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Poverty and Income Differentials

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I have been doing a bit of digging around looking at issues of pay differentials in and around Leeds.

A top professional footballer in the UK can expect to earn in the region of £140 000 every week.  It might take an average Leeds United player about 6 months to earn this much.

The post of Leeds City Development Director is advertised at £140 000 per year (you would think we would attract a decent candidate willing to work for that)

A Teacher on an average salary in Leeds would take 4.5 years to earn £140k.

A Registered Nurse would take nearly 6 years, as would a Police Constable.

A Healthcare Assistant almost 9 years.

A Teaching Assistant just over 10 years.

A Qualified Playworker (L2) would need more than 15 years.

The poor kids dad would take almost 30 years to get this income on current benefits.

A young person on the Job Seekers Allowance would be an old person – at least 72 – before they accrued JSA payments worth £140k, if it were possible.

Health Warning

All of these calculations should be treated with care.

They are based on current wages as researched on the web. In most cases, but not footballers, these are average wages.  I have done my best to check the maths but no guarantees!  I have done nothing sophisticated, just calculated how long at the current salary it would take to accrue 140k.  Having said that I think the numbers are illustrative and enlightening, even if they are not entirely accurate.  Any economists who fancy doing more accurate calculations and sharing them then please do let me know.)

The Power of Collaboration

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It seems to me that there is little more important to the quality of community than the ability to collaborate.  I think it was Kevin Kelly who first said that

Access is better than ownership.

Collaboration has the potential to allow us to access skills, ideas, money, labour, resources and allows us to achieve things that would be impossible if we did not learn how to collaborate.

  • So what can we do that helps to build our ability to collaborate across the city?
  • What can we do to collaborate over consumption and ownership?
  • What can we do to collaborate over creativity and production?

Today a small group is meeting in Leeds to explore some of the se questions and see just what if anything can be done to make Leeds a more collaborative city.

I look forward to seeing what comes from it.

What Now Leeds…?

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I spent a bit of time yesterday looking at the latest DRAFT ‘Vision for Leeds’, developed by the Leeds Initiative.  It has been under development for months now, and many of us will have contributed ideas through the ‘What If Leeds’ workshops or through the online forum that was set up for the job.  Depending on your point of view this document is either of central importance in influencing the development of the City, or just meaningless verbiage.  The amount of time I have put into this over the last year or so I really hope it is the former.

The new Vision for 2030 has been drafted, including City Priority Plans covering the work of 5 sub-boards:

  • Children and Families
  • Safer and Stronger Communities
  • Sustainable Economy and Culture
  • Regeneration
  • Health and Wellbeing

Clearly there are overlaps between these boards with much of what needs to be done needing co-ordination across several of them.

It is important to recognise that none of these sub boards have any powers. These remain with the partnership member organisations, including The Council, NHS, Police and Fire Authorities, Education, the private and third sectors. The boards simply provide a mechanism through which each organisation’s work can be co-ordinated and perhaps influenced to fit in with the over-arching development of the City.

But back to the draft Vision.

The Vision itself is incredibly bold and ambitious.  As the Vision says, the people of Leeds have spoken – and this is our Vision!

By 2030, Leeds will be locally and internationally recognised as the best city in the UK

By 2030, Leeds will be fair, open and welcoming. Leeds will be a place where everyone has an equal chance to live their life successfully and realise their potential. Leeds will embrace new ideas, involve local people, and welcome visitors and those who come here to live, work and learn.

By 2030, Leeds’ economy will be prosperous and sustainable. We will create a prosperous and sustainable economy, using our resources effectively. Leeds will be successful and well-connected offering a good standard of living.

By 2030, All Leeds’ communities will be successful. Leeds’ communities will thrive and people will be confident, skilled, enterprising, active and involved.

Nothing if not ambitious.

Each of these headline aims are expanded into a number of bullet points, such as:

