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Inward Investment – What’s the problem?

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Inward investment – the short cut to a prosperous and fair city where all of our communities can flourish?

But, what exactly is it?

It is the process where an investor believes that this is the best place to put their money to get a secure and sufficient return.  They may invest by setting up a factory or, more likely these days, an office or call centre.  And most cities employ specialist teams to attract inward investment – to present the best case for their city or region as an investment proposition.

But it can go further than this.

We may be able to offer specific incentives to investors to bring their money and their jobs to our city.  We may provide them with low or no-cost infrastructure, or other benefits such as an enterprise zone where they may enjoy high speed broadband, simplified planning requirements  and reduced business rates.

So inward investment becomes a highly competitive, and sometimes very expensive process to get those scarce investors to being their money to our city.  Inward investment teams are under pressure to deliver, and the dynamic gets interesting as sassy ‘investors’ play country off against country, region against region, city against city and even neighbourhood against neighbourhood.  But just look at the prize for the winners.  They get ‘investment‘ and even better ‘jobs‘.

But, we must remember the investment comes because there is an expectation of a return.  And it has to be a good return.  The net flow of cash over time will be out of the local economy and into the pocket of the inward investor and their shareholders.

But, inward investment brings many gifts…

Inward Investment brings Wealth to the City

This of course is true.  But it does little to distribute wealth.  It concentrates it with the lucky few.  Inequalities of wealth and health are, in my opinion, increased by inward investment rather than decreased.  It drives social stratification and is unlikely to be a great policy for a city that wants all its communities to thrive.

Inward Investment Brings Jobs to the City

This too is true.  But usually the jobs that go to local people are largely low skill, low wage. Often inward investment can increase local unemployment rather than decrease it as investment tends to create relatively few jobs and automates as much as possible.  Lets face it if employment costs are a large part of your business and you require large volumes of low skill workers then you are not going to be looking at the UK.  And if you do create high wage, high skills jobs what are the chances of local people being able to take them up?  It is likely that these jobs will go to incomers too.

Inward Investment Builds Houses

Very true.  Inward investors may take over a problem community – demolish or refurbish it and turn it into an aspirational address.  House prices are driven up and often beyond the reach of many local people

Inward Investment Creates Dependency

We become a blue collar community reliant on employers and investors.  They become powerful influence on the politics, economics and education in our communities as they demand more and more ’employability’, better and better conditions for business.  We end up with much time and energy being put into retaining our 100 largest employers and continually tipping the playing field in favour of ‘business’…. Becoming a dependent client class I believe has negative impacts on the wellbeing of community and acts as a significant barrier to the development of innate potential as we are shaped to meet the demands of employers.

Loss of Local Control

Not only are we dependent on the presence of inward investors in our communities but we cede control to them.  They manage their investments on the ground and if they choose to create redundancies in our communities there is precious little we can do about it.

Inward Investment is Fickle

The mobility of much modern business means that inward investors can go almost as easily as they come.  You might have to have very deep pockets to retain them in the face of all that competition for their ‘jobs’.

Inward Investment can Undermine Local Business

By competing for talent and skills and by driving up land values and costs beyond the reach of local independents.

It Plays a Zero Sum Game

If an inward investor moves from one part of the county to another there is not net gain in jobs.

Put More Strain on Local Services

Schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure may all face increasing demand as a result of inward investment. These costs are seldom met by the inward investor but is funded from other budgets.  Meanwhile in the community that the investor has just left services may lose viability and be forced to close.

It is Resource Hungry

Playing the inward investment game is a high stakes, high cost business. Renting a yacht at MIPIM and taking a high powered delegation there does not come cheap.  But that is just surface.  Someone has to pay for the business rate subsidies and the infrastructure demanded.  And every pound spent on helping an inward investor to realise a profit is a pound that is not spent elsewhere in supporting the local community and its economy.

But I am not Against Inward Investment…

It has a role to play in bringing ideas, innovation and fresh blood to our city.  What I am against is a political and business narrative that says it is really the only game in town, and one that says it is the only strategy worthy of real investment.   Instead of economic hunting perhaps we need to look at nurturing the potential our own communities a little more, and recognising that there is much more to creating sustainable and fulfilling lives than the ever increasing growth of GDP and a touching faith in the trickle down fairy.

 

 

Bonsai People in a Bonsai Culture?

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Bonsai = An ornamental tree or shrub grown in a pot and artificially prevented from reaching its normal size

The bonsai is not a genetic variant but has within it the potential to become a fully grown tree.  However it is carefully cultivated to meet the demanding requirements of the gardener.  It is fed few nutrients, kept in shallow soil, not allowed to form deep roots, continually pruned and kept ‘in proportion’; shaped to the precise requirements of the gardener and the specifications of their profession.

Bonsai People

Bonsai people have had their development limited, distorted and shaped by the influence of their environment rather more than it has been driven by their own potential and aspirations.  To an extent we are all Bonsai People.  But some people have been more bonsaid than others.

And some seem to be very content with their bonsai nature.  While others are frustrated at the sensation that there must be something more in them than this.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Rich Huxley and we were talking about developing musicians. I told him of a mentor in Leeds who had boasted to me about how they had worked with a 14 year old boy whose ambition was ‘to be the best bass guitarist in the world’ and had managed to get them to realise just what a preposterous and unlikely goal this was.  Instead he persuaded the lad that 5 grades A-C was a much more achievable and better ambition.

One of my own daughters was told while studying for GCSEs that she should play less netball and see less of her boyfriend in order to study more as she had the chance to get ‘straight As’.  This of course had much more to do with a teacher and a school under a hard performance management regime than it did the ‘spiritual, mental and physical development’ of my daughter!

