John Harris

Spending review 2010: living with the cuts

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

Tomorrow George Osborne will finally set out his plans to slash £83bn from government spending. John Harris talked to those who have already felt the sharp blade of the axe

Tomorrow afternoon, George Osborne will take to the floor of the House of Commons, and deliver the coalition’s comprehensive spending review (CSR), aiming to cut £83bn from government spending by 2015. So will end the strange, uneasy period during which cuts have tended to be talked about in the abstract, and politics has seen a kind of phoney war. “It’s the deficit, innit?” has become a national mantra; talk about belt-tightening and “tough decisions” has become almost banal. But on Wednesday, after those long weeks of tussling between government departments and the Treasury, we will start to get a picture of what such dramatic austerity will actually mean.

To some extent, we already know. Up and down the country, councils have been hacking back their budgets for more than 18 months, partly in preparation for a huge drop in the money they get from Whitehall. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have long been preparing for the impact of the cuts – and the first ministers of all three countries have signed a joint declaration against them. And let’s not forget: within weeks of taking office, the coalition made an initial round of decisions that set the tone. There was a start to the so-called bonfire of the quangos; help for asylum seekers and refugees was scaled down; Michael Gove tumbled into all that trouble with the cancellation of new school building projects.

Now, however, comes the really big stuff. No one – aside, perhaps, from the cloistered super-rich – will be unaffected. To mention only a handful of the scores of casualties seems a nonsense, but still: benefits, as we know, are in line for swingeing reductions; there are serious fears that tens of thousands of police officers will go; train fares will rise; house-building will shrink; libraries will close; care for disabled people will suffer; help for the arts will drop. The apparent munificence of the New Labour years will recede into the distance – and let’s not even talk about the distinct possibility of a double-dip recession.

Welcome to cuts-land, where some people have already been living for a while.

The respite service
Tadworth, Surrey

Emma Packham is 38. She is the single mother of 10-year-old twin boys – and nine-year-old Aaron, who is severely autistic. “Aaron dominates everything we do,” she says. “We can’t do anything spontaneous or impulsive. And he doesn’t sleep well, at all. He has two lots of medication: one lot to make him feel drowsy, to get him asleep, and a heavier sedative to keep him asleep. And he’s up between 5am and 6am every day, at the latest. Sometimes between 2am and 3am.”

Earlier this year, she received apparent good news from Tory-run Surrey county council. In addition to its funding for three hours a week of help at home, Aaron was eligible for a one-night-a-month stay at a new respite centre five miles from his home, called Applewood House. “Everything was brand spanking new. It had cost £1.8m: six purpose-built bedrooms, all with en suite . . . and I liked the ethos of the place. The staff were all dedicated and committed.”

Emma was so impressed, in fact, that she decided to use her existing care funding to pay for another 10 nights of respite care a year, so as to further acquaint Aaron with a world outside home and school, and allow her and the twins the odd small break.

Unfortunately, that prospect soon vanished. “Suddenly it all went quiet. In March, we had a family gathering that wouldn’t be appropriate for Aaron, and I rang them, and I said: ‘I know you’re opening around Easter – is there any chance Aaron can come to you on Easter Sunday?’ They said: ‘Actually, I’m afraid we’ve got bad news. Everything’s been put on hold. We don’t think we’re opening.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Such was the outcome of a drive to make up a £6m deficit in Surrey’s children’s services budget, save £180m across all the council’s spending in four years, and prepare Surrey for a drastic drop in the cash it gets from Whitehall.

Applewood House’s newly finished bedrooms are still empty – while 25 miles away in Woking, another respite centre has had its bed numbers cut from 20 to 10. Thus far, all this has only been explained using impenetrable official boilerplate, as evidenced by one of the many letters Emma has received from the council. She quotes me a typical passage: “It has been decided to undertake a review of our provision of residential short breaks across Surrey, and ensure these services are used to maximum capacity and are meeting needs appropriately.”

“I feel like the rug’s been pulled from beneath me,” she says. “We have a need; I’m not laying it on. And although it was only going to be one or two nights a month, I think it would have had an enormous benefit to the rest of the family – just having that day on the calendar to look forward to. If you get a week when you’ve been up at three, three mornings in a row, you can imagine: ‘Roll on Friday, when at least I know he’s going to be in good hands at Applewood, and I can get some sleep.’”

In the midst of the new austerity, talking about its disproportionate effects on the most vulnerable people has become a cliche – but as the Applewood case proves, that doesn’t make it any less true. Similar stories are starting to pop up around the country: in Bedford, for example, there have been noisy protests about the council’s decision to close a similar children’s respite centre as part of a £10m cuts programme, which means it has suddenly become “unsustainable”.

Towards the end of our conversation, Emma reads out a letter she recently got from Disability Challengers, a charity that runs a play scheme that Aaron uses most Saturdays: “You may understand that Disability Challengers is facing a double funding problem, with the impending cuts from national and local governments, at a time when financial uncertainty means voluntary donations from individuals and the community are declining rapidly.” In every word she says, there’s a very understandable dread.

