In his book, The Tyranny of Metrics (2018), Jerry Muller offers a critical analysis of the overuse of KPIs across a range of public and commercial sectors. Chapter 1 gives a summary of the this analysis and the book as a whole covers examples from policing, healthcare and transportation; as well as commercial examples of the misuse of KPIs.

Perhaps the obvious conclusion is that an obsession with KPIs crowds out any qualitative evidence of the positive and maybe negative impacts of a project, process or intervention.

But equally important is that KPIs-only has a feedback on which types of people become to be seen as effective managers, and it isn’t a good story. Muller shows that relying on KPIs alone to determine effectiveness tends to drive out managers who show creativity and talent, and promotes unhealthy gaming behaviours instead.

He doesn’t say that KPIs have no place at all, but they are not the predominant sign of excellence or effectiveness.

The idea of moral injury is perhaps best known in the health sector, naming the longterm stress that impacts on dedicated staff who are unable to respond to the distress of people they meet because of a poverty of resources.

But we are now seeing moral injury across many public services:
– schools arranging counselling for teachers no longer able to refer vulnerable children to social services;
– police officers attending serious incidents involving people and addresses where warning signs have previously had to be skipped over;
– housing officers unable to find a home anywhere for a family, even with young children.

Some right-wing politicians talk about the merits of the small state. This is usually linked to lectures about productivity in the public sector.

Productivity here isn’t what it usually means – companies buying the latest equipment so that people can do their best work – instead of investment these politicians are talking in code about fewer staff and lower wages.

In economics, reducing the revenue available, not increasing the capital invested. All to make room for tax cuts for wealthier people.

Where does this road lead to? I’d suggest it leads to burnout, followed by workforce exodus, leading to service collapse, and usually a public scandal but blaming an individual (usually a female manager, especially in the tabloids) instead of questioning the paymasters.

As with the breakthrough scandal of the Post Office, we paradoxically need more public scandals to save public services.

The conflicted world of medical and social care:

It seems the use of “PA” for Personal Assistant may become a source of confusion as medics are increasingly using PA now for Physician Associate, for example in social media posts.

Interestingly, office workplaces have already started to use “EA” and Executive Assistant instead of PA to avoid confusion in recruiting staff.

I guess the pressure will be to rename PAs as Care Assistants; probably accompanied by pressure to align CAs with Health Care Assistants, HCAs in hospitals. Or maybe SCAs, Social Care Assistants, as a parallel career to HCAs.

Disabled people with Personal Health Budgets are already seeing their PAs being tasked as if they were community-based HCAs, with all the medicalisation that implies.

Thanks to an academic colleague who prompted me to finalise a long-standing draft, I’ve prepared this booklet of Lorraine Gradwell’s campaigning t-shirts. I hope people find it useful.

EXTRACT, full report below:

Looking at this from Manchester, the announcement by the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancelling the HS2 programme north of Birmingham had echoes of the previous ‘pausing’ of the Regional Eurostar services from Manchester to Paris in 1999 to accommodate the rail privatisations by John Major started in 1993.

Before HS2 became a programme, around 2007 I started working on a pro bono rail regeneration project to show how trains could run between Manchester and Paris. In 2012 the detailed report was first published showing it was possible. 

But UK rail decisions are a tough mix of complex engineering and raw politics. 

The 15-year cross-party national consensus on a major project such as HS2 is maybe a bigger loss to the UK. Ever optimistic, this 2nd edition of the report is an attempt to keep the flame alive for a timely improvement in the rail connectivity of Manchester; and to provide a model for cities in the north and south-west of England, and in Scotland and Wales, just as Regional Eurostar did.

This report shows just one solution. It isn’t the only one, and good project management always requires adjustment as the conditions change, in order to continue to achieve the original goals. Therefore I haven’t updated 40 pages of technical details from 2012 – the point is that the case is shown to be viable, and a full professional team will certainly find a better mix of engineering than this for the 2020s.

But all this begs the question, is the project politically viable?

In writing this report I consulted widely with politicians, with the commercial directors of train operating companies, and with rail experts while writing the report. Politically, the support was always warmer the further north I went.

By contrast, there was genuinely warm and help both north and south from within the industry itself. Even from some of the companies who would be facing new competition. If it is invidious to name just one person, I want to record here that John Nelson was very kind to this project and he made time to come to lunch in Manchester to cover the details. 

The two main strategic changes since the first edition are the growing popularity and frequency of night trains between the major cities on continental Europe, and the 2021 Williams Review in the UK which effectively ended the franchise model of privatisation and replaced it with paying for arms-length management.

For discussion of options involving Birmingham, please see pages 8, 24, 27, 35 and 37 of the full report on this website (free).

If I have one observation to share here it is that the ‘business case’ mantra of
HM Treasury has become just politics pretending to be maths. 

And if I have one hope to share from this project it is that some seeds do grow. I said at the top that the Regional Eurostar project was just ‘paused’ so I like to think there is a possibility above 0% that it can still be delivered.

