good idea? You know, making the world a better place by making us humans richer?

A certain problem with the racial wealth gap

We’re told that there is yet another problem in our green and pleasant land. The racial wealth gap:

According to a recent report by the Runnymede Trust, Black African and Bangladeshi households have only 10p of savings and assets for every £1 of white British wealth.

About which it is necessary to point out just a few things.

Mass immigration is a comparatively recent thing in the UK and we find ourselves entirely unsurprised that recent immigrants are not at the top of the societal, income or wealth distributions. We tend to think that’s not how immigration works, not in the first generation. We would go on to agree that seeing such a pattern in the second and or subsequent generations would be worthy of investigation and possibly rectification.

It is also true that wealth increases with age. Household wealth is largely - actually, outside the top 10% of the population almost entirely - made up of pensions and housing equity. These are things which skew with age. None of us are surprised that a 20 year old has none of either, all understanding that both are built over a lifetime. The Black African and Bangladeshi populations trend very much younger in average age than the white. Whether the gap is purely explained by this we very much doubt but any examination which doesn’t control and correct for it is valueless.

There is a much more thorny problem here as well. Yes, there’s a significant gap in housing equity. We also have a system which subsidises people not to build housing equity. Part of this system is Housing Benefit, part is the system of social housing. These are both - not exclusively, but near entirely - aimed at the poorer sections of the population and at those who rent.

Leave aside entirely whether such should exist or not - we think that some system of subsidy to those who cannot afford housing is entirely fine, even if we argue with aspects of this one - and concentrate just upon the effects.

For what is the complaint here? That people poorer in income are not gaining housing equity. Yet we have a substantial system - Housing Benefit alone was something like £40 billion a year last time we bothered to look - which deliberately subsidises people not to build housing equity. For if you buy you don’t gain the subsidy, if you continue to rent you do.

So, why do the poorer among us not gain housing equity? Because we’re paying them not to do so. Which makes complaining about the absence of housing equity among the poor somewhat obtuse at best.

Of course, there is a solution to this, sell the social housing to the poor at whatever discount makes it financially viable for them to buy it. That produces, over time, the equity and reduces the cost of the subsidy as well. In fact, it solves the wealth gap problem entirely. It’s just that we can’t help feeling that someone has tried this before and the same people doing the current complaining didn’t like that at all.

Gender equality is a luxury

Before we create too, too, much apoplexy out there we should point out that we do not mean that gender equality is a luxury in the colloquial sense, something the rich can have and the poor just have to lump being without it. Rather, gender equality is a luxury good, that description being a technical one with a specific meaning. It means something we devote more of our income to as our income rises, less as it falls.

At which point:

Women's careers are regressing and taking Britain back to a 1950s style of living, a study has found, as experts say the pandemic has shifted traditional childcare duties back onto mothers.

We are currently some 20 to 30% poorer than we were 3 months ago - we’re not quite sure and won’t be until we see next month’s GDP release. The complaint here is that we’re going less of that gender equality stuff as we become poorer - gender equality is a luxury good.

We’re rather in favour of luxury goods ourselves and we’re also firmly in favour of gender equality - even as we might mutter a bit about how some people define that.

What interests us here though is that this is a good argument in favour of economic growth, isn’t it? Gender equality increases as society becomes richer, becoming richer is economic growth, gender equality is generally seen as one of those things we’re all in favour of - we should pursue economic growth as it increases gender equality.

Oh, yes, that also means that capitalist free marketry is pro-gender equality as it’s the only socioeconomic system that has produced consistent economic growth over time.

Good, we’re glad that’s solved then. Gender equality is just another in that long list of reasons to support capitalist free markets.

Why politics is such a lousy way of doing anything

We are looking at the rubble of the global economy caused by a pandemic. Allow us at least some rhetorical hyperbole here. We also know that the effect of the disease itself seems to vary over human genotypes. We’d like to know why.

We do know that Vitamin D is linked to the human immune response. We also know that Vitamin D production is linked to the melanin content of the skin and the amount of sunshine (more strictly, UV light) upon it. Pale skin wouldn’t have developed in northern climes (the equivalent latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere generally not being land) if this were not true according to our current understanding.

Unfortunately politics rather gets in the way here:

Public health officials are urgently reviewing the potential ability of vitamin D to reduce the risk of coronavirus.

It comes amid growing concern over the disproportionate number of black, Asian and minority ethnic people contracting and dying from the disease, including a reported 94% of all doctors killed by the virus.

A delayed Public Health England review into the reasons why BAME people are disproportionately affected, which pointed to historical racism, did not review the role of diet and vitamin D.

Some large portion of the politically engaged insist, for their own reasons, that the cause is that structural racism. Thus that’s the first answer that politics reaches, that it is structural racism.

This is rather what Hayek was talking about in The Road to Serfdom. Not that the existence of the National Health Service would make us all serfs. But that directing health care through politics would give political power over health care. Thus health, and its care, would be directed by the political fascinations of those who rule us rather than being offered on the basis of what actually works in improving our health and its care.

This current example does not exactly disprove his contention.

In terms of what’s really happening we’re entirely open about this. If it’s structural racism causing the problem so be it and let’s go and deal with it. If it’s Vitamin D then so too there. The important thing is that we want to know. For only then can we work out what to do. There would be little point in overturning society if the cure were actually to advise the melanin enhanced to go sit in the park for 30 minutes each afternoon.

All of which is why politics is such a lousy way of getting things done. Answers proffered tend to be politically determined. Even the questions asked are so. Which isn’t how we do get to understand reality and what to do about it.

For look at what politics has managed with health care so far in this pandemic. They’ve not, as yet, even asked the right question and yet they’re already proffering that answer. This just isn’t the way to do things.

The Not So Green Belt

There are few policies in the UK which bring about as much controversy as the Green Belt. These vast areas surround many major UK cities, and are hailed by their supporters as bastions of environmentalism. Yet to many the benefits of the Green Belt are questionable, and the externalities of reduced housing and increased congestion raise doubts on the efficacy of the policy.

In the case of the Green Belt, the opportunity cost of a supposedly environmentally sound policy is vast swathes of land which could be used to solve Britain’s housing crisis. In fact research from the ASI estimates that for London ‘one million homes could be built on just 3.7% of Green Belt land,’ meaning that if the Green Belt has (if any) positive environmental impact, it must outweigh the distortion that it creates on the UK housing market to be even remotely justifiable.

Yet whilst some areas of natural beauty may exist, 37% of land around London is used for high intensity farming, carrying with it detrimental environmental impact, not to mention the vast swathes of land dedicated to private golf courses. This is far from the enchanted forest depicted by many Green Belt supporters.

Further, with employment becoming increasingly centred around London, more and more people are forced to commute further out from London because of the Green Belt. This consumes immense quantities of oil, and creates clouds of emissions, further diminishing the limited environmental benefits of the Belt.

If the environmental benefit is doubtful, why does the Greenbelt continue to persist?

For a politician campaigning on credentials of environmental activism, showing support for a physical green space is far more likely to persuade the average voter than any talk of arcane emission standards or other more effective policies. The narrative of ‘green good, building bad’ put forward by activist groups clouds the debate into one of emotion, rather than of facts. This isn’t even mentioning the upward pressure on constituents’ houses prices creating an incentive for politicians to appeal to local supporters, rather than the national, or even global interest.

Thus we must seek to change the narrative to one which favours logic and tangible improvement to society, rather than one that rubs politicians ego’s and improves electoral chances in order to save both our housing market and environment together.

Tim Edwards is the winner of the 18-21 category in our Young Writer on Liberty 2020 competition.