The theatre company
Abergavenny, Gwent

Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and David Hockney have put their names to a letter of protest. The bosses of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sadler’s Wells have also weighed in. Now, what we have long known as “the arts community” awaits the CSR with knuckle-chewing anxiety, while the government signals cuts of at least 25% and tells them to be even nicer to corporate sponsors and private donors.

In Wales, a big arts shakedown has already happened. In June, to howls of dismay, Arts Council Wales announced that it was cutting its list of “revenue-funded organisations” by a third. Its chairman, Dai Smith, did his best to shrug off the idea that this was a pre-emptive decision related to the looming spending squeeze, but he was not convincing. “We’re not naive,” he said. “Wales will have to make cuts in public spending, and the assembly government will have its own choices to make about its funding priorities.” The move, he said, was “about using taxpayer’s money well”.

Among those hit were the Hay festival, an array of theatres and venues across Wales, and the Gwent Theatre, a touring company that has brought drama to schools in some of Wales’s most deprived areas since 1976, and had its £250,000 annual contribution cut to zero.

It has a staff of six, and employs scores of freelance actors, designers and writers, who have contributed dozens of original works to the theatre’s history. Each year, the company’s productions play to around 20,000 children and young people. Any time now, all this will come to an end.

Its creative director, 64-year-old Gary Meredith, has been part of the Gwent Theatre from the start. “On the 19 June,” he recalls, “we received a very long letter, which said we were no longer going to be included among revenue-receiving organisations. It was very difficult to understand their reasoning – in fact, there doesn’t seem to be any reasoning at all. We had a lot of paper, but no information. What I find bewildering is that they’ve chosen to cut a successful, well-loved, thriving arts organisation.”

The Gwent Theatre was not alone: the Welsh Arts Council also axed its grants for two other touring companies, based in the valleys and the huge county of Powys. “I think the suggestion is that if they want to experience the theatre, children and young people from those places can get on a bus and go to Cardiff. But given that about 80% of the children in the areas we serve are on free school meals, I don’t think that’s going to be high on their list of priorities. And that’s the thing: decisions like this do incredible damage to places that have some of the highest levels of social deprivation in Europe. Children and young people in these areas have got very little to begin with, and now even that will be taken away from them.”

Might he somehow get some money from private sponsors? “I don’t play golf with captains of industry, unfortunately,” he says, grimly. “And anyway, I think finding a quarter of million pounds every year would be pretty much impossible.”

Meredith plays down questions about what’s going to happen to him but eventually gives some kind of answer. “I still act,” he says, “and that’s what I’m trained to do. So I suppose I’m going to have to see if there’s work out there for an ageing, bald Welsh actor.”

The quango
Coventry, Warwickshire

Quango, for anyone unfamiliar with the coalition’s pet hate, stands for “quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation”. As the Financial Times recently pointed out, there are “few easier ways to win the approbation of tabloid newspapers or the applause of a rightwing meeting” than to attack a few – or, come to think of it, kill a couple of hundred, as the government did last week. “The very name is constructed to invite derision.”

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency – or Becta – might seem a case in point. Tucked away in a science park, it is housed in one of those buildings that evoke the more hi-tech end of David Brent-world. Its website suggests an operation in which a weird corporate-speak might have all but taken over: “Digital technology comes into its own in pedagogical terms not by replicating pre-existing forms and processes,” runs one contribution, “but by utilising the strengths and attributes that make new media forms distinct and different to established methodologies.”

Less than two weeks after the coalition took power, Becta was among the first to be readied for abolition, which would supposedly save £65m a year. At the time, the move was barely noticed – but since then, people have questioned whether it was the right thing to do. Retail tycoon Philip Green’s recent report about government waste has hardly helped: his basic point was that government was lousy at deal-making with the suppliers of everything from coffee to computers, but Becta apparently represents a shining exception.

Its most important role is simple: if a school or college wants to buy any new IT, Becta will look at its requirements and come up with a list of providers who meet the criteria. The buyers can then make their decision on the basis of budgets and cost-effectiveness – instead of, say, worrying about whether they have got the right spreadsheets to go with their email application.

Adrian Higginbotham, 36, is Becta’s “leading edge research manager”, and an activist in the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). “We found out what was happening on the 24 May, which was a Monday,” he says. “There had been a lot of speculation about us on the news that weekend, so people turned up for work knowing something was going on. Two hundred people were called into a meeting at 10 o’clock that morning, at the same time as the schools department was putting up a press release on its website saying we were closing. We didn’t have any more information than that.” The staff, he says, had expected to be downsized rather than axed completely, and perhaps allowed an official review of what they do: instead, the closure hit them as a fait accompli.

According to the government, Becta’s key work will be folded into the Department for Education, but Higginbotham has concerns. He worries about safeguarding kids from the darker aspects of technology, a big part of Becta’s work. He also mentions special educational needs, and points out that there is no other body whose brief includes making sure technology helps disabled people in education.

It looks as if around 75% of Becta’s 200-strong workforce will face redundancy, and in Coventry, that’s an all-too familiar story. The nearby Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority is also facing the chop. The fate of the Coventry-based Young People’s Learning Agency is under consideration. Across the city, in fact, more than 1,000 quango jobs could be lost, which isn’t great news for the local economy. “It’s a lot of jobs,” says Higginbotham, who is facing redundancy himself. “And a lot of worried people.”

