The great university tuition hours controversy: you read it here first

The latest news from England's ongoing student fees debacle is as predictable as it is depressing.

Briefly, the latest manufactured 'row' amounts to this: universities are now charging nine times what they charged just a few short years ago (in the times of plenty, rather than austerity and dearth). And yet teaching and contact hours have gone up by only a tiny little bit. Now, don't get university lecturers started. You and they know that the number of contact hours doesn't relate to the quality of the education received at these august institutions. You and they understand that most higher education must be self-directed research and learning - otherwise, students might as well stay at school for a few more years.

And we all know that universities don't have all that much more cash than they did when fees were as low as £1,000. The UK government has removed almost all of their teaching grant (or is in the process of doing so), so undergraduates may be paying a lot more, but there isn't a vast increase in cash pouring into Vice Chancellors' coffers to deal with all the extra expectation that might mount with a higher price tag. This would hamstring any attempt to push up teaching hours and the number of lectures, even before we take into account that there's no simple correlation at all between higher spending and more academic productivity.

We know all that - and we've known it all along. Still, the less sophisticated among the commentariat are up in arms.

It's important in this context to remember where we've come from, and where we might be going. You might have a slight feeling of deja vu here if you're a regular reader of this blog, because it's what we've predicted here all along. What did we say here at PPP, way back in October 2010? Let's take a look:

The main problem... will come about because of the withdrawal of most government funding for tuition. Most of the extra money will simply be swallowed up by [a] funding ‘black hole’ – a fact explicitly accepted by the [Browne] Report, which recommended a £6,000 soft cap for fees to drive ill-defined (and unlikely) ‘efficiency savings’. Students are not going to see any return for their extra outlays, even if they pay £12,000 per annum. 27 per cent of that charge will pass directly to the government, leaving only a small increase in funding over the total unit of resource even at ‘elite’ institutions. In fact, just the reverse – buildings are going to deteriorate, they are going to see their tutors less, IT investment will slow, and research laboratories will be slimmed down. They are unlikely to take all this in good humour.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it, in the context of student and parental complaints about 'quality' and the amount of teaching received in universities? Just nod, it's okay. To drive the point home, there was also this, that I wrote at about the same time:

This is a very high-risk strategy - something that should come as no surprise given the Coalition Government's decision to simultaneously revolutionise the NHS, the constitution, local government and macroeconomic policy. If it goes wrong, there may be little political capital left to reconstruct universities that have gone bankrupt. Academics' discussion should focus on the redistribution of risk: from the old to the young; from the collective to the individual; from government to the university managers and teachers who will have to manage student unrest. It is this new and bitter game that will dominate the years ahead.

Yes, well, don't give me any medals for prescience just yet. But it's not a bad record.

Marketising Higher Education, while giving it no more money overall, was always a recipe for tension, dispute and downright arm-wrestling within academe. For if they are encouraged to think of their university years as a consumer product, with a price-tag, and measured by its quantity as well as its quantity, who is to blame anyone for taking our universities to task when there seems no relation at all between actual costs and provision for the individual?

Remember: you read it here first.

Devolution: more dynamic, but more complex

 
I've just spent a very enjoyable few days in North Wales (lovely, thank you), during which I spoke at a Workshop on 'Community Building Governance' at Bangor University (above).

It was a very enjoyable day, attended by politicians (such as Anglesey MP Albert Owen), representatives from the charitable sector, third sector organisations such as Housing Associations, and - of course - the inevitable academic or two.

I won't bore you too much with the details. But what struck me the most was just how rapidly the United Kingdom's constituent elements are diverging in their constitutional and policy practice. I should know most of this, of course - but life's sometimes to short to hang onto most of the detail. Fixated on the Scottish independence referendum due next year, we sometimes fail to look at Wales as an example of a small country trying to do things differently on the other side of Offa's Dyke.

Devolution is dynamic. Following a 2011 referendum, the Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Assembly Government now have many more powers than under their original late-1990s remit. And resultant policy differences are growing. It was evident just from a few hours at Bangor that the entire political culture is different. There is a very different constellation of forces contending for power within the policy-making landscape. Local government is more powerful; the National Parks are bigger players, at least in relatively remote, rural North Wales; the state is bigger and more confident; four parties have entrenched power bases in way that UKIP can only dream about (for now) in England.

Take one example: Communities First, a series of grass-roots partnerships that have been attempting to tackle poverty at the ward and local level since 2001 - surely one of the longest-running policy initiatives of all, unheralded across the rest of the UK. A series of organic contacts between different groups too often sundered in England - acting of course in a much smaller country - its recent re-orientation towards a 'bottom up' rather than a relatively mechanical and statistical 'top down' approach was subject to both praise and controversy on the day.

