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In this article the editor reviews six recent books dealing in different ways with the current crisis in central-local governmental relations in Britain. Three deal with the nature of local government per se, two from a critical stance alleging serious inefficiency and lack of accountability. One advocates the case for local government, and the other two examine central-local relations in particular contexts. There is strong convergence on how the present system may be described, but marked dissensus on prescriptions for reform, reflecting not only differences in political values but also an inadequate analysis of the critical organisational issues.
Housing policy in Britain in the postwar decades was important, politically, administratively and financially. In the I980s and 1990s, despite growing academic interest, professionalisation and sophisticated lobbying, housing is manifestly losing out as a policy priority to other areas such as health, social security and law and order. How does one account for this major shift, involving the progressive marginalisation of one ofthe major pillars ofthe welfare state? This article will examine a number of major explanations including crude demographics, structural economic change, ideology and electoral arithmetic. By looking at recent fluctuations in policy interest in housing some inferences are drawn on the circumstances which are still capable of bringing housing up the policy agenda. This also raises issues about the relationship between trends, long waves, and cycles in policy analogous to these phenomena in economics. Looking at the situation in other advanced countries casts further light on the general relationship between housing policy and stages of development. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the ways in which key aspects of housing policy have diffused into other adjacent policy arenas where they may attract different labels.
This chapter looks at a range of policy responses to the need for affordable housing. It examines the innovations in the forms of ‘intermediate sector’ provision and in the planning and supply systems. The chapter concludes with a section on several policy ideas that are related to affordability.
Housing affordability problems are exacerbating poverty, particularly for working age households increasingly reliant on private renting, and housing needs have increased, reversing long-standing trends. UK housing still partially insulates the poor from bad housing experience but this tendency is weakening. Fuel poverty has significantly worsened and the poor are 6-10 times more likely to experience its adverse impacts. The poor are also more likely to experience neighbourhood social and other problems.
How many people live in poverty in the UK, and how has this changed over recent decades? Are those in poverty more likely to suffer other forms of disadvantage or social exclusion? Is exclusion multi-dimensional, taking different forms for different groups or places?
Based on the largest UK study of its kind ever commissioned, this fascinating book provides the most detailed national picture of these problems. Chapters consider a range of dimensions of disadvantage as well as poverty - access to local services or employment, social relations or civic participation, health and well-being. The book also explores relationships between these in the first truly multi-dimensional analysis of exclusion.
Written by leading academics, this is an authoritative account of welfare outcomes achieved across the UK.
A companion volume Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK: Volume 1 focuses on specific groups such as children or older people, and different geographical areas.
‘Destitution’ has re-entered the lexicon of UK social policy in the 2010s, highlighted by the rapid growth of food banks and rough sleeping in a context of controversial welfare reforms and austerity policies, yet theoretical literature on this remains limited. Specialist surveys have been developed to measure and profile these phenomena, but these remain separate from the mainstream statistical approach to poverty, which relies heavily on large-scale household surveys. Evidence from recent work in this area, including qualitative evidence, is very suggestive of risk and driving factors, but it is difficult to weigh the relative importance of different factors or to predict the effects of policy measures. A composite survey approach is developed, linking a specialised survey targeting households at risk of destitution with a major national household panel dataset, to enable predictive models to be fitted to data including significant representation of hard-to-reach and non-household populations. Models predicting destitution and food bank usage are developed and compared, highlighting the roles of key factors. Vignettes are used to show how the risks vary dramatically between households in different situations. The potential role of such models in micro-simulation or prediction of impacts of different scenarios is discussed.
This paper is concerned with the operation and impacts of planning on patterns of urban development and city (region) competitiveness. Land-use planning is one of the most important, possibly now the most important, form of regulatory intervention in economic activity and development in Britain. Indeed, some prescriptions for improving Britain’s competitive economic performance draw particular attention to planning (McKinsey 1998).
Most of the literature on planning and urban development tends to be written from ‘within the system’. That is, it tends to (a) adopt a normative stance, reasoning from certain desirable goals to proposed practical measures, and (b) take for granted features of the British planning system as normal/natural. In this paper we are trying to take a step back from this, and to look at the system more objectively, as an essay in ‘political economy’ which looks for some general regularities in the way that this decentralised politico-administrative system operates.
International comparisons may draw attention to this aspect of differences in the operating environment, without necessarily understanding the actual differences between land-use regulation regimes and ways in which these are changing. The way British land-use controls work is significantly different from systems operated in the US or elsewhere. Also, regimes in all countries are responding to environmental and political challenges, such that past assumptions about regulatory environments may no longer hold (see, for example, the US debate on urban growth controls (Danielsen et al, 1999; Downs, 1997; US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1999).
Property markets and urban development have a significant impact on urban competitiveness (see also the chapter by Gibb in this volume), especially in relation to how planning deals with different sectors of development, location and land use.
This chapter considers the use and adequacy of local services. It is largely based on data from the 1999 Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) Survey and draws on previous analysis of the 1990 Breadline Britain Survey undertaken by Bramley (1997) in order to assess trends over time. This is set in the context of wider research on the distributional impact of local services (Bramley and Le Grand, 1992; Bramley and Smart, 1993; Hills, 1996; Bramley, 1996; Sefton, 1997; Bramley et al, 1998) and on how adequate and accessible people regard these services as being (Duffy, 2000; Bailey and Hastings, 2002). The main aim of the chapter is to investigate whether local services are an effective mechanism of redistribution in favour of the ‘poor’, or whether these services are used more by the better off. In doing so, the chapter examines both use of and attitudes towards local services. It addresses the following specific questions:
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What is the distributional profile of local public services in terms of individual households, class, income and poverty in 1999? Are certain services used more by the poor or by the better off?
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Which local services are regarded as essential by most households? Are the ‘poor’ more or less likely to regard particular services as essential?
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Has the distributional profile of service usage changed since 1990? What factors might account for these changes? Is this service exclusion for the ‘poor’ becoming greater or diminishing?
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How does the distributional profile of usage for local private services compare with that for local public services?
While public support for local services as ‘essential’ remains high, there have been divergent trends in usage, with increases in public transport, corner shops and childrens services, but declines in information,leisure and cultural services. Distribution of service usage has become slightly more ‘pro-poor’, yet poorer groups are still more likely to report constraints in service access or quality. Services are not systematically worse in poorer neighbourhoods, in most cases, and service exclusion does not overlap much with other dimensions of social exclusion. While the service domain thus appears to continue to bolster equality, post-austerity cuts to local government spending threaten significant retrenchment in poorer localities.