The library
Bruton, Somerset

The compact town of Bruton does not look like a place that is feeling the pinch. Its population is apparently split between creative bohemians and moneyed green-welly-ites. Two out of three of its secondary schools are private.

But all is not as it should be. The branch of HSBC closed earlier this year. The post office is for sale, with reportedly no takers. Most miserably of all, the library – a central feature of local life for almost 100 years – is under grave threat.

In September, as part of a drive to plug a predicted £75m deficit and cut 1,500 jobs, Tory-run Somerset county council announced the library was to close, pending a final decision on its future, pegged to the decisive fall-out from the CSR. Since then, a one-off donation of £3,000 has kept the library open on Fridays, but the money will run out at Christmas. After that, no one knows what will happen.

This is a familiar story: as proved by closures in such places as Lewisham, Wirral, Nottingham and Swindon, when public finances get tight, it’s library services that are often first hit. Here, the woman leading the charge against closure is 62-year-old Anna Groskop, a local Conservative councillor. I meet her and library trustee Colin Hasleup on the high street, and they talk me through the place’s past, and possible future: its opening in 1913, thanks to a trust set up by the daughter of a local silk-making dynasty; the eventual cutting of its hours to two half-days and a single day a week; a recent survey suggesting the library was still used by 80% of local children; and Groskop’s still-evolving plan whereby it might be rescued via private philanthropy and local volunteering.

Once inside, you get an instant sense of what could be lost. There’s the obligatory noticeboard crammed with future local events, wooden boxes full of children’s books, the standard-issue knee-burning municipal carpet, five computers, and a sizeable reference section. Here, surely, is the very essence of what some people call a “community hub”.

“One of my first phone calls,” says Groskop, “was from a 90-year-old gentleman who said: ‘I can’t get outside of Bruton if I want access to books, and my social life is about coming to the library, reading the paper, exchanging my books, and meeting my friends.’ He said: ‘This is one of the worst things that ever happened.’ He was heartbroken about it.” He’s not alone: in the town’s health food shop, I meet 38-year-old Sonia Laue, who uses the library with her six-year-old son, and considers the mooted closure “unbelievable”. She doesn’t drive: she says that if the worst happens, the prohibitively expensive cost of local bus fares means they might stop visiting libraries altogether.

One question springs to mind: as a Conservative councillor in a Conservative-run county, at the blunt end of a cuts programme pursued by a Conservative-led government, how does Groskop feel? “I don’t feel it puts me in a difficult position,” she says. “I’m responsible for the community that I represent.” When it comes to the austerity drive, she says she generally approves of what is being done, but hopes that her work might mean the library is spared: having hired two librarians and 20-plus volunteers, she’s now hoping to find benefactors who can somehow help her override this small aspect of national austerity. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed that someone, somewhere cares enough about our community that they’ll help us,” she says. “There are ways round this.”

It sounds, I suggest, as if she might be at the cutting edge of what David Cameron calls the “big society”, whereupon she shoots me a look that could kill. “It’s nothing to do with the big society. I’ve never thought of it like that, and I never will. I think the big society puts people off, like all those soundbite things. This is about caring about your community, and what will happen to it in the future.”

The refugee centre
Sheffield, Yorkshire

“The reason they’re picking on the migration sector is because people aren’t going to scream as much as when other public services are cut. We’re a very easy target,” says Jim Steinke, 56, the chief executive of the Northern Refugee Centre (NRC) – responsible for work over a huge swath of the north of England.

It helps asylum seekers, approved refugees, and economic migrants, and aims to ease their integration into the places where they have arrived. Its casebook, he tells me, “matches global tensions. At the moment, there are still a number of Iraqis, a number of Afghanis, Congolese, Sudanese, Ugandans, and increasing numbers from Iran, Pakistan and China.”

Early this year, the staff at the centre knew they were in the frame for cuts, no matter who won the election – but in June, everything became clear. Putting together cuts imposed by the UK Border Agency and Eric Pickles of the communities and local government department, NRC was going to lose £300,000 out of a budget of £1m. Worse still, the cold economic climate meant additional losses – from charitable donations – of another £200,000, and Steinke also has fears about the knock-on effects of the CSR, when local councils begin to hack down help to organisations such as his. The centre has 42 staff: he has already sent out 21 “at risk” letters, but hopes to keep redundancies to around 15.

Obviously, this will still be bad news. Already, the cuts have had drastic effects on the centre’s mentoring programmes, whereby recently arrived people are given one-on-one help. He fears for such brass-tacks stuff as funding for childcare: “Ensuring that people aren’t doing asylum interviews with four kids round their feet.” Perhaps most alarmingly of all, he is already having to cut back on help aimed specifically at women: “Basically, we are now providing far less support to women who have been traumatised – by relocation, or sexual exploitation, including trafficking.”

He tells me about Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley estate, once “the racial incidents capital of the north”, where his staff have been helping to organise so-called conversation clubs. “That’s broken down so many barriers,” he says. “It’s an informal place where people can come to meet other people – either from their own community, or different migrant communities, or the host community. There’s basic tea and sympathy, conversation around tables. It eases people in and gives them an insight into what makes British society tick.”

