Category Archives: Politics, Policies And Process
No Top-Level Diversity Leaves Liverpool’s Leadership Lacking
Civic leadership in action requires a range of perspectives and understandings. No single ‘type’ of person can hold all the wisdom to take communities forward in this complex age. A range of experience is required. The overwhelmingly white, male hegemony in Liverpool’s corridors of power is a civic embarrassment, demonstrating a fundamental lack of will to learn from the richly diverse insights of its citizens.
For everyone to flouish, civic direction must draw on the life experience of us all. Sadly however this is a lesson yet to be learnt in Liverpool.
In April Liverpool’s Liberal Democrat-led City Council set up the long-needed Countdown Group in an attempt to sort the physical regeneration of Liverpool before our big European Capital of Culture year in 2008.
Currently, in September, Council leaders are doing the same with the Board of the Culture Company, with even less time for manoeuvre to achieve success.
Singular perspective
Both the Countdown programme and Culture Board are now led exclusively by white men. But with such a singular perspective, how can these City Council appointees even hope to do a decent job for everyone?
It needs saying yet again: Liverpool’s political leaders have no idea how to engage all the richly diverse talents of this city’s citizens.
Exclusion zone
Such wilful exclusion of women, and of people from the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities, demonstrates a huge failure by our political leaders to reflect on inclusion before they act – a consistent omission which may well impact on the success of 2008 and beyond.
Wherever the debates about inclusion in all senses may take us, the evidence to hand suggests Liverpool probably has the most sexist Council leadership in England.
Diversity Index
I award Liverpool City Council 0 / 5 for leadership on this website’s Diversity Index.
An editied version of this commentary was published as a letter in the Daily Post on 17 September 2007 and the Liverpool Echo of 21 September. Responses and commentary from other correspondents, endorsing the view, were also published on 18 September and 21 September.
Translational Science In Transition: The New Science Policy
Who owns Big Science in the UK? Does government science policy sit within wider public policy, or is it stand alone? The Cooksey Review has stirred strong feelings amongst medical scientists, and also further afield. Few science policy questions can be determined without understanding the wider public policy context.
Who pays for what in the constant race to stay at the global cutting edge in science and technology is a hot debate. Often neglected is an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of stakeholders, but this is an area which the scientists themselves sometimes ignore.
Getting to the bottom of who can / should pay for science and innovation in the UK is a difficult task. When all relevant interests – science and technology, policy makers, the economy / electorate – are perceived there is more clarity, but only rarely does this happen. The issue is however making headway as a result of changes resulting from the 2007 Budget, which promises an increase in investment in public science of 2.5 per cent from 2008-09 to 2010-11..
Both the Cooksey Review on funding for health research, and the (connected) introduction of the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills focus on ensuring that progress in scientific research and wider value for money go hand in hand.
Value for whom?
The really big question here is, who benefits from investment in what sort of science? This is surely the nub of the issue, but it needs a wide perspective to answer the question properly.
The emphasis seems so far to be on the ‘translation’ of blue sky research findings into marketable commodities – an entirely sensible idea in general., but not a complete one. The core issue of how much benefit accrues to whom when commodities become marketable is not easily resolved.
Whether the product eventually taken to market is a medical drug, a form of renewable energy or a development in nanotechnology, there are likely to be direct and indirect benefits and costs.
Medical priorities in research
One person’s or sector’s gain may be another’s loss – an obvious but frequently forgotten matter from the perspective of practising scientists.
This may be particularly true in the case of medical scientists, who are currently it seems most agitated, and who often have a specific, and possibly tragic, individual human condition in mind as they undertake their work. Nonetheless, this human priority cannot stand alone.
Medical scientists have not always covered themselves in glory when it comes to collaborating within the Big Science framework – the Daresbury crisis of a few years ago comes to mind – and for some of medical researchers the universe probably finishes at the point where abstract research translates (to use the new term) into pharmaceuticals. This is why, when public money is involved, others must take a wider view.
Science policy and public policy
Policy in government-sponsored science is not, contrary to much of the discussion, a singular issue. For a start, there is policy about science; and then there is policy relating science and the general public interest. These two are inter-connected, but not always the same.
