John Harris

Another omnishambles – and this time it threatens me and my autistic son | John Harris

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

The black hole of official indifference, now given official licence, threatens accountability and special needs provision

Two threads run through the current government’s rhetoric, just as they defined a lot of what we heard in the Blair and Brown years.

People – and particularly parents – must be empowered, and the supposedly slow hand of the state has to be quickened and made more responsive, or done away with altogether. Now as then, the watchwords are choice, competition, localism, empowerment.

Strange, then, that so much of what this government and the last have done has pointed in the opposite direction, towards centralisation and the emasculation of the citizen. Strange, too, that a particularly egregious example of all this has just been unveiled, and very few people seem to have noticed.

The government’s drastic proposed changes to England’s special educational needs (SEN) system will affect close to 1.7 million children. The plans threaten to chop down parents’ rights, hand power and initiative from families to local authorities and also strengthen the centralised fist of the Department for Education. Moreover, everything is behind schedule. Sarah Teather, the Lib Dem minister who claimed the reforms were something of a personal crusade, was a casualty of September’s reshuffle. Having been up and running for mere months, the department’s hurried “pathfinder” schemes will not report until the reforms hits the Commons, as part of the Children and Families Bill. Omnishambles threatens to strike again.

I first wrote about this six months ago, when the reforms were announced, drawing on my experience of the SEN system, and what it took to get roughly the right provision for my six-year-old son, who’s autistic. As things stand, the most reliable arrangements are founded in statements of special educational needs, which currently apply to around 225,000 children, and usually deal with every aspect of their education – including NHS therapies. If you can stomach the cost and stress involved in getting one, statements represent a pretty solidmeans of holding your local authority to account. The usual route lies in a request made by parents, or a child’s school: some authorities tend to oblige, and others only issue statements after the most grinding of fights.

If a request is made by parents or a headteacher, a local authority has a legal duty to respond within six weeks. If it declines to commence the requisite assessment process, parents can appeal via the SEN tribunal system. The next step, if you’re lucky, is what’s called statutory assessment, which has a legal limit of 12 weeks, and then the finalising of the statement itself, which can take no longer than eight weeks. That’s six months in all: a long time when all you can think about is the urgency of so-called early intervention, but at least the limit is there.

But not for much longer, it seems. The government wants to replace statements with “single plans”, spanning education, health and social care. On the plus side, these will extend from birth to 25, as long as a young person remains in education or training – but that step forward is compromised by the fact that they will be less exacting. Witness one of the most fundamental aspects of what’s being proposed: the government’s draft legislation – belatedly published in early September, and now being looked at by the education select committee – makes no mention of defined rights for parents or schools to request an assessment, nor a prescribed period for a request to be dealt with. To anyone who has been through the special needs process, what that suggests is grim: the black hole of official indifference, now given official licence.

Under the current system, local authorities have a duty to specify the provision that will be made. The word specify is fantastically important: it means you can argue against fuzzy promises of “regular” this or “frequent” that, and push for guarantees of, say, speech therapy or physio for stated periods, at specific intervals (an hour once a week, for example). With echoes of a move that was defeated by parent campaigners back in 2001, the new plans contain only an obligation to “set out” what will be provided: “wildly different”, as one campaigner puts it, and a change that will rub out decades of case law that have hardened parents’ rights.

In the switch from statements of educational needs to the new single plans, there is another glaring problem. Under the current system, all of a child’s therapies and programmes – even if they’re provided by the NHS – come under the umbrella heading of “education”, and thereby fall under the remit of the special educational needs tribunal. If something fails to materialise or is taken away, you can at least take your case to an affordable(ish) forum of appeal. But no more: the government plans to separate everything out into three categories of education, health and social care – but keep only the first one under the tribunal’s authority. What that means for parents like me is obvious enough: the knocking-away of accountability that currently underlies things such as occupational therapy, and help with our children’s speech and language.