The day we talk, he is getting ready for a half-hour meeting with Nick Clegg, whose constituency, in Sheffield’s upmarket outskirts, is only a few miles away. “It’s important that we use what means we have,” he says. “We’ve got quite a good dossier of all the statements the Lib Dems have made, prior to the coalition government. And I’ve got to say: on a personal level, he has always been very supportive.”

There’s a pause. “But I appreciate how different things are now, obviously.”

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Spending review 2010: living with the cuts

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

Tomorrow George Osborne will finally set out his plans to slash £83bn from government spending. John Harris talked to those who have already felt the sharp blade of the axe

Tomorrow afternoon, George Osborne will take to the floor of the House of Commons, and deliver the coalition’s comprehensive spending review (CSR), aiming to cut £83bn from government spending by 2015. So will end the strange, uneasy period during which cuts have tended to be talked about in the abstract, and politics has seen a kind of phoney war. “It’s the deficit, innit?” has become a national mantra; talk about belt-tightening and “tough decisions” has become almost banal. But on Wednesday, after those long weeks of tussling between government departments and the Treasury, we will start to get a picture of what such dramatic austerity will actually mean.

To some extent, we already know. Up and down the country, councils have been hacking back their budgets for more than 18 months, partly in preparation for a huge drop in the money they get from Whitehall. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have long been preparing for the impact of the cuts – and the first ministers of all three countries have signed a joint declaration against them. And let’s not forget: within weeks of taking office, the coalition made an initial round of decisions that set the tone. There was a start to the so-called bonfire of the quangos; help for asylum seekers and refugees was scaled down; Michael Gove tumbled into all that trouble with the cancellation of new school building projects.

Now, however, comes the really big stuff. No one – aside, perhaps, from the cloistered super-rich – will be unaffected. To mention only a handful of the scores of casualties seems a nonsense, but still: benefits, as we know, are in line for swingeing reductions; there are serious fears that tens of thousands of police officers will go; train fares will rise; house-building will shrink; libraries will close; care for disabled people will suffer; help for the arts will drop. The apparent munificence of the New Labour years will recede into the distance – and let’s not even talk about the distinct possibility of a double-dip recession.

Welcome to cuts-land, where some people have already been living for a while.

The respite service
Tadworth, Surrey

Emma Packham is 38. She is the single mother of 10-year-old twin boys – and nine-year-old Aaron, who is severely autistic. “Aaron dominates everything we do,” she says. “We can’t do anything spontaneous or impulsive. And he doesn’t sleep well, at all. He has two lots of medication: one lot to make him feel drowsy, to get him asleep, and a heavier sedative to keep him asleep. And he’s up between 5am and 6am every day, at the latest. Sometimes between 2am and 3am.”

Earlier this year, she received apparent good news from Tory-run Surrey county council. In addition to its funding for three hours a week of help at home, Aaron was eligible for a one-night-a-month stay at a new respite centre five miles from his home, called Applewood House. “Everything was brand spanking new. It had cost £1.8m: six purpose-built bedrooms, all with en suite . . . and I liked the ethos of the place. The staff were all dedicated and committed.”

Emma was so impressed, in fact, that she decided to use her existing care funding to pay for another 10 nights of respite care a year, so as to further acquaint Aaron with a world outside home and school, and allow her and the twins the odd small break.

Unfortunately, that prospect soon vanished. “Suddenly it all went quiet. In March, we had a family gathering that wouldn’t be appropriate for Aaron, and I rang them, and I said: ‘I know you’re opening around Easter – is there any chance Aaron can come to you on Easter Sunday?’ They said: ‘Actually, I’m afraid we’ve got bad news. Everything’s been put on hold. We don’t think we’re opening.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Such was the outcome of a drive to make up a £6m deficit in Surrey’s children’s services budget, save £180m across all the council’s spending in four years, and prepare Surrey for a drastic drop in the cash it gets from Whitehall.

Applewood House’s newly finished bedrooms are still empty – while 25 miles away in Woking, another respite centre has had its bed numbers cut from 20 to 10. Thus far, all this has only been explained using impenetrable official boilerplate, as evidenced by one of the many letters Emma has received from the council. She quotes me a typical passage: “It has been decided to undertake a review of our provision of residential short breaks across Surrey, and ensure these services are used to maximum capacity and are meeting needs appropriately.”

“I feel like the rug’s been pulled from beneath me,” she says. “We have a need; I’m not laying it on. And although it was only going to be one or two nights a month, I think it would have had an enormous benefit to the rest of the family – just having that day on the calendar to look forward to. If you get a week when you’ve been up at three, three mornings in a row, you can imagine: ‘Roll on Friday, when at least I know he’s going to be in good hands at Applewood, and I can get some sleep.’”

In the midst of the new austerity, talking about its disproportionate effects on the most vulnerable people has become a cliche – but as the Applewood case proves, that doesn’t make it any less true. Similar stories are starting to pop up around the country: in Bedford, for example, there have been noisy protests about the council’s decision to close a similar children’s respite centre as part of a £10m cuts programme, which means it has suddenly become “unsustainable”.

