Boris isn't the only cakeist

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In principle, it seems entirely reasonable and rational for any city facing traffic gridlock to introduce a congestion charge as part of its attempts to deter cars and reduce both congestion and pollution.  It will never be popular with motorists, but there are many policies relating to climate change which are likely to prove unpopular, and the job of politicians is to explain why they are necessary and what the problems are with the alternatives rather than simply chase popularity.  In that context, this week’s proposals from Cardiff City Council are a brave start, even if the level is being set so low as to question whether it will have the impact required.  In practice, however, such policies need to be part of an overall joined-up approach, and despite their proposed investment in improved public transport in the same timescale, I’m not convinced that Cardiff’s proposals entirely meet that test.

It still seems to be the policy of both the Council and the Welsh Government to attract major office-based employers to the centre of Cardiff, rather than adopt a more dispersed approach to growth.  This is the prime driver of commuting into the City Centre, and the result is that they are, at one and the same time, seeking to attract more commuters into Cardiff and prevent them commuting by car. 

I’m sure that they would counter by saying that their improvements to public transport will make the car journeys unnecessary by providing a suitable alternative, and that a reduction in congestion should also make those public transport journeys more punctual and reliable.  Maybe, but it seems as though the public transport improvements planned within the required timescale are mostly restricted to travel within the city itself, and since residents of Cardiff are to be exempted from the charge, the result is that those who could gain the most advantage from the public transport improvements are not subject to the same disincentive to use their cars.  Those who would pay the charge are those who are resident outside the city, and they are the people most dependent on the badly failing rail network, where improvements seem to be further in the future.  In arguing that this looks like a tax on people living in the Valleys to pay for transport improvements for Cardiff residents, Blaenau Gwent AM Alun Davies makes a valid point.  Whilst it’s certainly true that improvements to the frequency, capacity and reliability of the rail network are not the responsibility of Cardiff Council, that doesn’t help the commuters who depend on them.

It looks, not for the first time, as though Cardiff City Council want to have their cake and eat it; they want the income and benefits of concentrating economic development in their area and they want the benefits of attracting workers from a wider area, but they don’t want the problems caused as a result of those policies.  Somebody needs to be taking a wider view of the issues.

Sharing the eggs between the baskets

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Last week, the leader of Cardiff Council told us that the City of Cardiff is ‘Wales's best economic asset’.  As is ever the case, such terms need more precise definition before being accepted uncritically, but in the sense that Cardiff and the area around it is the wealthiest part of Wales and contributes most to GVA, then I agree with the statement.  That isn’t the same as agreeing with the conclusion, however, which seems to be that Cardiff should therefore receive a disproportionate share of future investment to make it even more successful and wealthy.  There are two main reasons for rejecting that conclusion.

The first is that it ignores, or overlooks, the question of how that situation has come about in the first place.  There is nothing inherently special about Cardiff which means that it has become wealthy while the rest of Wales has not (in the same way as there is nothing inherent in being Welsh which dooms us to being one of the poorest parts of the UK).  One of the reasons for Cardiff’s greater success has precisely been that it has already received a disproportionate share of past investment.  Imagine for a moment replacing Cardiff with London, and saying ‘As the result of previous wealth concentration, London is the UK’s best economic asset, therefore future investment should be concentrated there’.  As a statement of current UK government policy, it looks pretty accurate, but most of us in Wales would reject that as a basis for determining future investment strategy.  Why would we want to simply replicate that in Wales?

The second is that, ultimately, such an approach amounts to seeing the future economic growth of Wales in ‘average’ terms.  That is to say that Wales, as a whole, looks better off if the average GVA per head increases, and the easiest way of achieving that might well be to put the investment into those areas where GVA growth is potentially the fastest.  But improving the ‘average’ GVA per head isn’t the same as making everyone in Wales better off.  Indeed, it is perfectly possible in mathematical terms to increase the average whilst decreasing the actuals across most of the country.  And sometimes it even looks as though government policy is to attempt to prove that mathematical theorem in practice.