All this seems comically antithetical to what habitually comes out of ministers’ mouths: an officially sanctioned power-grab by often unreliable public institutions, at the expense of the few solid rights that parents currently possess. Although the cost of implementing the reforms looks huge, much of this is seemingly driven by the same logic as the cuts that are already impacting on the lives of children with disabilities and learning difficulties: in pushing public bodies further away from accountability, the government seems to be giving them freer rein to hack back provision even more. On occasion, in fact, the DfE has looked only too happy to create exactly that impression: do not forget that last spring, the plans arrived in a flurry of headlines about as many as 450,000 children being taken out of the category of special needs altogether, as if they had been put there thanks to a spasm of profligacy and trendy teaching.

To cap it all, the draft legislation contains at least one burst of power politics at its most brazen. The existing SEN system’s statutory code of practice – the details of how it’s actually meant to work – can only be altered after any changes have gone through both houses of parliament. In the suggested new reality, the secretary of state will be able to change its provisions at will. Once again, it seems, talk of empowerment and accountability masks the usual centralism.

Towards the end of last week, having thought about my own case and pored over the exhaustive analysis of the reforms by the special needs charity Independent Special Education Advice (IPSEA), I contacted the DfE with an itemised list of concerns, expecting at least cosmetic engagement with what thousands of people are increasingly worried about. But it didn’t happen: a spokesperson said ministers “want to hear people’s views” and would consider them, along with what the education select committee has to say, “very carefully”. Their four-sentence statement ended thus: “These reforms will put parents in charge, giving them better information and a comprehensive package of support that meets their needs.”

In fact, unless MPs can work miracles, the whole thing looks dangerous and ill-thought-out. That may sound painfully familiar, but we need to think about the fallout not in terms of political pantomime, but as it will affect children and parents who need government to get things right.

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »

Another omnishambles – and this time it threatens me and my autistic son | John Harris

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

The black hole of official indifference, now given official licence, threatens accountability and special needs provision

Two threads run through the current government’s rhetoric, just as they defined a lot of what we heard in the Blair and Brown years.

People – and particularly parents – must be empowered, and the supposedly slow hand of the state has to be quickened and made more responsive, or done away with altogether. Now as then, the watchwords are choice, competition, localism, empowerment.

Strange, then, that so much of what this government and the last have done has pointed in the opposite direction, towards centralisation and the emasculation of the citizen. Strange, too, that a particularly egregious example of all this has just been unveiled, and very few people seem to have noticed.

The government’s drastic proposed changes to England’s special educational needs (SEN) system will affect close to 1.7 million children. The plans threaten to chop down parents’ rights, hand power and initiative from families to local authorities and also strengthen the centralised fist of the Department for Education. Moreover, everything is behind schedule. Sarah Teather, the Lib Dem minister who claimed the reforms were something of a personal crusade, was a casualty of September’s reshuffle. Having been up and running for mere months, the department’s hurried “pathfinder” schemes will not report until the reforms hits the Commons, as part of the Children and Families Bill. Omnishambles threatens to strike again.

I first wrote about this six months ago, when the reforms were announced, drawing on my experience of the SEN system, and what it took to get roughly the right provision for my six-year-old son, who’s autistic. As things stand, the most reliable arrangements are founded in statements of special educational needs, which currently apply to around 225,000 children, and usually deal with every aspect of their education – including NHS therapies. If you can stomach the cost and stress involved in getting one, statements represent a pretty solidmeans of holding your local authority to account. The usual route lies in a request made by parents, or a child’s school: some authorities tend to oblige, and others only issue statements after the most grinding of fights.

If a request is made by parents or a headteacher, a local authority has a legal duty to respond within six weeks. If it declines to commence the requisite assessment process, parents can appeal via the SEN tribunal system. The next step, if you’re lucky, is what’s called statutory assessment, which has a legal limit of 12 weeks, and then the finalising of the statement itself, which can take no longer than eight weeks. That’s six months in all: a long time when all you can think about is the urgency of so-called early intervention, but at least the limit is there.