Towards the end of our conversation, Emma reads out a letter she recently got from Disability Challengers, a charity that runs a play scheme that Aaron uses most Saturdays: “You may understand that Disability Challengers is facing a double funding problem, with the impending cuts from national and local governments, at a time when financial uncertainty means voluntary donations from individuals and the community are declining rapidly.” In every word she says, there’s a very understandable dread.

The theatre company
Abergavenny, Gwent

Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and David Hockney have put their names to a letter of protest. The bosses of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sadler’s Wells have also weighed in. Now, what we have long known as “the arts community” awaits the CSR with knuckle-chewing anxiety, while the government signals cuts of at least 25% and tells them to be even nicer to corporate sponsors and private donors.

In Wales, a big arts shakedown has already happened. In June, to howls of dismay, Arts Council Wales announced that it was cutting its list of “revenue-funded organisations” by a third. Its chairman, Dai Smith, did his best to shrug off the idea that this was a pre-emptive decision related to the looming spending squeeze, but he was not convincing. “We’re not naive,” he said. “Wales will have to make cuts in public spending, and the assembly government will have its own choices to make about its funding priorities.” The move, he said, was “about using taxpayer’s money well”.

Among those hit were the Hay festival, an array of theatres and venues across Wales, and the Gwent Theatre, a touring company that has brought drama to schools in some of Wales’s most deprived areas since 1976, and had its £250,000 annual contribution cut to zero.

It has a staff of six, and employs scores of freelance actors, designers and writers, who have contributed dozens of original works to the theatre’s history. Each year, the company’s productions play to around 20,000 children and young people. Any time now, all this will come to an end.

Its creative director, 64-year-old Gary Meredith, has been part of the Gwent Theatre from the start. “On the 19 June,” he recalls, “we received a very long letter, which said we were no longer going to be included among revenue-receiving organisations. It was very difficult to understand their reasoning – in fact, there doesn’t seem to be any reasoning at all. We had a lot of paper, but no information. What I find bewildering is that they’ve chosen to cut a successful, well-loved, thriving arts organisation.”

The Gwent Theatre was not alone: the Welsh Arts Council also axed its grants for two other touring companies, based in the valleys and the huge county of Powys. “I think the suggestion is that if they want to experience the theatre, children and young people from those places can get on a bus and go to Cardiff. But given that about 80% of the children in the areas we serve are on free school meals, I don’t think that’s going to be high on their list of priorities. And that’s the thing: decisions like this do incredible damage to places that have some of the highest levels of social deprivation in Europe. Children and young people in these areas have got very little to begin with, and now even that will be taken away from them.”

Might he somehow get some money from private sponsors? “I don’t play golf with captains of industry, unfortunately,” he says, grimly. “And anyway, I think finding a quarter of million pounds every year would be pretty much impossible.”

Meredith plays down questions about what’s going to happen to him but eventually gives some kind of answer. “I still act,” he says, “and that’s what I’m trained to do. So I suppose I’m going to have to see if there’s work out there for an ageing, bald Welsh actor.”

The quango
Coventry, Warwickshire

Quango, for anyone unfamiliar with the coalition’s pet hate, stands for “quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation”. As the Financial Times recently pointed out, there are “few easier ways to win the approbation of tabloid newspapers or the applause of a rightwing meeting” than to attack a few – or, come to think of it, kill a couple of hundred, as the government did last week. “The very name is constructed to invite derision.”

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency – or Becta – might seem a case in point. Tucked away in a science park, it is housed in one of those buildings that evoke the more hi-tech end of David Brent-world. Its website suggests an operation in which a weird corporate-speak might have all but taken over: “Digital technology comes into its own in pedagogical terms not by replicating pre-existing forms and processes,” runs one contribution, “but by utilising the strengths and attributes that make new media forms distinct and different to established methodologies.”

Less than two weeks after the coalition took power, Becta was among the first to be readied for abolition, which would supposedly save £65m a year. At the time, the move was barely noticed – but since then, people have questioned whether it was the right thing to do. Retail tycoon Philip Green’s recent report about government waste has hardly helped: his basic point was that government was lousy at deal-making with the suppliers of everything from coffee to computers, but Becta apparently represents a shining exception.

Its most important role is simple: if a school or college wants to buy any new IT, Becta will look at its requirements and come up with a list of providers who meet the criteria. The buyers can then make their decision on the basis of budgets and cost-effectiveness – instead of, say, worrying about whether they have got the right spreadsheets to go with their email application.

Adrian Higginbotham, 36, is Becta’s “leading edge research manager”, and an activist in the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). “We found out what was happening on the 24 May, which was a Monday,” he says. “There had been a lot of speculation about us on the news that weekend, so people turned up for work knowing something was going on. Two hundred people were called into a meeting at 10 o’clock that morning, at the same time as the schools department was putting up a press release on its website saying we were closing. We didn’t have any more information than that.” The staff, he says, had expected to be downsized rather than axed completely, and perhaps allowed an official review of what they do: instead, the closure hit them as a fait accompli.

According to the government, Becta’s key work will be folded into the Department for Education, but Higginbotham has concerns. He worries about safeguarding kids from the darker aspects of technology, a big part of Becta’s work. He also mentions special educational needs, and points out that there is no other body whose brief includes making sure technology helps disabled people in education.