For current contextual details, the page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Eurostar – provides a fair account with credible sources.

This is the full report, 44 pages:

As I write there is an amusement park dedicated to funding in Heaton Park in Manchester. For my friends in the south think Hampstead Heath but better. 

Funder Park, to give the experience its proper name, has a number of thrilling experiences such as Cliffhanger (it really does!).

So, what other treats might we expect to find? Some suggestions are:

Ghost Train: travel through the darkness in search of the promised phantom replacement funding for EU grants.

Waltzer: spin your head round and round while funders change the grant conditions midway.

Carousel: sit in the same place while appearing to move forward, only to finish exactly where you started.

Coconut Shy: try to hit all the criteria off their hoops to win a prize, but too late notice you can only throw table tennis balls.

Hall of Mirrors: try to navigate a path through all the distortions required to secure funding without laughing uncontrollably at the ridiculous nature of the task. 

Roller Coaster: try to hold on to your stomach, and breakfast, while parroting the ridiculous dogma that official bodies insist on seeing in bids. 

Whack-a-Mole: need I say more? 

Welcome to the pleasure dome!

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that there should be equal and non-discriminatory access to adequate housing.

Many disabled and older people – particularly those who use wheelchairs – cannot find a home that suits them. It is estimated that there are 14.6 million disabled people in the UK: 22% of the population. Wheelchairs are used by around 1.2 million people.

The 2016 English Housing Survey calculated that only 7% of homes are accessible.

Only 32% of planning authorities surveyed in 2018 had committed to building even a proportion of accessible housing, and only 18% to a proportion of housing built to Category 3 standard, Building Regulation M4(3).

The London and Liverpool Plans (best in class) require those authorities to ensure that 100% of new homes meet at least M4(2), Category 2 standard, with 10% at Category 3.

In July 2022 the government announced it would make Category 2 the national minimum standard for nearly all new homes.

We need to build more accessible homes and more homes accessible for wheelchair users.

We need to enforce policies in Local Plans that cover both social and private housing.

As a minimum, every new home should be suitable for disabled or older people to move into or to age in place, i.e. M4(2) standard.

• The government should commit to M4(2) as standard for all new housing.

• Local plans should be required to build 10% of new homes, social and private, to Category 3 standard.

For what its worth, some thoughts on AI from someone who did a computing degree followed by a humanities masters …

Summary: after the noise and clickbait has faded, the implications for creative content makers will be ‘a flight to quality’ where brands or names will earn value by their reputations – hard won and easily lost.

My laypersons sense of AI in terms of creative content is that AI will become like ‘the channel five of the internet’ – low common denominator, time-filling, bland, forgettable. Cheap brands will use AI to make buckets of unremarkable stuff. Ask ChatGPT to write a treatment for a programme on Benny Hill – it won’t exactly inspire the awards panel.

Where AI comes into its own will be in so-called narrow applications: better speech recognition, better scans of medical images, better organising of large amounts of raw data without having to program a database. It’s been around longer than the public realise, for example in the handwriting recognition of historic documents for USA family history websites, still commercially sensitive.

And I think it will be the “new narrow” applications in the next few years that will surprise us most – there are already researchers working on AI for court hearings and decisions with the promise of no discrimination in sentencing; and on medical triage on phones before you see a GP, or in many countries, an advanced nurse with prescribing powers. Imagine uploading every scrap of paper from the Stephen Lawrence police files, and the AI summarising the weaknesses and gaps, and then for other cases in real time directing the police investigation. “AI SIO” to coin a phrase. Not impossible, AI is already passing the New York Bar Exam with consistent 80+% marks.

Or imagine a professional video editing suite where one written instruction can “remove the traffic noise from the left audio track, leave it in the right” or “add falling rain to the window pane in scene 7”.

But for now, if you just ask the internet how many types of AI are there, you will discover that there are 3, 4, 5, 7 or 9. (If it wasn’t for the ‘4’ and ‘9’ I would suspect a pattern based on prime numbers.)

Final policy point: the degree to which quality brands can protect their content from adulteration may determine their prospects. This isn’t quite the same as protecting their content from being scraped into an AI grinder. Like a hologram on a banknote to protect against forgery, it will be the digital hologram on quality content that protects value. For my money this will be done using blockchain tech as a protector of the provenance of premium content. Even of digital currencies are just a 2020s bubble-scam the underlying tech is sound.

The interesting question is which brand will become the guarantor of provenance – the creative Bank of England equivalent which will sit behind all the retail brands? As a publisher I buy unique ISBNs for ‘my’ books by the dozen, I register the details with an international database as each book emerges into the world, and Google Books etc all use this database to find fraud.

TB

There is a view that the disabled people’s movement (DPM) in Britain learnt much of its principles in the 1960s from the Black people’s civil rights movement in the USA. The difficulty we have is in finding any evidence to support this theory. To be fair, there is little surviving evidence of the DPM in the 1960s in the archives or in textbooks, so it might have been an influence.