But not for much longer, it seems. The government wants to replace statements with “single plans”, spanning education, health and social care. On the plus side, these will extend from birth to 25, as long as a young person remains in education or training – but that step forward is compromised by the fact that they will be less exacting. Witness one of the most fundamental aspects of what’s being proposed: the government’s draft legislation – belatedly published in early September, and now being looked at by the education select committee – makes no mention of defined rights for parents or schools to request an assessment, nor a prescribed period for a request to be dealt with. To anyone who has been through the special needs process, what that suggests is grim: the black hole of official indifference, now given official licence.

Under the current system, local authorities have a duty to specify the provision that will be made. The word specify is fantastically important: it means you can argue against fuzzy promises of “regular” this or “frequent” that, and push for guarantees of, say, speech therapy or physio for stated periods, at specific intervals (an hour once a week, for example). With echoes of a move that was defeated by parent campaigners back in 2001, the new plans contain only an obligation to “set out” what will be provided: “wildly different”, as one campaigner puts it, and a change that will rub out decades of case law that have hardened parents’ rights.

In the switch from statements of educational needs to the new single plans, there is another glaring problem. Under the current system, all of a child’s therapies and programmes – even if they’re provided by the NHS – come under the umbrella heading of “education”, and thereby fall under the remit of the special educational needs tribunal. If something fails to materialise or is taken away, you can at least take your case to an affordable(ish) forum of appeal. But no more: the government plans to separate everything out into three categories of education, health and social care – but keep only the first one under the tribunal’s authority. What that means for parents like me is obvious enough: the knocking-away of accountability that currently underlies things such as occupational therapy, and help with our children’s speech and language.

All this seems comically antithetical to what habitually comes out of ministers’ mouths: an officially sanctioned power-grab by often unreliable public institutions, at the expense of the few solid rights that parents currently possess. Although the cost of implementing the reforms looks huge, much of this is seemingly driven by the same logic as the cuts that are already impacting on the lives of children with disabilities and learning difficulties: in pushing public bodies further away from accountability, the government seems to be giving them freer rein to hack back provision even more. On occasion, in fact, the DfE has looked only too happy to create exactly that impression: do not forget that last spring, the plans arrived in a flurry of headlines about as many as 450,000 children being taken out of the category of special needs altogether, as if they had been put there thanks to a spasm of profligacy and trendy teaching.

To cap it all, the draft legislation contains at least one burst of power politics at its most brazen. The existing SEN system’s statutory code of practice – the details of how it’s actually meant to work – can only be altered after any changes have gone through both houses of parliament. In the suggested new reality, the secretary of state will be able to change its provisions at will. Once again, it seems, talk of empowerment and accountability masks the usual centralism.

Towards the end of last week, having thought about my own case and pored over the exhaustive analysis of the reforms by the special needs charity Independent Special Education Advice (IPSEA), I contacted the DfE with an itemised list of concerns, expecting at least cosmetic engagement with what thousands of people are increasingly worried about. But it didn’t happen: a spokesperson said ministers “want to hear people’s views” and would consider them, along with what the education select committee has to say, “very carefully”. Their four-sentence statement ended thus: “These reforms will put parents in charge, giving them better information and a comprehensive package of support that meets their needs.”

In fact, unless MPs can work miracles, the whole thing looks dangerous and ill-thought-out. That may sound painfully familiar, but we need to think about the fallout not in terms of political pantomime, but as it will affect children and parents who need government to get things right.

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »

Costa Coffee drops plans for Totnes outlet after protests

Friday, October 26th, 2012

Chain of 1,400 cafes across UK wakes up and smells the support for local coffee after meeting with mayor and MP

Costa Coffee has abandoned plans to open a new outlet in the Devon town of Totnes after months of protests by a campaign group.

The chain’s plans had been approved by the local district council, and the 70-seat outlet had been expected to open this year, but Costa now claims to have “recognised the strength of feeling” about its arrival and has decided to pull out.