Science policy variously (as examples, and in no order of priority) might be about:
* ‘translating’ or bringing blue sky research to the market;
* meeting a specific human or technical need;
* continuing promising lines of investigation which may or may not eventually go anywhere;
* establishing or maintaining national reputation, or that of an institution and / or individual/s.
Public policy relating to science might, e.g., concern:
* developing local science-based businesses;
* linking scientific and technical / medical research outcomes to the wider economy;
* developing programmes or projects in geographical or otherwise specifically identified areas, to progress regeneration or other ambitions for general benefit;
* seeking answers to particular policy conundrums or challenges, by way of developing the evidence-base available to decision-makers.
Contextual perspectives on science
To make sense of these difficult and often conflicting priorities between science and public policy requires seeing the wider contexts in which science and technology operate.
Social, economic and political backdrops are not secondary matters when government is paying directly for science to be done. They are central and critical, right from the beginning.
‘Translating’ science is ultimately about taking blue sky research to market, but it is also in another sense about making sure that stakeholders – the general public – know and are comfortable with what, through their taxes, they are paying for.
Consensus on taking science forward
From this point of view scientists need to accept that, if government pays directly, it wants to know how the research will take public policy forward.
Politicians are not usually keen to write open cheques for unknown outcomes, nor should they be.
Scientists paid by government are usually there to do their part within a policy framework geared to fairly tight timescales, to make the evidence-base available or to develop a required product. As such they rarely have the luxury of following their noses in research, just because it looks interesting.
Government funding
Sometimes there is a case for blue sky research directly funded by government, but probably, given budgetary constraints and the constant need to be immediately answerable to the electorate, not often.
The right way to support (most) blue-sky research is through the universities’ wider funding and large science-led corporations.
Such investment will, if directed wisely, bring reward in the longer term, when investors can as a result make the evidence-based case for government to invest in developing the applications of their new-found knowledge.
Fast Trains And The North-South Divide
Is large-scale sustainable transport possible? Should we welcome Britain’s fastest-ever domestic train, which has arrived in Southampton this week? The UK’s North- South economic divide brings these questions into sharp focus. The further one is from London, the more important connectivity can become. So is carbon footprint a critical issue only after the economics have been taken care of?
Economics and environment don’t always mix. For some the pressing need is to reduce travel. For others, it is vital to improve physical connection. These complicated issues have come up the agenda again this week, with the news that the Go-Ahead Group has arranged imminent delivery of 29 high-speed Hitachi trains from Japan, which will operate from 2009 on the South Eastern network.
Low expectations?
Whilst commuters in the South are getting excited about travel times and accessibility to the Capital, those in more northerly parts of the UK are likely to be less enthused. For many the expectation of poor transport is a way of life, and there is a feeling – perhaps unjustly in respect of some local northern operators – that nothing is going to happen to change this. For others, the temptation is to believe that yet again the South is benefiting and the rest are not. Few Northerners are as yet willing to ditch their cars.
Will the new fast trains effect a change of heart? The optimists for train travel think that signs we are catching up with the Europeans will focus a national clamour for this form of transport. More dour observers suggest that because of potential damage to the environment we should not be encouraging travel anyway.
Sustainable transport, sustainable economies
I’m generally on the side of the optimists here. There’s little chance of sustainable living across Britain whilst inequalities (not just North-South, but certainly including that) are so great. I’d like to see more trains, and faster ones, right across the country. This is one area of environmental concern where we really can ask the technical people to work on the ‘clean and green’ agenda.
Science can’t solve all eco- problems, but in terms of transport and communications, we shouldn’t write technology off yet. The challenge now is for the politicians to come up with proposals which will match economic balance across the North and South with the possibilities opening up in transport.
Nothing in life stays still. Sustainability in communities of whatever size must start from the ‘can do’, the will to be positive and fair, because any other starting point is doomed in the long-run to failure.
Politicians Work For You ~ The Evidence
It’s often claimed that politicians are out of touch or otherwise irrelevant to their electorate. The website ‘They Work For You’ is one way in which this claim can be examined, at least for Members of the UK Parliament. But can MPs ever meet all the demands put upon them, and what else do we need to know?
Perhaps the idea that ‘politics is irrelevant’ is actually a ploy, consciously or not, for people to avoid the difficult questions which the political process poses for us all.
