by Citizens' Income Trust | Feb 1, 2012 | Opinion
Stuart Lowe, The Housing Debate, Policy Press, 2011, 1 847 42273 6, pbk, 280pp, £14.99
Stuart Lowe’s The Housing Debate takes a refreshingly broad view of housing and welfare. Rather than a balanced introduction for students to current debates around housing and social policy, Lowe has a clear case to make. ‘There is mounting evidence that housing is not only an important pillar of welfare states, but, looked at in its broadest sense, has become a foundation.’ (p33)
Through a series of historical and thematic chapters, Lowe argues that there is a fundamental connection between housing systems and the type of welfare states that develop from them and alongside them. In the UK, the growth of home ownership from the mid twentieth-century and the liberalisation of mortgage markets from the 1980s have been integral to developing our asset-based welfare state, where individuals and families use personal wealth to buy into welfare.
In 260 pages, Lowe doesn’t attempt to offer a comprehensive history of housing policy; rather, he draws out key themes and illustrative aspects of housing policy that have helped shape both the current structures of the welfare state and political debates about housing. Historians and welfare experts may occasionally be frustrated by this brevity. Indeed, its introductory style is occasionally prone to over-simplify, oto gloss over important subtleties. This includes, for instance, the changes to social housing to be introduced through the Localism Bill currently before Parliament, which Lowe reduces to ‘effectively creating a mirror image of the tenancy arrangements in the privately rented sector’. (p4) However, readers already interested in tax, welfare and benefits, but who come fresher to the housing debate, will value the clear structure and the balance between history and welfare theory.
The historical account begins by identifying the emergence of a distinct housing policy from Victorian public health concerns, and then traces the socio-economic roots of the modern concept of home-ownership in the interwar years. Those interested in a Citizen’s Income might be particularly taken by Lowe’s comparative analysis of housing markets across Europe and the US. He focuses on the divergence of a municipal approach to housing in Britain, where state housing was an acceptable response to a dwindling private rented market, and Germany, where a social insurance model and related scepticism of a statist approach helped more diverse provision to develop through housing co-operatives. One can see this initial split at the start of the twentieth century extending and deepening. The author’s perception of the 1961 Housing Act is that it was the end of a brief period of reliance on the private rented sector and the return to housing provision by local authorities.
Lowe’s distinctive offer is in Chapters 6 and 8, where he argues for a clearer role for housing in the analysis of welfare states. The Housing Debate neatly contrasts a historical analysis with literature on comparative welfare to argue that different approaches to housing have shaped very different welfare systems. In the UK, this means asset-based welfare. This is, in part, due to home-ownership’s significant initial costs that lead to electorates in countries with high proportions of home-owners favouring low taxes, low interest rates, and low spend social policies. And so one trade off to be made is between home-ownership and pension provision. Lowe identifies examples of explicitly asset-based welfare, including the Child Trust Funds in the UK and the experiment with individual asset bonds for low income families in the US. And as the author indicates in his conclusion, there is much still left to consider in the welfare debate, once we acknowledge that housing is part of a state model where citizens are expected to secure savings and assets to contribute to welfare.
This book has been written to persuade students of social and public policy to take housing seriously. The debate should stretch further than this. It provides a very timely analysis as policymakers turn again to reconsider housing policy in the face of slow economic growth, accelerating private rents, and projections for the costs of social care for an ageing population. This slow economic growth means that people are struggling to sell their homes at the price that they should be. This slows the market down significantly as people cannot then purchase their next home unless they used a let to buy mortgage. This allows homeowners to let out their current home until they can sell it for an appropriate price. This helps the homeowners to move into their next home too.
Jake Eliot
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jan 31, 2012 | Opinion
Daniel Dorling, Fair Play: A Daniel Dorling reader on social justice, Policy Press, 2011, xiv + 397 pp, pbk, 1 847 42879 0, £24.99
In this book Daniel Dorling has brought together fifty-two of his academic papers, newspaper articles, magazine articles, and unpublished essays, to create a nicely structured and really quite devastating critique of our unequal society: devastating because so carefully researched.
The book contains sections on inequality and poverty, injustice and ideology, race and identity, education and hierarchy, elitism and geneticism, mobility and employment, bricks and mortar, wellbeing and misery, and advocacy and action. Most of the sections follow the same pattern: a scene-setter (often a newspaper article); then mainly articles from peer-reviewed journals; and finally a newspaper or magazine article, or occasionally a final journal article, suggesting a policy direction which might reduce inequality.