It looks as if around 75% of Becta’s 200-strong workforce will face redundancy, and in Coventry, that’s an all-too familiar story. The nearby Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority is also facing the chop. The fate of the Coventry-based Young People’s Learning Agency is under consideration. Across the city, in fact, more than 1,000 quango jobs could be lost, which isn’t great news for the local economy. “It’s a lot of jobs,” says Higginbotham, who is facing redundancy himself. “And a lot of worried people.”

The library
Bruton, Somerset

The compact town of Bruton does not look like a place that is feeling the pinch. Its population is apparently split between creative bohemians and moneyed green-welly-ites. Two out of three of its secondary schools are private.

But all is not as it should be. The branch of HSBC closed earlier this year. The post office is for sale, with reportedly no takers. Most miserably of all, the library – a central feature of local life for almost 100 years – is under grave threat.

In September, as part of a drive to plug a predicted £75m deficit and cut 1,500 jobs, Tory-run Somerset county council announced the library was to close, pending a final decision on its future, pegged to the decisive fall-out from the CSR. Since then, a one-off donation of £3,000 has kept the library open on Fridays, but the money will run out at Christmas. After that, no one knows what will happen.

This is a familiar story: as proved by closures in such places as Lewisham, Wirral, Nottingham and Swindon, when public finances get tight, it’s library services that are often first hit. Here, the woman leading the charge against closure is 62-year-old Anna Groskop, a local Conservative councillor. I meet her and library trustee Colin Hasleup on the high street, and they talk me through the place’s past, and possible future: its opening in 1913, thanks to a trust set up by the daughter of a local silk-making dynasty; the eventual cutting of its hours to two half-days and a single day a week; a recent survey suggesting the library was still used by 80% of local children; and Groskop’s still-evolving plan whereby it might be rescued via private philanthropy and local volunteering.

Once inside, you get an instant sense of what could be lost. There’s the obligatory noticeboard crammed with future local events, wooden boxes full of children’s books, the standard-issue knee-burning municipal carpet, five computers, and a sizeable reference section. Here, surely, is the very essence of what some people call a “community hub”.

“One of my first phone calls,” says Groskop, “was from a 90-year-old gentleman who said: ‘I can’t get outside of Bruton if I want access to books, and my social life is about coming to the library, reading the paper, exchanging my books, and meeting my friends.’ He said: ‘This is one of the worst things that ever happened.’ He was heartbroken about it.” He’s not alone: in the town’s health food shop, I meet 38-year-old Sonia Laue, who uses the library with her six-year-old son, and considers the mooted closure “unbelievable”. She doesn’t drive: she says that if the worst happens, the prohibitively expensive cost of local bus fares means they might stop visiting libraries altogether.

One question springs to mind: as a Conservative councillor in a Conservative-run county, at the blunt end of a cuts programme pursued by a Conservative-led government, how does Groskop feel? “I don’t feel it puts me in a difficult position,” she says. “I’m responsible for the community that I represent.” When it comes to the austerity drive, she says she generally approves of what is being done, but hopes that her work might mean the library is spared: having hired two librarians and 20-plus volunteers, she’s now hoping to find benefactors who can somehow help her override this small aspect of national austerity. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed that someone, somewhere cares enough about our community that they’ll help us,” she says. “There are ways round this.”

It sounds, I suggest, as if she might be at the cutting edge of what David Cameron calls the “big society”, whereupon she shoots me a look that could kill. “It’s nothing to do with the big society. I’ve never thought of it like that, and I never will. I think the big society puts people off, like all those soundbite things. This is about caring about your community, and what will happen to it in the future.”

The refugee centre
Sheffield, Yorkshire

“The reason they’re picking on the migration sector is because people aren’t going to scream as much as when other public services are cut. We’re a very easy target,” says Jim Steinke, 56, the chief executive of the Northern Refugee Centre (NRC) – responsible for work over a huge swath of the north of England.

It helps asylum seekers, approved refugees, and economic migrants, and aims to ease their integration into the places where they have arrived. Its casebook, he tells me, “matches global tensions. At the moment, there are still a number of Iraqis, a number of Afghanis, Congolese, Sudanese, Ugandans, and increasing numbers from Iran, Pakistan and China.”

Early this year, the staff at the centre knew they were in the frame for cuts, no matter who won the election – but in June, everything became clear. Putting together cuts imposed by the UK Border Agency and Eric Pickles of the communities and local government department, NRC was going to lose £300,000 out of a budget of £1m. Worse still, the cold economic climate meant additional losses – from charitable donations – of another £200,000, and Steinke also has fears about the knock-on effects of the CSR, when local councils begin to hack down help to organisations such as his. The centre has 42 staff: he has already sent out 21 “at risk” letters, but hopes to keep redundancies to around 15.

Obviously, this will still be bad news. Already, the cuts have had drastic effects on the centre’s mentoring programmes, whereby recently arrived people are given one-on-one help. He fears for such brass-tacks stuff as funding for childcare: “Ensuring that people aren’t doing asylum interviews with four kids round their feet.” Perhaps most alarmingly of all, he is already having to cut back on help aimed specifically at women: “Basically, we are now providing far less support to women who have been traumatised – by relocation, or sexual exploitation, including trafficking.”