  • people are treated with dignity and respect at all stages of their lives – (which I love because of the sheer scale of its ambition)
  • we all behave responsibly (which I love because of its sheer idiocy and unwillingness to accept human nature for what it is! Imagine the focus groups defining ‘responsible behaviour’, and the fun that might be had with enforcement!  And we all behave responsibly when?  All of the time?  Some of the time?  Once in a while?  In public places? We might need some kind of ‘responsibility licence’ where we get ‘points’ for irresponsible behaviour.  Too many points and your banned.  Perhaps each community can shape its own definitions of ‘responsible’ allowing us to develop communities with distinct cultures.
  • local people have the power to make decisions that affect us – (I am guessing that in this case the ‘Us’ is the council and its partners – just imagine that, a city where citizens had the power to make decisions that affect the state!  We could call it ….democracy….)
  • a strong local economy driving sustainable economic growth (a local economy! Not a regional, national or global one.  Just imagine that.)
  • work for everyone with secure, flexible employment and good wages – a city of full employment and good (above average?) wages
  • high-quality, accessible, affordable and reliable public transport
  • successfully achieved a 40% reduction in carbon emissions (by 2020)
  • people have the opportunity to get out of poverty (now I would like to think that we could strengthen this to say everyone that wants support to get out of poverty is able to access it and use it to make progress, or some such)
  • community-led businesses meet local needs (look out private ownership – the Peoples Republic of Leeds is after you.  You can go and meet the needs of non locals – but here, we look after our own.  Community led banks, utilities…everything! By 2030.)
Now I love a big hairy audacious goal as much as anyone.  They require great leadership, tremendous commitment, phenomenal communication, a willingness to fail in their pursuit and, usually a lot of time and money.  And if you are going to engage me in the pursuit of a BHAG, you had better be serious about it.  Any hint that this is hot air or political posturing without the commitment and resources to have a real crack…..
The draft vision then starts to move towards implementation in the form of a series of City Priority Plans, one for each of the 5 sub boards.  And here I have some real concerns – because some of our BHAGs get diluted,  BIG TIME.
City Priority Plans
So the Vision (or BHAG) of Leeds being a ‘healthy and caring city’, becomes a 4 Year Priority to ensure that ‘More People Make Healthy Lifestyle Choices’ which gets translated into a Headline Indicator that tracks the number of adults smoking.  A vision that could be something to rally people around becomes a simple quantitative goal that the NHS and Government taxation will ensure happens anyway.
And this is not a one off.
The City Priority Plan for regeneration has a Four Year Priority to ‘Support the recovery of the Leeds Economy’.  And the Headline Indicator for this?  Development of an as yet unspecified number of hectares of brownfield land!
If we are not careful we will end up with a bureaucratic response to the ‘Vision for Leeds’ that will enable the various strategic partners to get on with what they were doing anyway.
At least some of the people of Leeds spoke their minds when it comes to setting the vision for the City.  I think that we now need to speak our minds again when it comes to developing the City Priority Plans.
You can download the full document in pdf format here.  Just click the link for ‘Tuesday 15 March 2011’.  The Vision for Leeds starts on page 37.

Big Society: Doing it for ourselves; not for them

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One of the mantras of Big Society is that we all need to find time to do more, to give more, to help others more.

Now we can moan about this being poorly timed, or a fig leaf for cuts or whatever.  But this misses the real point.

Which is that, in my book, it completely misunderstands the nature of community, why we need it and how it helps.  It seems to go against the grain of human nature and millenia of evolutionary biology.  Because for most of us, most of the time what motivates us to act is our own self interest.  How we make things better for ourselves and our loved ones.

Most communities don’t develop as expressions of human kindness and generosity.  They don’t build around some desire to ‘place make’. Or around shared public statements of values, intent and belief.  Congregations maybe.  And cults.   But not real, diverse, vibrant communities.  There are plenty of ‘place making consultancies’ that tell us otherwise, and politicians who really value compliance over powerful communities.  But real communities (as opposed to planners confections) develop as a social response to a multiplicity of self-interests being negotiated.

Real communities develop because they help their members to live the kind of lives that they want to lead.  They are a human evolutionary response to attaining a competitive edge. To help us survive and then with good fortune, thrive. Community helps members to explore their potential and develop their lives as they would wish.

So the starting point for the process of community building is not finding more time to help others (laudable though this is) or philanthropy or some demonstration of social responsibility.  It is a thorough understanding of self interest; of the kind of life you wish to lead and the potential that you wish to develop.  As this becomes clear so to will those with whom you have to make common cause, with whom you have to co-operate and perhaps compete.

And as you start to understand that your self interest can only be met in relationship with others, and they understand the same then the development of vibrant and real community, as opposed to some Orwellian fiction that ‘shapes character to that chosen by the electorate’.

Which is why I advocate, as the starting point for community development, not community organisers, but community coaches, who help people to clarify their own self interest and to build their power.  Which they nearly always do by building their networks and relationships.  And once we have a critical mass of people pursuing their self interest with power and compassion through constructive engagement and association, lo and behold, we have a community with oomph, with enterprise.  We have ‘Big Society’.

Simples.