That isn’t to say that Cardiff shouldn’t receive a ‘fair’ proportion of future investment (although defining ‘fair’ is a major topic in itself, far more complex than mere headcounts).  But any Welsh government which was serious about sharing prosperity would be looking to a strategy which improves life for all the people in Wales.  And that can’t be measured simply in averages.

Averaging the averages

Tweet The idea of ‘city regions’ as some sort of solution to Wales' economic woes has taken far too strong a hold amongst the political classes.  It’s not often that I hear doubts being expressed, so this article on the Bevan Foundation blog earlier this week was more than a little welcome.  Not least, it’s a counterpoint to the interview with the chair of the Cardiff City Region a few days ago, in which he said that Cardiff is the “priority for driving Wales forward”.

It’s hard for those of us who are sceptical about the city region concept, and the emphasis being placed on it, to argue the case without sounding like we’re opposed to economic success in Cardiff.  I’m certainly not opposed to that, but I do want to see economic success in the north, and down here in the west as well.  The question is how we achieve that without competing and arguing with each other.

I’ve never been convinced by the argument that creating wealth in one place means that it somehow ‘trickles down’ to other places; if that were true, we wouldn’t have seen such a huge concentration of wealth and income in one small corner of the UK.  It often seems that policy in Wales is trying to ape that of the UK as a whole, and merely exchanges the south east of Wales for the south east of England.

But I’ve also wondered whether it’s not at least in part a result of politicians failing to understand that increasing the average income per head in a country is not the same as increasing the income of the average person.  Maths is not often their strongest point.

I have no doubt that increased economic success in Cardiff could lead to an increase in average GDP per head when looking at the figures for Wales as a whole.  But the point is that it could all too easily do that without there being any change at all in the average GDP per head outside Cardiff.  Improving things for a few only looks like an improvement for the many when people fall back on the use of unqualified averages.

Yet it is often those overall averages – or rather the misuse of them – which fuels much of what passes for debate about economic ‘success’.  Just think of the headlines comparing Welsh averages with English averages, with no serious consideration of whether the comparison is a valid one.  And I fear that may be part of what is driving Welsh Government policy – a need to be seen to be improving the figure for average GDP per head, without worrying too much about how that is achieved or what it means for all the people of Wales. 

It’s the wrong starting point – and people who start out in the wrong place rarely end up in the right one.

Cardiff, Cardiff, Cardiff...

Tweet The plans for the revamp of Cardiff Central station are ambitious.  They are also likely to be very expensive.  It’s not a plan that I’d oppose in principle, but I don’t agree that it should be the next priority for the network rail investment programme.

I understood why electrifying the main line from Paddington to Swansea should be a top priority.  I can also understand why the lines running through the South Wales valley should be the second priority.  But there are still unelectrified lines in west and north of Wales, and I cannot understand why the scheme to electrify those is not being brought forward ahead of the revamp of Cardiff station.

I try to avoid falling prey to simplistic regional jealousies pitting one part of Wales gets another.  And given the concentration of population and employment in the south-east, the status of Cardiff as the capital, I can understand the logic of an electrification scheme which serves that area first.  It shouldn’t end there though, and a desire to avoid internal competition shouldn’t become an abject acceptance that all investment goes to one corner.

The comment made by the Institute of Directors (“If Cardiff is to compete with other cities in the UK and internationally for investment, then it really needs a train station that is as good as anything else”) sounded like a reprise of why we have to build the extra M4 around Newport, why we have to create a city region based on Cardiff, and why we have to build the Greater Cardiff Metro.  How many more things does Cardiff “need” because we will not get economic development without them, and when will Cardiff have ‘enough’ grand schemes to allow serious investment elsewhere in Wales?

It increasingly looks as though the answer is never – no sooner has one key problem been overcome then another one gets pushed to the fore.  There will always be another key obstacle to Cardiff's development which the rest of Wales will have to pay for, as funds are directed to that one corner of the country.

It’s hard to deny that Cardiff is receiving a substantial devolution dividend, but what about the rest of Wales?  Replicating the south-east bias of the UK was never anyone’s stated intention – yet that’s where we seem to be going.

City Regions to widen Wales GVA gap?