He tells me about Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley estate, once “the racial incidents capital of the north”, where his staff have been helping to organise so-called conversation clubs. “That’s broken down so many barriers,” he says. “It’s an informal place where people can come to meet other people – either from their own community, or different migrant communities, or the host community. There’s basic tea and sympathy, conversation around tables. It eases people in and gives them an insight into what makes British society tick.”

The day we talk, he is getting ready for a half-hour meeting with Nick Clegg, whose constituency, in Sheffield’s upmarket outskirts, is only a few miles away. “It’s important that we use what means we have,” he says. “We’ve got quite a good dossier of all the statements the Lib Dems have made, prior to the coalition government. And I’ve got to say: on a personal level, he has always been very supportive.”

There’s a pause. “But I appreciate how different things are now, obviously.”

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PMQs – just like an Oxbridge freshers’ week | John Harris

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

David Cameron may have the cut-glass accent, but Ed Miliband surpassed expectations with his quiet, forensic style

There was a flavour of freshers’ week to today’s PMQs. More specifically – and I have experience here – the first couple of weeks at an Oxbridge college, where ranks of state schoolies come face to face with the swagger and assurance that comes at around £20,000 a year, and wonder how on earth two such different sets of people are going to get on. On one side, complete with insouciant despatch-box leaning style and impeccable delivery, the prime minister; on the other, Ed Miliband, who looked a little more nervous than the instant TV responses have suggested, and with very, very good reason.

As with his conference speech, he surpassed expectations – partly because he seemed to understand that the best counterpoint to David Cameron’s parliamentary style is to be quiet, painfully reasonable and forensic. Gordon Brown, you may recall, tended to respond to any rise in noise by either growling or yelping like a stressed bear, whereas, as he picked his way through his run of questions about the iniquities of the child benefit cut, Miliband stayed calm, enviably focused, and well clear of any silly showmanship. Yes, last week’s CB farrago made for an easy(ish) run, but he had some nice lines – not least, the implied contrast between the cut-glass voices opposite, and the people he said will be feeling the pain: primary school deputy heads; police officers.

Obviously, there will be much, much more of this, as Labour develops its focus on the so-called “squeezed middle” – a much more interesting idea than the name implies. In Australia, the Labor party calls them “the battlers”; in the States, the woes of stagnating middle incomes, rising living costs and harried lifestyles provided the key narrative drive during the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Here, as the cuts bite, their travails look likely to be raised just about every week – which may rather exclude the predicament of the people really feeling the pinch, but will still cut to the heart of one of our politics’ biggest delusions: that between the poor and rich, there is a largely content, “aspirational” mass whose attention can only be snagged via the dried-up stuff of tax cuts and “personalised” public services.

Cameron had one easy but effective line: hadn’t it been the last government that had so squeezed them? There are two responses to that: that in actual fact, it’s been forces governments have dared go nowhere near that have done most of the squeezing; and that, as the cuts kick in, laying all the opprobrium at the feet of the last regime increasingly won’t wash. So: a pretty compelling occasion, with more than a hint of the battlelines to come. And Cameron looked ever so slightly rattled, didn’t he?

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Ed Miliband’s leadership will be lonely, but his politics are sound | John Harris

Sunday, October 10th, 2010

Of the 49 people who ran for the shadow cabinet, only nine backed this Miliband. He must not let this dilute his radicalism

On the final day of the Tory conference, after such a wobbly week, the in-house branch of Blackwell’s had a sudden run on biographies of Mrs Thatcher. I duly queued and bought the last one on the shelves, though not for quite the same reasons as the nostalgic faithful. In the first volume of John Campbell’s Thatcher history, Grocer’s Daughter to Iron Lady, there lurked exactly what I was looking for, in an account of what happened when she unexpectedly took the Conservative leadership: “She was very conscious of the weakness of her political position, a little frightened of her own inexperience and the heavy responsibility which had suddenly been thrown on her, and well aware of the formidable combination of habit, convention and vested interest that was ranged against her.”

Stifle all guffaws and bear with me, because I am about to compare the Blessed Margaret with Ed Miliband. Obviously, let’s not even go into the stuff of background and personal style. But in terms of the hostility of party establishments, radical instincts, and the initial loneliness of their respective leaderships, 1975 and 2010 have at least a few things in common.

Can you believe the slurry that has been poured by some Labour-aligned people over Ed Miliband’s head? In this week’s Tribune, a story links the birth of the term “Red Ed” to Peter Mandelson. And why are supposedly progressive voices citing primogeniture, as if Ed stood outrageously in the way of his brother rather than taking his place in a field of five? When David’s hopes were dashed, why were the more moronic parts of the commentariat yakking on about “a profound personal tragedy”?

And now listen to the noise: in last Sunday’s Observer, the former Blair insider Tim Allan launched into the new leader, and took issue with his angst about the widening pay gap, claiming it gave the impression he was “against success”. Allan is the very wealthy MD of a PR firm whose client list includes Tesco, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and BT. It’s not hard to choose a word for his kind of position: “derelict” will do me.