It's an interesting example of multi-centred policymaking, and we're all going to have to get used to it. One of the few benefits of Bill Clinton's 'aboltion of welfare as we know it' was the handing down of much power to the individual states, meaning that they could learn from each other and experiment much more easily than previously.

Can we grasp that nettle here? It looks unlikely for now, especially given the three different parties in power in Cardiff, Edinburgh and London, but more events like Friday's Community-Building Workshop might give grounds for hope.

Queen's speech: dog's dinner

Domestic public policy shouldn't make you too angry, really. At least in the developed world, where we've got time - and cash - to think things out. Football? Yes. World poverty? Yes. Tinkering with the machinery of the mixed economy? Not so much.

Yesterday's Queen's Speech (above) may, however, be an exception. For it contained immigration 'reforms' so crasss, so ignorant, so eye-wateringly, bladder-emptyingly turgid, messy, stupid and downright ill-conceived that any of us with a brief on the public policy circuit should be smashing up seminar rooms and howling at the moon. We're going to tut and write blogs instead, but there you go.

The speech from the throne contained some good ideas, though many of them will never be actually implemented - partly because the Coalition itself is running swiftly out of steam, and partly because they're not radical enough. Reforms to social care, trying to stitch the NHS and local authority responsibilities together, and increased probation for ex-offenders, come under this heading. 'Not bad: try harder' isn't too bad a summary of these well-intentioned proposals.

But when we get to immigration 'reform' - well, excuse my brevity, but the announcement was a turd. Doctors are to check immigrants' length of stay, and charge short-term residents. Councils are to give priority to local people for housing - though they're already allowed and encouraged to do this. Most absurdly of all, landlords are to check tenants' papers. So let me get this straight. A supposedly liberal-conservative government wants to create a new bureaucratic array, a ragged army of snoopers, checkers, form-fillers and listeners-in... All for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. For anyone who believes that a single one of these ideas will change one migrant's idea about coming or not coming to the United Kingdom is deluded. What counts on that front is work - its absence or presence both here and in people's countries of origin. Economic growth will both bring people in, and be boosted in its turn, by the arrival of hard-working foreigners. That's the crux of the matter, and that's why immigration has fallen recently. There's no evidence, and there never will be any evidence, to prove the contrary. Evidence-based policy? Cutting red tape? They've gone out of the window in order to placate Conservative fears about the rise of the anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party.

But it's worse than that, really. These proposed laws are ridiculous even given their own presumptions. Will GPs really want to see your passport? Who's to look at tenants documentation? Agents? Landlords? How will the Government check if you've done it? Will doctors or councils listen to what the Government says anyway? It seems unlikely that a doctor is going to be asked to turn people away, or make them pay, when they're acutely ill.

It's bad law gone wrong, with legislation lurching from the absurd to the absurdist. It's the unenforceable and ineffective 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act all over again, brought in at a time when sensible public health measures, from minimum alcohol pricing to plain tobacco packaging, are being left to gather dust on the shelf. The same amount of people will be able to come - in particular, from the European Union - and the economic and social determinants of people's movements will remain exactly the same as they were before this ludicrous set of non-laws were sort-of enacted. All in all, it's an indictment of our entire political culture that the laughter today has been limited to polite, behind-our-hands sniggering.

Well, it's not sniggering that's coming from this blog, that's for sure. It's snarling.

Labour's baby steps are not good enough

So England's local elections made it a night for celebrating the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party - if you had a mind to.

But remember the bar we set Labour on Tuesday. That was for the party to win 300 council seats, and show that they could win in places from which they had retreated in disorder under Gordon Brown: Harlow in Essex, for instance, a 'must win' seat if they are to hope to govern on their own anytime soon.

How did they do? That's the real question. There's a psychodrama taking place on the Right of British politics, one we'll address in further posts, but it's Labour progress and Labour's presence on the ground which will decide who sits in No. 10 Downing Street after the next election. Remember that UKIP has only bought an admission ticket for national politics, and won as many seats as the Greens have, regularly now, for many years. And on just about any measure, Labour came up a little bit short short. The fog of battle has not yet lifted, but the party seems unlikely to make it to 300 gains. In Harlow (above), they made two gains out of the three seats on Essex County Council (PDF) that could have fallen to them, but they fell short in a third they might have claimed - all with the help of thousands of UKIP voters who siphoned support (for the main) away from the Conservatives. Essex as a whole warmed to the populist UKIP message, and not to Labour, which still has only nine seats on the council (compared to 42 Conservatives).