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I don’t share the near-unanimity with which the report of the Task and Finish Group on City Regions (available here) seems to have been greeted, but then I’ve never particularly been one for going with the consensus.  When I read the report, it reminded me rather of the saying that I remember once seeing on the back of a box of England’s Glory matches – “he drew an unwarranted straight line all the way across from an invalid premise to an unjustified conclusion”.

My biggest problem is that the report starts from the clear beliefs that, firstly city regions work and that secondly, there is a critical mass which makes them work (although the basis for placing that critical mass at any particular level is not obviously evidenced).  Any failed attempt at a city region is then ascribed to ‘parochialism and tribalism’ (evidence in support of that, beyond anecdote, once again not being entirely obvious), and any success by cities which are not ‘city regions’ is explained by saying that “some [cities] are perfectly capable of thriving economically without recourse to the concept”. 

But if not all cities need the concept, and if some of those that do adopt it fail anyway, where is the hard evidence that says the concept ‘works’ and can thus be applied successfully elsewhere, or that identifies in advance which cities need the concept and which do not?  'Knowing' that the concept works and then dismissing any counter instances looks more like an act of faith than evidence-based policy making.  Correlation and history aren’t the same thing as cause and effect.  And without satisfactorily evidencing the basic premise, it’s hard to accept the conclusions drawn from it.

Even where success is demonstrated, the report highlights the different things which different city regions have done to achieve their success.  It surely has to be at least possible that it is those particular approaches which have led to the success, not to the fact that they were undertaken by something called a city region.  Perhaps the same approach by a smaller city, or by a larger nation would have been equally successful.

For sure, there are statements such as “OECD research has shown that the common feature of poorly performing areas is a population with a high proportion of low qualifications”.  But which is the chicken and which is the egg?  Is the area performing poorly because of low skills or have all the highly skilled people left because of the poor performance?  The answer to that question is highly relevant to Wales, many parts of which lose their most highly-educated young people; but if the exodus follows poor performance, then increasing skill levels won’t necessarily improve performance.  Indeed, if it leads to a larger exodus, it could even make things worse.

Then we have the statement, with which I have no quibble at all, that “in Wales, our cities generate only 33% of our income/wealth which is significantly the lowest proportion of all UK nations and regions”.  Where I would quibble, though, is with the very next sentence, “It is a reasonable assumption that this is a key factor in explaining Wales’s relatively weak performance on productivity and average wages.”  I’m not at all convinced that one flows from the other.  If a smaller percentage live in cities, then cities will generate a smaller proportion of income and wealth; that's simple artithmetic.  What matters is not what proportion of Wales’ wealth comes from cities, but what the total level, and level per head, of that wealth is.

So, I’m not convinced.  I am concerned, however, at some of the policy suggestions which stem from this report, given my doubts about the premise.  Take, for instance, this sentence from recommendation number 20: “if city regions are the engines of growth, they must be the principal beneficiary of transport, housing, inward investment and funding”.  Am I alone in seeing something of a chicken-and-egg argument here as well?  If the only way that the city regions are going to provide the growth is by diverting investment from the rest of Wales, then isn’t it just possible that it’s that concentration of investment which makes the difference rather than the establishment of the region per se?

It’s a statement backed up by a not particularly subtle suggestion that the EU funding being allocated to the parts of Wales which are designated as being the poorest should be spent in a way which maximises the benefit to those areas considered the richest.  That sounds like a sort of inverted Robin Hood approach to economic development in Wales.  And it seems calculated to lead to a situation where the GVA gap between England and Wales is reduced, but at the expense of increasing the GVA gap between different parts of Wales.  It’s a Cardiff- and Swansea-centric approach which mirrors on a Welsh scale the London-centric approach which many of us have railed against for decades.

As if to, albeit unintentionally I suspect, underline that point, Rhodri Morgan said this in his column in Saturday’s Western Mail: “it doesn’t make sense to tell potential punters exactly where within the city-region you want them to put their new jobs.  Keep it simple.  Just come to Wales.”  And if I substitute ‘the UK’ for both ‘city-region’ and ‘Wales’, doesn’t it still say much the same thing?  If we want to see more geographical equality across Wales, we won’t get it by putting all our eggs in the Cardiff-Swansea baskets.