Do we actually know what we want from politics? The They Work For You website is one way in which we can all engage; it follows the issues raised by individual Members of Parliament (and others) at Westminster and elsewhere.
What do we want to know?
But obviously numbers of questions asked in decision-making assemblies are by no means the only thing we would like to know about the political process. There are many other important aspects of political work as well.
Some MPs have active websites, some do not. Some meet with their constituents regularly, some probably less often. Some have a schedule of discussions with their local authorities, others make contact less systematically. But all are open to scrutiny by the media and the public.
All things to all (wo)men?
So how should MPs respond to the mis/perception that politics is meaningless? Should they leaflet constituents all the time (green issues here, volunteer delivery energy levels apart?), should they talk to the media (spin?), should they consciously ask questions in Parliament in the knowledge that They Work For You will report these (skewing activity for coverage?), should they do something else?
What would make people think politics has meaning? What would provide public assurance that all politicians are not ‘in it for themselves’?
Or don’t we want to answer these questions, for fear that then we’d have to take responsibility ourselves for what’s happening around us?
Climate Change And Planning Applications Reviewed
A White Paper on sustainability and planning rules is about to appear. Ruth Kelly, the Government’s Communities Secretary, wants climate change to be an integral part of the agenda for the overall planning process, regarding both infrastructure and local renewable technologies. So why has the Local Government Association already rejected the White Paper?
The detail is always the issue, of course, but surely the Local Government Association (LGA) is plain wrong to reject – or so it appears – Ruth Kelly’s proposed White Paper on planning rules and sustainability even before it goes to print?
There may well be issues about how planning applications for big projects such as airport terminals are handled, but the present system is hardly perfect. (The time scale – six years – and cost of the process for Heathrow’s fifth terminal is one example.)
Addressing climate change where it makes a difference
The critical point of the intended White Paper is that it attends to the very real challenge of climate change. Yvette Cooper, the Department of Communities and Local Government Housing Minister, is already lined up to head a ‘green buildings
task force’; now Ruth Kelly wants to do her bit by enabling more easily the actual implementation of the essential changes to the way things will be done.
Oliver Letwin, the Conservatives’ policy spokesperson, and (Lord) Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Tory leader of the LGA, have responded to the idea of the Green Paper by talking about loss of ‘local control’.
A global issue, not a local one
I’m all for local people feeling empowered and engaged – the local dimension does matter – but haven’t Messrs Letwin and Bruce-Lockhart lost the plot?
Climate change is a global issue, not one which can be resolved primarily by local consultation, for goodness’ sake.
Lewis’s, Lime Street And Liverpool Losing Out
Liverpool city centre is in a state of flux, as the Big Dig re-routes and bewilders in equal measure. The aim is that the city centre will become a pleasant, business-friendly place to be. The disgraceful state of Renshaw Street, linking Lime Street Station to the city south end, sadly belies that intent. It’s scruffy and delapidated; does it have to be like this?
The steel-grey vistas above are what first greet visitors to Liverpool’s city centre. The once-mighty Lewis’s department store and the street from there to the main train station look much as some of us recall them thirty years ago, except perhaps they are less well scrubbed. And to add to this we now have the challenge of the City Centre Movement Strategy (CCMS) ‘in action’ every time we come into town.
The Big Dig as a way of life
To those familiar with Liverpool’s city centre the Big Dig has become a way of life. Intended to make the heart of Liverpool ‘fit for purpose’ for the celebratory years of 2007 and 2008, this now seemingly perennial feature of the city centre experience feels to have become a liability for Liverpool’s citizens, rather then an opportunity to enhance our future.
Many are asking whether a city which has suffered so much digging of holes and diversion of traffic in all directions can actually survive as an economic entity until the works are finally completed. The word is that some local businesses are going to the wall, especially in the train station area around Liverpool Lime Street, RenshawStreet and the Adelphi Hotel (not, it seems, itself under duress).
Enterprise endangered
Certainly, there have already been casualties. Heart & Soul, Chumki Banerjee’s signature bistro restaurant just around the corner on Mount Pleasant, has closed and Lewis’s Ltd (quite a different retail company from John Lewis) is rumoured after many years – it was founded in 1856 – to be folding imminently (mid-May 2007). There are also suggestions that
some other long-established local stores are at risk.