I was encouraged to pursue my abilities in maths, physics and biology on the grounds that they were ‘the future’ rather than my then interests in community work, punk and ecology.  Funnily enough community, music and sustainability have proven life-long passions.  Maths? Not so much.

Young people are encouraged in all sorts of ways to drop art, music, drama and so on, in pursuit of ‘more academic’ subjects.   If you are going to spend 39k a year on a degree then you had better make sure it has a job at the end of it etc.   It is as if the sole purpose of education is to get as many employer brownie points as possible.  To produce the perfect Bonsai rather than nurture potential and passion.

We might as well put education in the UK into the hands of the Department for Business for heaven’s sake….

And I have worked with lots of professionals, who tell me that they are ‘not in the right job’, that ‘this is not really me’.  Most were offered ‘training’ (usually in accountancy, management or some other commercial discipline) that would be good for their career.  They might not have been enthusiastic, but never look a gift horse in the mouth etc.  Before they know it they are in finance department earning decent money trapped in job that is just not them.  They are bonsai of themselves.

Sound familiar?

There is a massive difference between schooling – training to conform and meet someone elses specification and educating – drawing out and developing potential, exploring and nurturing individuality.  Much of what we today call education is really little more than schooling.

Living in A Bonsai Culture?

Could we be living in a predominantly bonsai culture, where relatively few people are deeply interested in the potential of themselves, never mind their neighbours.  What passes for a culture of self-improvement now largely focuses on enhancing abs, pecs, other bits of the anatomy and ‘style’ rather than the continual development of character, personality and ‘self’.  The main pre-occupation is less ‘what might I become?’ than ‘how can I fit in’ or ‘how can I get by?’

Or instead of focussing on potential we focus on what we are told are ‘flaws’. Corrections of perceived ‘abnormalities’ rather than a genuine exploration of potential and individuality.

Escaping the Bonsai Culture…

…seems like an almost impossible ask.  Once you start looking the tools of the bonsai gardener are everywhere, in the media, adverts, politicians manifestos indeed just about every external stimulus that we are exposed to is designed to influence us, to shape us to persuade us in some direction.  Even this post…

But we can choose to:

  • Spend more time with people who value us for who we are and not what we might do
  • Reflect more on who we are and what we might become
  • Be comfortable talking about our own development, what it might mean and how it might be approached – rather than relying on the prescriptions of our chosen ‘teachers’
  • and think twice about whether a course of action is likely to make us more like the person that we want to be, or more like the person that someone else wants us to become?

If these themes and possibilities interest you then check out Progress School running in Leeds

 

 

 

 

Is your work person centred? Really…

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My inbox is rammed with emails from various agencies of the State claiming that they are developing person centred approaches to service design, delivery and development.

Most are not.

  • If you have set up a service designed to promote behaviour change because you have been told/asked/contracted to do so by a policy maker – then your work is not person centred – it is policy centred
  • If you have developed a service that only works on predefined agendas, with pre-defined ‘solutions’ and services, then your work is not person centred – it is service centred.
  • If your service works on a  premise that service users are in some way broken, faulty or otherwise in need of your modification (smoking cessation, weight management, more entrepreneurial, better CV and qualifications etc) then your work is NOT person centred.
  • If you push your services on people without being invited, using systems of sticks and carrots, and large marketing budgets, to promote engagement – then your work is not person centred – it is to some degree at least manipulative and coercive.
  • If you make decisions that prioritise achieving targets over the wellbeing of the people that use your service – then your work is not person centred.  It is target centred.

Person centred work is done:

  • At the invitation of the person – they invite you to work with them – primarily based on their perception of your relevance to them and their agendas.  If people are inviting you to work with them and finding the process helpful then word of mouth will soon spread and you do not need to spend vast sums promoting your service.
  • When the person sets out their agenda and accesses the support that they choose (rather than those that your agency is set up to deliver).  They always have choices and person centred work helps them to recognise these and prioritise amongst them.
  • When interventions let the person decided whether they wish to engage with ‘professional service providers’ and/or with their neighbours and peers – they don’t assume that the solution lies with experts and ‘mainstream’ providers.
  • When the ‘whole’ person is acknowledged and accepted – not when we fragment them according to our service design.  If we have a service that is just designed to promote health, crime reduction or entrepreneurship – then we are not person centred.

This matters enormously.

Once we start to take the ideas and ideals of person centred working seriously we can transform the impact of the so called ‘helping services’.  Instead of a Nanny State we can have an enabling and empowering state.  And people can really start to recognise their own responsibility for helping themselves in a context that is out to help rather than to fix.

Carl Rogers in On Becoming a Person had this to say:

It has gradually been driven home to me that I cannot be of help …by any means of any intellectual or training procedure.  No approach which relies upon knowledge, upon training, upon the acceptance of something that is taught, is of any use.  These approaches are so tempting and direct that I have, in the past, tried a great many of them.  It is possible to explain a person to himself, to prescribe steps that should lead him forward, to train him in knowledge about a more satisfying mode of life.  But such methods are, in my experience, futile and inconsequential.  The most they can accomplish is some temporary change, which soon disappears, leaving the individual more than ever convinced of their inadequacy.

The failure of any such approach through the intellect has forced me to recognise that change appears to come about through experience in a relationship.

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If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.

Carl Rogers – On Becoming a Person

So my plea to you: If your work is not genuinely person centred – please don’t say that it is. You will just be serving to reduce the chances of genuinely person centred approaches ever getting a fair crack at the whip.

And if you you want to explore how you can adopt genuinely ‘person centred’ approaches then please do get in touch!