Thus the section on inequality and poverty opens with an article on murder: ‘Behind the man with the knife is … the man who decided that his school did not need funding, the man who closed down the plant where he could have worked, the man who decided to reduce benefit levels so a black economy grew …’ (p.25). Then come articles showing how economic growth is generally higher in urban areas nearer to London, and that ‘society in Britain has become so divided that very few people live anywhere where they can see how a representative range of folk live’ (p.55). Finally there’s a more political piece: ‘Cameron says he is worried about “deep poverty”, about the poorest in society. But he clearly does not want a redistribution of the money, the land, the work, the educational resources and the “opportunities” that the rich have expropriated from the poor over the past three decades’ (p.59).
There are two respects in which the introduction isn’t quite accurate. Dorling claims that he’s edited the articles and extracts so that they have a consistent style, but there is still a considerable difference between the style of an article written for the Guardian and one written for the peer-reviewed Local Economy. The introduction also says that each section ends with a discussion of what we can do about the inequality evidenced. In many of the sections this is only true in the sense that Dorling asks that a current policy trend should be reversed. In just one section he proposes a new policy direction: a land tax (p.129). I suspect that this is because he’s a geographer and has studied our unequal land distribution and the many other ways in which ‘place … matters in what might inspire (or condition) you. Circumstances matter’ (p.343), and where we grow up has a considerable effect on our opportunities and prospects. In the same vein, Dorling shows how recent Housing Benefit changes will result in ‘the cleansing and clearing out of so many poorer people (and people made newly poor) from more prosperous areas of the country’ (p.99).
As well as being Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield, Dorling is President of the Society of Cartographers, and this book would be worth buying simply for the full-colour maps which say more about inequality than words alone could say. However, the main reason for buying this book has to be the sheer variety of evidence which it offers for an increasing social malaise. We are sleepwalking into a seriously unequal society. A land tax would help to reduce that inequality. To distribute the proceeds as a Citizen’s Income would make even more of a positive difference.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jan 30, 2012 | Opinion
This interview with Guy Standing first appeared in The Times of India, Crest edition, 9th July 2011, and we are grateful for permission to reprint it. For the original interview, please see www.timescrest.com/opinion/social-insurance-is-not-for-the-indian-open-economy-of-21st-century-5775. The interview was conducted by Rukmini Shrinivasan
You have become a strong advocate of cash transfers. Why so?
From my point of view, cash transfers are an essential pillar of a comprehensive social protection system. Social insurance was for an industrial society; it’s not for the Indian open economy of the 21st century. You can’t have unemployment insurance – it doesn’t reach the poor. You can’t have a means-tested system because we’ve seen the problems with it. So, you’re going to need to have some basic income transfer. The technology to do it is rapidly emerging – in some respects, India is becoming a world leader in this – and rolling this out within the next few years is certainly within the capabilities of the Indian state, if there was a will to do so.
I think cash transfers should be seen as whether they’re good or bad in themselves. They should not be discussed as an alternative to any specific policy. I do not think it is fair or correct to see this debate around cash transfers as a substitute for something else such as the public distribution system (PDS). I may have my criticisms of the PDS but they are separate from the reasons why I think cash transfers are good.
That may apply to cash transfers in general, but a general income cash transfer is not on the policy table in India right now. The only cash transfers that are being discussed within the government are those that replace subsidies.
I agree, but then there should be a proper debate. Clearly, there are chronic inefficiencies in the existing subsidy system. It goes right across the board, and anybody who defends that system is just charging against a volume of evidence that says it is chronically inefficient and inequitable and it is not solving poverty. The Prime Minister knows that, Sonia Gandhi knows that. If we know that there are very good reasons why a scheme doesn’t work, then it is intellectually reprehensible to continue in that direction.
But many of the problems in the PDS can be traced to targeting. The state of Tamil Nadu, which has a universal PDS, has both the best record of reaching beneficiaries and the lowest leakages. Why then are cash transfers the natural direction in which you look, rather than universalisation of the PDS?
I don’t know enough about Tamil Nadu, so I’m not going to say anything. Sure, you could universalise if that’s what works. But, I don’t think that’s an argument against cash transfers.
Even if it’s a targeted or conditional cash transfer, as is currently being proposed in India?