In August Costa told the Guardian that it aimed “to add to the vibrancy of the town and support the local community … by adding vibrancy [and] complementing what Totnes currently offers”.

Later that month the chain’s managing director, Chris Rogers, met Totnes’s mayor, Pruw Boswell, and the town’s Conservative MP, Sarah Wollaston, both of whom were opposed to Costa’s arrival and supportive of the local “Say no to Costa” campaign. Costa now says the discussion resulted in its about-turn.

“We had an open and constructive discussion and as a result … we have carefully considered the points made and decided not to open on Totnes high street,” said a company statement.

A letter signed by all three parties acknowledges Costa’s 19 outlets in Devon and their use of milk and food from the county. But it describes Totnes as “a town with a long and proud history of independent retailers”, which has “one of the lowest percentages of branded stores of any town of its size in the UK, very few empty shop fronts, as well as a very high proportion of places selling coffee”.

Campaigners put the number of coffee-selling businesses in the town – population 7,500 – at 42. Totnes is the home of the UK’s original transition town project, which is aimed at “strengthening the local economy, reducing the cost of living and preparing for a future with less oil and a changing climate”, partly via a local currency. The anti-Costa campaign drew much of its energy and nous from the work of Transition Town Totnes.

A petition expressing opposition to the chain’s arrival collected 5,749 signatures, 75% of which were said to have come from the town or its surrounding areas. Campaigners threatened to greet Costa’s opening with a campaign of resistance: among the ideas proposed were encouraging locals to order tap water and drink it as slowly as possible, covering the Costa outlet’s exterior in hostile posters, and encouraging a local boycott.

The anti-Costa campaigner and Transition Town Totnes action manager Frances Northrop said Costa’s decision “said something about a company actually coming to visit a place and understanding it, rather than sticking a pin in a map”.

She added: “This is a massive achievement, and it could be a turning point in terms of chains getting too big. The idea of communities standing up and saying ‘you’re not right for us’ has now got a lot more traction than it would have had before.”

Costa’s statement about Totnes says it is “proud to be a successful British company employing 10,000 people, the majority of whom are under 25″. It says that “in all communities in which we operate, we seek to be a force for good, contributing to growth, creating jobs, and supporting the local economy”.

The company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Whitbread plc, is now the UK’s biggest coffee chain, operating 1,400 outlets. It recently announced plans for 350 more, and its chief executive, Andy Harrison, has talked of increasing the number of branches to as many as 2,000. But the chain’s founder, Bruno Costa, who sold the business to Whitbread in 1995, has recently drawn attention to the chain’s domination of the coffee shop market.

Costa now lives in Purley, Croydon, where Costa has just opened its sixth outlet. “As far as the coffee business is concerned, like here in Purley, I know it is monopolised by these three or four companies that don’t give much chance to the smaller ones,” he told the Croydon Advertiser. “It reflects what the supermarkets have done to smaller shops in the high streets.”

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David Miliband and the Labour art of speaking in code | John Harris

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

New Labour alumni have taken to surreal new heights the practice of putting out coded messages that appear – to the untrained eye – to say close to nothing at great length

Although he has to put up with the gnawing pain of thwarted ambition, it can’t be too bad being David Miliband. Never mind that he still seemingly feels too awful to fight the good fight in the shadow cabinet, in the financial year 2011-12, in addition to his salary as an MP, he turned £410,171 in fees for “consultancy work and speeches”, supplied to such worthy causes as an agribusiness firm called Indus Basin Holding and the United Arab Emirates’ ministry of foreign affairs. How he finds time to represent the struggling folk of South Shields as well as overseeing his Movement for Change (which, according to its blurb, works in “specific areas to support campaigns for change in local communities, to identify and nurture talent and to develop new responses to the challenges that people face”) is anyone’s guess, though his 45% Commons voting record may say something. Or perhaps he’s just given up sleep.