Miliband’s politics are shot through with an insight that eluded the Labour leadership for the duration of the party’s time in office: that from the malign effects of immigration, through our corrosive long-hours culture to the decline of British towns, Labour has long been “naive about markets”. Unfortunately this elemental idea still either eludes or annoys far too many high-ranking Labour parliamentarians. The result? Of the 49 people who ran for the Labour frontbench, only nine chose Ed as their first leadership preference. A similar isolation defined Thatcher’s experience in 1975: as Campbell pointed out, her candidacy was opposed by almost the entirety of Ted Heath’s shadow cabinet.

Which brings us to where the comparisons break down, and what worries some of Miliband’s confidantes. From the off, Thatcher was shored up and advised by such allies and outriders as Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson. Every bit as important was the presence of her one-time rival Willie Whitelaw, who hardly carried a copy of The Road to Serfdom in his briefcase but came to play a vital role in steadying the Tory ship.

Bluntly put, even in the wake of the shadow cabinet election, Ed Miliband still has no Willie. Some of his circle saw Alan Johnson taking that role, but his seditious conduct since the result – questioning Ed on crime and student finance – rules him out. Harriet Harman might be up for the job, but her reach does not extend to the hostile elements. For a matter of hours David Miliband was tipped for the gig, but those hopes soon disappeared. Moreover, though Ed has a sure grasp of his intended direction of travel, he lacks the likes of Howe or Joseph – few people around him feel it nearly as deeply as he does.

So, what to do? Ed Miliband has staunch supporters – Peter Hain, Hilary Benn, John Denham, Sadiq Khan – but, Hain apart, they may not have the heft to make a crucial difference. More promisingly, among the capable faces whose jobs will be announced shortly, there are people whose social-democratic instincts are palpably stirring after all those years of largely keeping quiet: Yvette Cooper, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham (though Balls will need managing, to say the least).

The biggest question, though, is whether he has the country right. On the last day of the Labour conference, I made a Guardian film in the Mancunian suburb of Altrincham, where the people Miliband wants to speak to (and for) were everywhere: short of time, worried about the future, sickened by what had happened when a vast shopping complex half-killed their town centre.

Think about what is about to hit so many of these people: in the context of long-stagnating incomes, the dreaded effects of all those cuts. And then picture a prime minister who so little understands them that he stood up in Birmingham, evoked Lord Kitchener, and exhorted them to somehow carve out hours they simply do not possess, and become special constables, set up their own schools, start up their own businesses, and more.

These are the people Ed Miliband calls the “squeezed middle”: modern successors to a crucial part of the coalition that kept Mrs Thatcher in power for so long. The question for Labour is whether the intervening two decades have so turned things around that it is social democracy that will give them a voice. Their new leader may have problems, but on this score, he’s made a pretty impeccable start.

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What conference film-making taught me about the new political landscape | John Harris

Sunday, October 10th, 2010

John Harris looks back on his tour of the three conferences

This year’s political party conference season was hyped up as one of the most interesting in years – and it really was. The Tories were meeting as the party of government for the first time since 1996; the Lib Dems have a share of power for the first time in an age. Labour, meanwhile, had to elect a leader and decide its post-Blair and Brown direction. During the three conferences, I made nine films – an attempt to capture not only the big debates around the standard issues, but also to delve into what was really eating away at both activists and members of the public, well away from the main conference halls and set speeches.

Here are nine things I learned:

1) The Lib Dems have made some people very, very angry.

For years ignored or patronised, the Lib Dems were this year subject to protests from a coalition of trade unionists, political activists, students and others opposed to their coalition with the Tories and the planned public spending cuts.

2) A few Lib Dems are also pretty irate.

The subject of free schools and academies brought out a polite but determined rebellion from a sizeable number in Clegg’s party.

3) A combination of all this has had political consequences on the ground already.

I visited the bellwether Liverpudlian ward of Picton to speak to the people there about their views of the Lib Dems six months into the coalition, as well as Ian Jobling, a councillor elected as a Lib Dem who has since defected to Labour.

4) Ed Miliband has a fight on his hands.

Red Ed? Lurch to the left? The Labour conference got pretty surreal after the younger brother got the job of steering the party’s future.

5) There are women in the Labour party, too.

In an attempt to get beyond the brothers, I spoke to Labour women about the ongoing fight for women’s representation, gender equality, and why all this is a weak point for the coalition.

6) Ed Miliband gets it.

In an attempt to get to grips with “middle England”, I visited the affluent suburb of Altrincham to speak to people struggling to earn a living, but also desperate to live a life beyond the bottom line, and I put their views to the new Labour leader, who had some very interesting things to say.

7) The “big society” still doesn’t make much sense to a lot of the Tory party (or anyone else).

In asking Conservative conference delegates and politicians whether the cuts where out of ideology or necessity, I kept on being returned to Cameron’s big idea – but even its evangelists admit it is very much in its infancy.

The Tories are still claiming to be the greenest party ever.

But, as proved by the telling omission of climate change from Cameron’s speech, the evidence for this was very thin on the ground in Birmingham.

9) We really are not all in this together.

I visited two starkly different areas of Birmingham – Edgbaston and Newtown – to talk to people about the government’s proposed welfare reforms, only to collide with some uncomfortable truths about the state of Britain and our lack of solidarity.

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