The British administrative class loves opacity. When it comes to why money flows here rather than there, it has rarely been forced to make its principles explicit. Who understands, for example, the rationale behind the Housing Corporation’s distribution of cash? There are clear criteria for RSLs – but aren’t housing ministers interested in where grant ends up?
“Where” is of course social as well as geographical. If the beneficiaries of social housing support fall below a certain level in terms of household income, that might imply large geographical disparities in grant, without much regard to the physical condition of the stock. But what if most support ends up in regions of the country where GDP per head is markedly below the UK average, meaning the North?
Rather tentatively, the Treasury has been asking a key question: who benefits? For example, spending on higher education benefits the middle classes. A neo-socialist might want to slant spending towards the have-nots. That could mean either grants for poorer students or (whisper it) less higher education spending in favour of more for community colleges and schools. But the prime minister, mindful of middle class votes, knows that a lot of social spending is not “progressive”.
Then there’s the vexed question of where the money goes, territorially speaking. Meeting regional aspirations for “fairness” requires the centre to be stronger, both intellectually and politically. If it is not strong, how can it apportion fairly?
Iain Maclean, an Oxford academic, has been making the case for a neutral distributive mechanism to hand the money out on the basis of objective principles which everyone recognises and accepts.
But that’s the problem. It is contentious to say poorer areas deserve more money for primary care because poorer people tend to be sicker since that inevitably means less for leafy Surrey, the inhabitants of which tend to pay more tax.
The Treasury is juggling two competing claims. One is social need and the obligation that governments (even the Tories) have accepted to massage spending so poorer households get more.
The other pressing claim is cost. Looking at estimates of GDP per head relative to public spending, London gets far more than it “deserves”. But London services cost more and there is a case, made in a report from the Greater London Assembly last week, that existing weighting schemes under-estimate the capital’s costs. In an ideal world (say Treasury officials privately) there would be no national pay bargaining and London teachers and social workers would get more while those in lower-cost Liverpool would get considerably less.
We’re probably nearer than before to getting this out in the open – distribution has always been a thing of smoke-filled rooms and off-putting formulae. This is a good thing, provided our political system can handle the often sharp divergence of interest between competing places and the harsh reality of inequality.
I don’t just mean party politics, either. Health, education and housing are fields within which groups compete outside the formal structure of Westminster and town hall politics. Professional politicians spend their lives dealing with this – but can the non-professional politicians who manage social and public services?
Source
Housing Today
Postscript
David Walker writes for the Guardian and is a regular presenter of BBC Radio Four’s Analysis programme. He is a director of the Places for People Group
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