Just to further suggest that’s he’s bionic, the elder Miliband has also become a prolific polemicist, in the Guardian and elsewhere – though then again, maybe “polemicist” is the wrong word. According to my dictionary, to meet that description, you’re meant to be able to turn your hand to “a controversial argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine”. As far as I can tell, he might be in the habit of doing that, but only in a very strange way.

His latest Guardian piece appeared last week and was a masterclass in an age-old political art that alumni of the New Labour regime have taken to surreal new heights. The political vernacular terms it “speaking in code”: putting up kites and undermining your adversaries while ensuring that everything is put so nebulously that you can deny any such thing. To the untrained eye, it looks more like the borderline absurd art of saying close to nothing, at great length.

Miliband’s latest article was ostensibly about the old Blairite theme of so-called public service reform, which of itself may represent a pop at his younger brother: Ed Miliband does not talk about that stuff very much, and his brother’s wing of the Labour party has always used this subject as a club with which to beat its supposedly unreconstructed adversaries. Anyway, the elder Miliband said things such as: “Successful economies in the modern world are not sheepish about the power and responsibility of the state. But there is a catch. We need to be reformers of the state to reboot our economy and build a fairer society … the fiscal crunch requires a different kind of state. The failure of the government’s economic policy makes how much less we spend, and how and where we spend it, a core issue. We cannot meet our goals on jobs, health, education, long-term care and tackling poverty without changing the way government goes about its business.”

At first sight, this stuff might be at least mildly interesting. Does he, perhaps, think the approach that has run from the last government into the current one, whereby bits of the public services are chopped up and handed to Serco and Richard Branson, is still a good idea? Has he begun to have doubts? Or is this some fiscally driven grope into entirely new territory? Who knows, least of all Miliband himself: after 728 words, nothing is clearer at the end than it was at the beginning. One Guardian letter writer moaned: “Having read his piece three times, I haven’t a clue what he means by reform. He has one paragraph with two sketchy proposals, but nothing of substance.” Quite so.

To be fair to Miliband, the archives are bursting with this stuff, much of it written by other people. When I spent a joyous few hours researching this piece, it was available in the same volume as french fries at McDonalds, and was similarly taste-free and borderline pointless. In 2005, for example, that bold New Labour outrider Stephen Byers told us: “Achieving renewal in office can play a crucial part in uniting the party. The process itself needs to be inclusive but perhaps even more importantly, it provides Labour with the opportunity to state exactly what it is for, rather than just what it is against … The task now is to bring forward a policy programme firmly based on the values of the centre-left. The promotion of social justice, opportunity for all and security would maintain that coalition of support that led to landslide victories in ‘97 and 2001.”

Burningly controversial, that was. Among its other disciples, the same rhetorical tradition found another outlet in James Purnell, now of the IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) but once hyped as a future Labour leader. Even when liberated from ministerial office, he still tended to speak in the same slightly strangulated way: “The left believes in equality – we disagree about equality of what, but we agree that it should be a goal … I think we need to widen out from a narrow focus on income, to aiming for equality of capability – giving everyone the power to pursue their goals … Over time, New Labour became too much of a sect – we went from big-tent politics to small-gazebo politics.”

Pardon? But back, anyway, to David Miliband and what’s arguably the founding document of his recent outpourings, the leader column he wrote when he guest-edited the New Statesman in July: “As the economy stagnates, politics needs to respond with vigour and imagination … The danger is to confuse being a better opposition with becoming a potential government … Labour’s history is that it wins and governs when it aligns an economic narrative of modernisation with a social agenda of compassion and a political culture of dynamism and progress … Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative – that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world. This is bold. Given the crash, it is also necessary … The point is that defence of the status quo cannot deliver our goals … In developing new policies, Labour cannot afford the old politics of a conversation with itself.”

Brilliant! While we’re here, it’s also worth mentioning a recent jointly authored piece in the Observer by Miliband and the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, who went all the way to the Democratic National Convention and came back brimming with useful thoughts. From the top, then: “We need to be state reformers as well as market reformers …. we win by looking like the whole of the country not just part of it … we have to find new ways to connect our politics with the small businesswoman in Ipswich, the GP in Fleetwood, the personal trainer in Gloucester.”