A relaxed approach to regeneration?
No-one denies that improvements to the city centre are required; but many question the apparently relaxed approach the City Council and others have taken to achieving this.
Work on the Big Dig seems at best to be nine-to-five, and nobody, as far as one can tell, has a responsibility actually to clean up the grimly grey and crumbling retail and commercial buildings along Renshaw Street from Lime Street.
Take a fresh look – and freshen up!
Is it surprising that businesses in this well-established part of town are feeling the pinch? Who would choose to walk from Lime Street up to Lewis’s along a street resembling the set of a 1960s kitchen sink melodrama, when they can instead take the
crossing outside the station into the pedestrian zone?
Perhaps some city leaders need to walk this walk, as well as talking the theoretical talk about the local infrastructural wonders we can soon expect.
Support the positive
There will always be brave souls who find a way forward. Fleur Hair and Beauty, previously located in the now-collapsing Lewis’s department store, has taken a walk across the road to the Adelphi Hotel Health Club, where the business can re-consolidate. No doubt there are others too who have faced the future and re-grouped.
Things are never static, especially in the world of enterprise, and to some extent this is good. That, however, does not excuse the failure of city local leaders to address problems which are beyond
the control of all but the very largest businesses.
Challenging market conditions
This is a city with more than the usual proportion of small and medium sized enterprises (compared to large ones – but still low in proportion to the public sector). These SMEs, often owned and run by individuals who actually live in Liverpool, have little slack in their business plans to accommodate civic laxity.
Not all businesses are equally effectively run, but Liverpool can’t afford the luxury of just letting private sector interests go to the wall without any support.
Nurture the positives
As I have said before, Regeneration Rule No. 1 has to be:
First nurture the positive assets you already have.
It’s not just the interests of visitors to our 2007 and 2008 celebrations that we must protect. The concerns of local workers and entrepreneurs are also core.
They, after all, are the people who hope still to be here in 2009.
Fleur Health & Beauty
Spindles Health Club
The Britannia Adelphi Hotel
Ranelagh Place (Renshaw Street)
Liverpool L3 5UL
0151-709 7200 x 044
And a happy PS: Fleur has now re-opened her salon in the ‘rescued’ Lewis’s, to run alongside the Adelphi salon – Lewis’s, Ranelagh Street, 0151-709 7000.
Regeneration And Community Engagement In Action: The ‘Rules’
‘Regeneration’ happens when someone with influence perceives a need for improvement. But this is a process in which professionals omit to involve those to whom regeneration is being done at their peril. What follows is therefore a set of observations or ‘rules’, derived from direct experience, about how regeneration and community engagement may play out on the ground.
The ‘Rules’ below are presented from the perspective of a professional approaching a regeneration scenario. The reader might like to turn them around and ‘translate’ them, to reflect the possible understandings of a person ‘in the community’ on whose (claimed) behalf regeneration is taking place.
1) It is very difficult to ensure that everyone ‘knows’ what they need / would like to know.
2) People at all levels get suspicious / unhelpful if they feel ‘left out of the loop’.
3) Identifying legitimate Stakeholders is always a challenge – not all of them are formal.
4) Professional practitioners are not the font of all knowledge.
5) Perspectives and language (discourse / terms) may vary
dramatically between parties.
6) Expectations may similarly vary, and can be challenging to manage.
7) It is essential to start any programme by identifying ‘what works’ and protecting that.
8) Who is ‘qualified’ to undertake such ‘what works’ identification can be problematic.
9) Participants’ understandings develop over time; what they’d initially asked for will change.
10) The same may also apply to the professionals involved – especially if they are sensitive to context.
11) Sustainability – social, economic, physical – is often
overlooked in practice, if not in theory.
12) There is rarely a clear end-point (when does ‘regeneration’ finish?)
13) Engagement is by definition voluntary; it can never be forced, but is very necessary.
14) Equipping people to engage often requires patience, skill and thoughtful leadership.
15) Many stakeholders only really become interested when the chequebook arrives; be ready and beware!
These observations formed part of a lecture delivered (by Hilary Burrage) on 23 April 2007 to Masters’ students of social policy and political science at Charles University, Prague, in the Czech
Republic.
What do you think?