Labour did take some good steps forward, and it was by no means a disastrous night for them. They held on to a safe seat in the North of England, a seat where their vote held up fairly well. They pushed their drinks cabinet that little bit closer to the offices of real power in Whitehall among the streets of Hastings and Lincoln, where they picked up seats (for instance Lincoln Moorland) where they must do well next time. They gained control of Derbyshire, in general making up ground they lost so precipitously in their 2009 debacle. In general, First Past the Post looks to be helping them because they're able to focus their efforts on areas with vulnerable Conservative MPs, who must know look nervously over their shoulders at the UKIP insurgency.

But Staffordshire, at the outer edges of Labour's ambitions, stayed Conservative. Labour pushed  Warwickshire into no overall control, but couldn't take control of the council. Nor could they gain a decisive upper hand in Cumbria. They made six gains in Bristol, but weren't able to get close to controlling the council chamber there (though that was, admittedly, never really on the cards because the whole council wasn't up for election). 

Let's sum it all up. Labour is crawling towards power, shuffling forwards across the broken glass of low public esteem and trust. On this showing, they might well be the biggest party come the aftermath of the next General Election. The idea that anyone is going to win an overall majority has now been clearly exposed as a fantasy. But what sort of mandate would a Labour Government have if it won 33 or 34 per cent of the vote, when the Conservatives and UKIP had split over 40 per cent between them? Well, you could say the same sort of mandate that Margaret Thatcher had when she won a First Past and Post landslide in 1983. But that's another debate, for another day.

For now, our conclusion about Labour's path to power must be this: it's long, rocky and uncertain. And, as far ahead as 2015 at least, it may be leading nowhere at all.

England's local elections - PPP's yearly preview

Regular readers will know that this column likes to preview each year's local elections, in order to read the tea leaves on how well the political parties are doing. So will this year be like 2011, when Labour did pretty poorly for the only major party of Opposition? Or will it be more like 2012, an election held just after Chancellor George Osborne's 'Omnishambles' Budget, in which Labour did just about well enough to look like a credible government-in-waiting?

Probably neither. Probably somewhere inbetween.

First, let's set the bar. It's a 'shire' election, in Conservative-leaning rural counties (many of which have had their urban sifted out into unitary authorities for each city). That means we have to calculate a 'notional national share' by looking at how these wards performed in the past and then imagining those shifts all over the country. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, the gurus of such things, reckon that if Labour does as well as it's doing in local by-elections at the moment it ought to gain 350 seats. Many fewer - less than 300, say - and all the opinion poll leads in the world will look pretty useless when weighed up against real votes.

All the signs are that they're risking just that outcome. There'll probably be nothing like the local elections of 1968, which saw Labour annihilated and suggested that a Conservative government really might be on the cards, or 1995, when the Conservative retreat turned into a rout (particularly in Scotland), or 2009 - the last time these wards were up for election - when the voters took the opportunity to give the Brown government a kicking as it dredged the very bottom of its unpopularity. The Government will do better than the dire economic situation would seem to suggest. They'll be pretty badly beaten up, all right, but holding their losses down to anything under 300 will feel like a triumph after everything the country's been through in the last three years. Their deficit in the opinion polls has been shrinking recently, and the economy may just (just) have turned the corner. Labour's going to have to come from a 2009 third place in lots of wards if they're to win the seat - a tough ask if ever there was one. If the Conservatives do come out of this with bruises, rather than losing an electoral limb, they'll feel pretty chipper.

Even the possibility of such a result ought to worry Labour, for the real mark of an Opposition ready to spring back into power is overwhelming victories like these at the local ballot box. At the moment, their strategy is frankly overwhelming, and they do very poorly indeed in the south of England. What happens in Essex (above), for instance, where ultra-marginal constituencies such as Harlow should be in Labour's sights, might matter a great deal more than what happens in the Midlands once we get into a General Election campaign. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is (probably falsely) rumoured to have a '35 per cent strategy' to win the next election, where he keeps hold of left-leaning Liberal Democrat defectors but doesn't have to attract many other voters. That may have worked for Barack Obama in Ohio and Florida, but the less clearly-segmented electorate in Britain - and Labour's enfeebled state, in terms of both finances and organisation - make that a harder trick to pull off here.

But the real answer to all this in 2013 is that we don't really know what'll happen. How well will the United Kingdom Independence Party do? That's a question that resonates very strongly in a first-past-the-post election where the winner in each ward takes all. Will they do well enough to throttle the Conservatives' chances of holding on to a swathe of councils and seats, perhaps pushing their losses up towards 400? Well enough even to make a big breakthrough on their own and seize fifty to a hundred council seats? It's not clear. Upon that uncertainy hangs a great deal: essentially whether Conservative MPs chortle or panic on Friday morning.