Sorry, but only people who have spent far too long in the mind-bending environs of Westminster could write a sentence like that. Who knew that things are now so bad there’s only small businesswoman in Ipswich, and a solitary fitness instructor in Gloucester? And why pick on Fleetwood?

You can do this stuff, too, if you’re bored: it’s like a party game for people who are far too interested in the minutiae of politics. Essentially, you sling together one or two cliches, at least one word or phrase (such as “reboot”) that suggests you own a computer, and a couple of propositions that it would be impossible to argue against (a la “Feed the world” or “Make trade fair”). You then chuck in some apparently oxymoronic ideas, to make yourself look a bit clever.

Just watch: “We need to represent the whole of Britain, not just some of it. In doing so, we will move into the radical centre, and prove that if you’re hard, you can also be soft. In a time of change, we must be the change-makers. Opportunity must be our watchword. Watchwords must be our opportunity. It is time to switch Britain off and on again. We deserve nothing less. And nothing more. Neither does the mechanic in Morecambe, or the wrestler in Rhyl. We will win. Or we might lose.” Etc, etc.

What, aside from firing muted shots in some factional battle no one really cares about, is the point? Right when this most miserable of rhetorical traditions is refusing to die, people at the opposite end of the political spectrum are mastering the business of being altogether more blunt and plain-spoken. For proof, read the already-infamous Tory treatise Britannia Unchained – which may advocate working until you drop dead and deregulated everything, but is at least coherent and straightforward. Meanwhile, David Miliband and his ilk talk – but say what, exactly? Time to leave the gazebo, disrupt the economic narrative and reboot?

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George Osborne’s first-class train gaffe: Plebgate act II | John Harris

Saturday, October 20th, 2012

Have senior Tories and their aides learned nothing from the past few weeks? Do they think first-class fares don’t apply to them?

This is now getting silly. With Andrew Mitchell still in post and the phrase “fucking plebs” continuing to echo uncomfortably around Westminster, now we get an incident that suggests the same variety of behaviour. It’s like Plebgate Act II: another episode suggesting an almost surreal reluctance to respect the same rules as the rest of us.

It’s all laid out in the Twitter timeline of Granada TV correspondent Rachel Townsend, who today claimed to have watched George Osborne get on a London-bound train at Wilmslow (my hometown, and a key part of his constituency). “George Osborne just got on at Wilmslow with a STANDARD ticket and he has sat in FIRST,” wrote Townsend at around 3.45pm. Then this: “His aide tells ticket collector he cannot possibly move and sit with the likes of us in standard class and requests he is allowed to remain in first class.

Ticket collector refuses.” Respect! And while we’re here, what of Osborne’s recent revival of “We’re all in this together”?

There’s still some confusion over exactly who needed the upgrade: later word from Townsend suggested that it was the aide who had a standard-class ticket, and was insisting on staying in first class, because the chancellor “couldn’t possibly sit in standard class” (for fear, presumably, of the Olympics treatment). There was thus a “standoff”, an assurance from the ticket collector that there was “no chance” of the aide getting his way, and a subsequent refusal to pay a £160 upgrade – for which ordinary folks might be thrown off at Crewe, or something. As far as I can tell, around 15 minutes then passed, before the money was reluctantly handed over, while Townsend managed another couple of amazed tweets: the whole story is now on the ITV news website. The BBC has reported that Virgin Trains says it was Osborne himself who was “caught travelling” with the wrong type of ticket.

Whatever the precise details – and they’re likely to be fought over, as in Plebgate – all this prompts a few questions: was it so wise to have had this out in apparently loud voices? Have senior Tories and their helpers learned nothing from the last few weeks? Or are they so convinced of their own superiority that they think any such lessons, much like first-class fares, somehow don’t apply to them? Answers below, please.

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