Do these ‘rules’ reflect your experience? And are there other ‘rules’ to add to these?
Alternate Weekly (Waste) Collection: Has It Been Explained?
AWC (Alternate Weekly Collection of recyclable and non-recyclable household waste) has a bad reception in the UK, although it increases the extent of recycling. But why is something designed to sustain our environment – an ambition held by most of us – producing such hostility?
Latest in the endless list of Things People Don’t Like is the idea of alternate weekly collection of recyclable and non-recyclable domestic waste. There is evidence that this is effective in getting people to think more carefully about what they can and cannot recycle (rather than just bunging the lot in the dustbin) but everyone seems to be in uproar about it.
Why?
‘Why?’ is always a complex question to answer in environmental matters. What seems self-evidently sensible to the scientists and policy-makers (not to mention the demanding officials of the European Union, who are rightly leading a very serious environmentally conscious charge) is far less evident to Mr & Mrs Suburbia or Mr & Mrs InnerCity. The dialogue has got lost on the way, or perhaps has simply never existed.
People suspect that the bi-weekly collection of their ‘normal’ waste, even though it is to be interspersed by alternate weekly collection of what’s recyclable, is actually the result of a financial ‘cut’, and that it must therefore be bad. No-one seems to have thought to explain that there’s good evidence that AWC increases recycling – albeit at contested levels of efficacy.
Cynicism is the only winner
So there is Big Fuss. Nobody seems to believe something could be being done for ‘good’ reasons; and in that local politicians have often not helped. This situation benefits no-one.
The sooner the powers-that-be learn they must share rationales with ‘ordinary’ people right from the start of their thinking, the better. This is an issue which goes beyond what used to be called the ‘public understanding of science’, to an even more pressing
issue – the sustainability of our planet.
Be straightforward
So let’s ask our media, policy-makers and politicans to be braver and more honest in how they present these things. It would be good for everyone.
Read the debate which follows then…
Pianos For Peace
Rarely are artistic installations truly inspirational, but the use by George Michael and Kenny Goss of John Lennon’s piano, on which Lennon composed the song Imagine, is one such example. This travelling piano scenario is art, goodwill and common humanity all rolled into one.
George Michael is taking John Lennon’s piano on a roller coaster ride of emotions. Or that, at least to my eyes, seems to be what’s happening.
Singer-songwriter Michael acquired Lennon’s piano, on which the song Imagine was written, at the turn of the Millennium, and he and his partner Dallas art gallery owner Kenny Goss have now resolved the question of what special use to put it to: It has been given the central role in the world-tour Imagine Piano Peace Project.
Genuinely inspired art
It is a stroke of genius to take that humble piano to troubled places – sites of gruesome events such as assassinations, state-sanctioned executions, bombings, multiple murders and the like. The piano and its associations bring to these grimly horrible and
almost unthinkable acts a sort of dignity and calm.
The piano itself cannot and need not speak. It shows and incites no fear. All it has to do is occupy these sites as physical spaces. We can, each of us, work out the rest for ourselves.
John Lennon started life an unremarked child, attending our local school in Liverpool. He ended it a tragic victim of sudden very public violence in New York. As he himself might also have said of his travelling piano, just “Let it be.”
The Independent: Climate Change & Bottled Water
Today’s Independent newspaper offers us a mixed message. Under a front page story entitled ‘The Climate Has Changed’ it features a special issue on ‘the bill which makes action on global warming a reality’. And then, at the point of sale, it proposes a special offer of a free plastic bottle of water…. Celebration of a major breakthrough in environmental legislation is greatly to be welcomed. But toasting this particular achievement with such an environmentally unfriendly product tells us a lot about the contradictions of the market.
The Independent has long featured environmental issues as important news, and for that it should be applauded. A headline like today’s ‘Blair hails ‘historic day’ in battle against climate change‘, with a full seven pages of analysis, is indeed something to be welcomed.
But why on earth (to use an apt metaphor) did The Indy decide to promote sales (in some train stations at least), today of all days, by offering free bottled water – just at a time when large numbers of organisations are acknowledging the importance of good old water-from-the-tap?
Joined up thinking, this is not. Priority of marketing over content, it might well be. There’s a way to go on the eco agenda yet…
Dreaming Realist 