Planning for schools

Tweet There's been a lot of analysis and discussion of the decision taken by Carwyn Jones on schools in Cardiff. Syniadau in particular has looked in detail at the rationale given and why it was fundamentally flawed.

The decision was one taken by the First Minister himself, and – officially at least – it's in the nature of a quasi-judicial decision by the minister on a proposal put to him by a council, rather than a political decision which one would have been expected would have been discussed by ministers in advance.

Others have imputed political machinations and motivations – I'm prepared to start from the assumption that there has been no political interference. But that doesn't mean that the decision came from nowhere - the case would have been looked at in detail by the relevant officers who would have presented their views to the minister before he made his decision.

And that's the part that concerns me most. The education department in the Assembly seems to be remarkably good at producing fine-sounding strategies, but what happens when it comes to implementing them? The decision taken by Carwyn Jones seems to fly in the face of two important strategies which are, I thought, the policy of the Welsh Government.

The first is Welsh-medium education. The education department seems to, at best, not understand the demand for Welsh-medium education, and at worst to have a deep antipathy to it. I have noted before that the department has been actively colluding with Carmarthenshire County Council in preparing a scheme which deliberately ignores the demand for Welsh-medium secondary education in the Tywi Valley. The decision in Cardiff is not a stand-alone case.

The second is rationalisation of empty school places. The department seems to relish demanding that rural counties close schools with surplus places, but faced with a similar urban issue on their doorstep in Cardiff, their enthusiasm for resolving it rapidly evaporates.

I don't pretend that I know enough about the detail in Cardiff to judge whether the proposal put forward by Cardiff was the only solution, or even the best solution. But I do know that they'd been working on it for some time, and went through all the proper processes in submitting it. There surely has to be a better way of working through this sort of issue than allowing a council to work on a scheme for two years – the government department in Cardiff must have known what was being looked at – and then simply rejecting it.

Supercities and human needs

Tweet I don't have any issue with the idea of the towns and cities of South Wales working more closely together, as was suggested by a think tank today. Nor do I have any issue with the idea that sensible economic – and even more so, transport - planning should look at cities and their hinterland as a whole, rather than trying to focus attention on small parts of the area. But I strongly disagree with the underlying thinking behind this particular report.

They seem to be starting from a number of premises as follows:

• Globalisation is not only good, it is inevitable
• Globalisation means that cities have to compete with each other on the world stage
• Competing means that cities have to be bigger and bigger

To them, these premises are not even open to challenge. I beg to differ.

In a way, the subject is one which goes to the very heart of my own political philosophy. I believe that human institutions, towns, cities, transport, the economy – all these things and more – should be shaped and driven to meet human needs and aspirations; and on a human scale. It sometimes seems to me as though many of the cold economists are telling us that we, as humans, must adapt to fit the needs of the market – or rather, the needs of globalised big business.

Now some might argue that the two things are not that different. To meet human needs and aspirations requires jobs and resources; business creates those jobs and resources. I consider that to be over-simplistic, not least because there is nothing contained within the statement that requires globalisation.

Globalisation is the current fashionable trend; but just as generals are always said to be stuck fighting the previous war, I think that many economists and supporters of globalisation are supporting an outdated set of ideas. The future lies with re-localising production and consumption, and it will be forced upon us by rising world populations, shortage and increased cost of fuel, and climate change. Above all, the complexity which is being built into our economic systems by globalisation and long supply chains represents a major threat in itself; the globalised economy is actually becoming more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse as a result of a failure at a single point.

So, by all means let's have integrated and cohesive planning between our towns and cities rather than competition; but let's do it to shape our country to meet our needs rather than because we want to compete with Paris or London. And let's start by deciding what we want from the economy, rather than what it wants from us.

PS – I was a little taken aback by Peter Stead's quoted comment, "One is tremendously attached to the Valleys but certainly in the long term the future lies with the ports". What exactly is the fundamental difference between that and the insane suggestion just a few weeks ago that people should all move from the North of England to places like Oxford?