There's your card marked, then. If Labour win fewer than 300 seats, things don't look so good for them - and they will look very bad indeed if they're down under about 200 or so. If the Conservatives lose more than 350 seats, their chances of winning an overall majority in the House of Commons at the next General Election will look even closer to zero than they do now. If they lose a great deal fewer than 300, they can pat themselves on the back and say they've come through the worst.

Come back on Friday, and let's test projection against reality!

Sometimes the water flows downhill!

Sometimes The Historian can seem like a bit of a grump. Public policy? It's usually done pretty badly. The news agenda? Dominated by commentators who can't remember yesterday, let alone post-war Britain... and rarely know much even about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Austerity? Don't even get me started.

But every now and again a little shaft of light pierces though the gloom. That was the case on Saturday, when I had the honour to chair a research degrees training day at my home institution.

The speakers were great - sharp about the use of the internet for research, interesting about the nature of blogging, really fascinating about the use of social media to disseminate students' research. The non-academic speakers, from the Royal Literary Fund not least, were also superb - focused, helpful, useful, to the point. I felt like a bit of a dinosaur in a way, because when I started with research, I had to get great big dusty tomes out of the Bodleian and shoot paper slips down Harry Potter-style holes in the wall. Now it's all changed, as the audience (full itself of writers and thinkers) appreciated. Research has become something protean, a blurry, moving set of boundaries that are in flux all the time. It's much less easy to pin down: but it's much more exciting.

The barriers to understanding are many. Academic writing that obfuscates more than it enlightens. Academic feuding that seems to go on for decades, long after the initial issues have been long forgotten. A grasp on research ethics and research efficacy that sometimes seems slippery at best.

But sometimes, somehow, through all the dissauding torrents of controversy, via what passes for Higher Education 'policy', despite all the slog... sometimes the waters of new knowledge do flow. If that's right, it's a critical insight at a depressing time, and a welcome boost to sagging morale.

Britain's economy: it's a slog that lies ahead

So we avoided a triple-dip recession (above) It's a relief, and a sign that at long, long last there might be a bit of hard ground under our feet. We might just have stopped sinking.

There'll be a bit of a fillup to confidence from the announcement. There'll certainly be sighs of relief in Whitehall and amongst MPs from the two governing parties at Westminster. A Conservative administration - albeit a minority one - might still be formed following the 2015 General Election after all.

But what does this really tell us about where we're headed? The answer: not much. Scratch underneath the headline data, or alternatively look at historic trends and comparators, and things still look pretty bleak.

We're going ahead, but we're going ahead very, very slowly. The nadir of our projections - less than one per cent growth this calendar year - might be behind us. We might do a little bit better than that, at this rate. But this is still by far the slowest and flattest recovery from any recession in modern history. Sure, we went down further in the crash of the early 1930s (partly because we tried to reflate this time, before aborting the operation after the 2010 General Election) - but we're bumped along the bottom for years now, and the waste of lost output and lost income is now worse than in the Great Depression and its aftermath. That's right: worse than the Great Depression.

There's worse. Productivity growth has plummeted, to some of the worst levels we've ever seen in this country. Why invest? Why retrain? Why Why move your job or your company? You might very well ask those questions, and answer them with a very negative 'don't bother' if banks won't lend and the economy looks unlikely to grow very rapidly for years to come. Of that virtuous circle of high growth, rising wages, high investment and high productivity that was the hallmark of the 1950s and 1960s - the era demonised by Thatcherites for three decades now - there is no sign. And there isn't likely to be, either.

That's because fiscal policy continues to be pointed in exactly the wrong direction - 'cutting' the deficit, while tinkering around with some ludicrous and ill-conceived supply side plans that not even the Conservatives' own MPs and Lords think will work. A declared objective that won't even come true in its own terms, as the Treasury is likely to continue missing debt targets for as far as the eye can see. They made it in under the wire for 2012/13 by the simple trick of slashing capital spending and demanding departments spend little or nothing in February and March. You know what? I can pick up a telephone and shout at people too. It's not a skill. It's an admission of failure.

So we look out on a rather unappealing vista: years and years of public sector spending cuts, perhaps running to 2018 or 2019, very low productivity growth, little or no real income growth (in fact, quite the opposite - a big squeeze on family budgets) and only moderate growth in GDP.

We're beginning to crawl away from the precipice. But we're shuffling away from the brink on our hands and knees. We should be walking on our own two feet by now.