I really hope that the conditionality issue can be defeated; I think that’s the wrong way for India to go. One just imagines the scope for corruption and inefficiency; the mind boggles. I also hope that the simplicity and transparency of cash transfers will be appreciated for what it is. I hope that policy makers will look at food security as just a small part of overall security. We saw food security improve dramatically in a universal cash transfer pilot programme in Namibian villages as a result of not handing out food, but people having cash by which they could buy seeds and grow things.
You and the BIEN repeatedly talk of a universal income transfer. However, when this is operationalised by countries like Brazil, they do impose conditions and targeting. Isn’t it disingenuous to continue to talk of a universal income transfer when countries take up only a targeted version?
The whole of my professional career, I have advocated universalised and unconditional social protection and cash transfers. You are right that in Brazil, it was not only targeted in trying to reach just the poor, but it was also selected in trying to reach just women. It was not universal and it was conditional. The realisation was that the conditionality – sending kids to schools and attending clinics – was merely helping to legitimise the cash transfers among the middle class. But in 2004, Brazil passed a law committing the government to implement a universal, unconditional cash transfer for the whole population. The objective has been to roll it out and the number of beneficiaries has risen from 11 million to 60 million and the conditionality is being faded out. I foresee that something like that could happen in India.
What was the impact of the basic income cash transfer pilot in Namibia that you were a part of?
Child school attendance went up dramatically, use of medical clinics went up. Those with HIV/ AIDS started to take ARTs (Antiretroviral Therapy drugs) because they’d been able to buy the right sort of food with the cash. Women’s economic status improved, and the economic crime rate went down. Income distribution improved. This is very relevant in India because with your existing handout of goods and even with NREGA, you don’t alter the structure of local economies; in fact, you almost rigidify them. If you provide an equal amount of cash to all members of a community, you are automatically giving proportionately more to the poor. If you do that, you release the constraints that are on the lower income groups – they can pay off their debts, they can take risks, and they can buy things that they need for petty production.
Are there pilot schemes going on in India?
Social protection policy develops best when it builds on pilots, because pilot schemes allow institutional learning. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The scheme that may evolve in the Indian context may be unique – we don’t know yet. But what would be sensible is if there were calm, collected, quiet pilot schemes that were tried out with good principles, were professionally advised, developed, and implemented – without fanfare, without misrepresentation. I’m afraid that at the moment, the political polemic is making sensible piloting harder. Too many people are posturing and are keen to disrupt sensible, well-meant pilots being conducted. It is not in the interests of anybody that pilots be disrupted or prevented. The Delhi situation seems to have fallen into that trap and I think it’s very sad.
The Delhi Pilot
The Delhi government, in 2010, appointed the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and the India Development Foundation to conduct a pilot study into cash transfers as a possible alternative to the Public Distribution System (PDS). The pilot, which began in January 2011, will run for one year in West Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar slum.
100 households volunteered for cash transfers and will receive Rs 1,000 per month but will have no access to the ration shop. Another 100 volunteer families will only get a bank account and will continue to use the ration shop. The third volunteer group of 150 families will neither receive cash nor a bank account and will have to use the ration shop. The last group is of 150 families who did not want cash transfers and will not receive it. All cash transfers will be made in the name of the woman of the family.
The pilot will study the consumption, expenditure, and nutrition of the four groups and compare them against each other to determine the impact of cash transfers, and will submit its findings to the government.
However, the pilot programme has faced serious opposition from NGOs opposed to cash transfers. Members of these groups distributed pamphlets in the slum warning that participating in the pilot would lead to ration shops shutting down, and disrupted public meetings held by SEWA in the area. The pilot continues. RS
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jan 30, 2012 | Opinion
Daniel Dorling, Injustice: Why social inequality persists, Policy Press, 2011, xvii + 403 pp, pbk 1 847 42720 5, £9.99
Daniel Dorling’s Injustice (reviewed in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, edition 3 for 2010) has been reissued in paperback with a new foreword by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and a new afterword by the author.
In the book, Dorling gathers evidence for ‘continued belief in the tenets of injustice’ (p.13): ‘Elitism is efficient’, ‘exclusion is necessary’, ‘prejudice is natural’, ‘greed is good’, and ‘despair is inevitable’ – tenets imbibed by the wealthy as they grow up, and which perpetuate them in power and perpetuate their power; and tenets in which many others acquiesce. Dorling persuasively argues that the result is growing inequality, and it is surely shocking that ‘in countries such as Britain people last lived lives as unequal as today, as measured by wage inequality, in 1854, when Charles Dickens was writing Hard Times’ (p.316).
Presumably Wilkinson and Pickett were asked to write the new Foreword because of the success of their book The Spirit Level, which found that inequality (sometimes understood as income inequality, and sometimes more generally understood) was correlated to a variety of social ills. In their significant Foreword to Injustice they do as we suggested in a review in a previous edition of the Citizen’s Income Newsletter (issue 1 for 2010), and have located the causes of inequality and of various other social ills in deeper social structures – social structures which they interestingly suggest have prehistoric and indeed pre-human origins.
Dorling’s new Afterword is equally significant. The Coalition Cabinet contains more millionaires than any other in the last hundred years, and Dorling shows that in the interests of the élite which they represent, Cabinet members are consistent exponents of the ‘tenets of injustice’. He suggests that they have established a new higher education funding regime likely to restrict higher education to a social elite because they believe that elitism is efficient. Perhaps he’s right.
The Afterword locates the cure for all of this injustice in changed beliefs, as does the original book, but there is little to suggest how this might be achieved apart from the idea that we should fortify ourselves for the journey by reminding ourselves that things have sometimes changed for the better. This lack of a prescription raises an important question: Do we change behaviour by changing beliefs, or is it the other way round? The process is probably circular, which means that behavioural and structural change will be important methods of changing people’s beliefs, and vice versa. To take an example: Enforced good behaviour in the workplace in relation to racial equality has promoted belief in racial equality, and increasing belief in racial equality has promoted better workplace practice. If the process is circular in this way then we shall need to construct ‘equality mechanisms’ if we are to see people’s beliefs change.
Needless to say, Child Benefit, a Citizen’s Pension, and then a Citizen’s Income, will be such mechanisms. This leads us to suggest that, at last year’s Conservative Party Conference, George Osborne announced that Child Benefit would be deuniversalised because, in its present universal form, Child Benefit represents everything which the ‘tenets of injustice’ are against.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jan 29, 2012 | Opinion
Tony Fitzpatrick (ed.), Understanding the Environment and Social Policy, Policy Press, 2011, xviii + 366 pp, hbk, 1 847 42380 1, £65, pbk, 1 847 42379 5, £21.99
This is an exploration of the complex relationship between social policy and the environmental challenges which we all face, with social policy here defined as ‘systematic public interventions relating to social needs, well-being and problems’ (p.2) – and the relationship really is complex because, whereas in the short term there might be a trade-off between money spent on protecting the environment and money spent on health, housing and education, in the longer term money not spent on protecting the environment will impact on health, housing and education. In the other direction, social policies in areas such as fuel poverty will have an impact positively or negatively on the environment; social policies have often been designed to promote economic growth, and this has an impact on the environment; and to redirect the aims of social policy will have an impact, too, and preferably one which will steer us away from the worst of the possible climate change outcomes.
In the first chapter Hodgson and Phillips describe the causes and implications of climate change and the depletion of non-renewable resources, and they discuss the different solutions available: mitigation, adaptation, geoengineering, and conservation. In chapter 2 Hannigan asks how ecologically valid solutions can be politically feasible when economic growth appears to be the political imperative. Any useful solution will therefore need to moderate consumption by the wealthy and provide a basic level of security for the poor so that they don’t need to destroy the forests. In chapter 3 Fitzpatrick discusses environmentalists’ criticisms of social policy’s current presuppositions, and outlines a ‘green economy’ and the social policy agenda to which it would give rise (for instance: ‘How can social insurance systems be adapted to cope with collective uncertainties?’ (p.84))
Chapters follow on the state’s (historically understood) role in environmental protection, environmental (consequentialist) ethics, philosophies (of environmental justice), and environmental policy (markets, regulation, and education); and then chapters on particular social policy fields: health, urban planning, transport, employment, citizenship and care, and international development and global poverty.
Fitzpatrick’s concluding chapter is an eloquent description of the options facing us: a sustainable global society, the human race clinging to survival at the Earth’s poles, and something between the two.
In Fitzpatrick’s chapter on environmental justice there is a discussion of a Citizen’s Income’s complex relationship to environmentally sustainable social policy, and at various points social insurance and taxation are discussed, but there is no chapter on income maintenance. This policy area is discussed in his Freedom and Security (Macmillan 1999) and in his Environment and Welfare (Palgrave 2002), but a chapter here would have aided our ‘understanding [of] the environment and social policy’.
The proof reading is poor in places. A particularly nice error is Fitzpatrick’s ‘I promised to void complexities’ (p.77).
This book does exactly what it sets out to do. It offers us understanding of the environment and social policy, and it does it well.