But the evidence that does survive from the disabled people’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s does show direct links with and learning from the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The AAM was the name of a strong and progressive formal organisation of radical anti-racists, people of colour and allies, based in London.

An explanation of the focus in Britain on the AAM rather that the USA civil rights movement is perhaps best explained by the history of British colonialism, the British Empire.

Starting in the 1920s with Egypt and Guyana, by the 1950s the movements for national independence of colonised countries was unstoppable, characterised by the ‘winds of change’ speech. India and Pakistan had won their independence in the 1940s, and countries in East Africa were following – Kenya and Uganda for example – but Rhodesia and South Africa were examples of White minority rule holding out against democracy and Black majority rule. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe on liberation, but South Africa had left the British Empire following the earlier Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and the white minority held out the longest in resisting democracy, creating its racist Apartheid regime of oppression.

Looking at the materials that survive from the disabled people’s movement in the 1960s, we can consider the following:

1. In Paul Hunt’s journal from 1962 much of his interest is in the non-violent civil disobedience of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). This is the era of the Cuban missiles crisis, of the Aldermaston marches and mass rallies and arrests in Trafalgar Square. His journal does not explicitly mention the Black people’s civil rights movement.

2. In the records from the 1960s of the National Campaign for the Young Chronic Sick (NCYCS) is Mike Gerrard, an activist on its executive committee and also active on the executive committee of the AAM. The AAM archive is at the Bodleian Library in Oxford (also online) which includes a transcribed interview where he also talks briefly about NCYCS.

3. In the 1970s one of the founders of UPIAS (Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation) was Vic Finkelstein, a disabled man who was a political refugee from South Africa, where he had been imprisoned in the 1960s for helping Black people resist the apartheid regime. When he fled to London he was involved in the AAM first and said it was a few years later that he started to develop his political thinking around disability politics. He was at the centre of the early discussions that led to the social model of disability. He had previously been in Britain for a year in the 1960s, staying at Stoke Mandeville hospital for treatment for the first year after he broke his neck.

4. The AAM was particularly active in organising boycotts and disrupting South African sports teams that tried to play in Britain. This was mostly about rugby and cricket matches, but it also included disabled people’s sports. In particular was the demonstration by disabled people outside the Stoke Mandeville international games in 1983, and the high-profile boycott of the event by radical disabled athletes including Bernard Leach, a swimmer from the radical Manchester Disabled Athletes sports club, which made the national newspapers. The surviving documents of this event credit the work of the AAM Health Committee in helping organise and publicise the protests.

Thus, from a fragile base of evidence which needs to be further researched, the early findings show links between the disabled people’s movement and the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s struggle, as a stronger research narrative than links to the Black people’s civil rights movement in the USA.

Historical stories can be fragile. I suspect that if history had a smell, it would be popcorn. Much of our sense of our many pasts, our various heritages, and from these our shared stories of who we are, comes not from books but from Hollywood. And Hollywood narratives are not a good guide to the radical British histories.

Some further reading:

https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/library/finkelstein-Reflections-on-the-Social-Model-of-Disability.pdf

https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/library/finkelstein-presentn.pdf

https://tonybaldwinson.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/1983-05-sport-disabled-people-and-the-fight-against-apartheid-may-1983.pdf

Two main topics for this month’s update:

A. Disabled people in Ukraine

B. An exhibition of the history of GAD in Greenwich, London

A. Ukraine and Disabled People

Currently the European Disability Forum (EDF) is convening an online meeting each Thursday to discuss what can be done to help disabled people in Ukraine. These meetings are open to any EDF member organisation or individual members, and where recently only one person present was from the UK.

EDF is not the only organisation to respond on this issue, but it does have useful connections and suggestions. Within the UK the main coordination is by DEC, the Disasters Emergency Committee.

Currently the best information on the context is:

1. There are *at least* 40,000 disabled people in Ukraine living in institutions, some people feel the number will turn out to be "much higher".

2. There are many children in Ukraine living in orphanages, and many are expected to be disabled children.

3. Medical supplies and medical volunteers are in short supply, being sent forward from institutions to the combat areas for casualties, plus shortages with general medical supplies and difficulties getting them into the country at all.

4. Hungary has sent in some accessible mini-coaches, each one for around 8 disabled passengers, to help with ferrying evacuations.

5. Sending money remains a general priority.

6. No information yet on disability organisations in Poland and the strains on them receiving displaced disabled people from Ukraine.

NEXT MEETING: Ukraine War and Work of the UN agencies

EDF 28 April, 12 – 1:30 CET (11am – 12.30pm UK time)

"Following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the European Disability Forum (EDF) is hosting a sequence of short webinars about specific topics relevant to the war and their impact on persons with disabilities. These meetings are for EDF members. The fourth meeting will focus on “the work of the UN agencies”.

Speakers from various agencies (OHCHR, UNICEF, PRPD and IOM) will present their work in Ukraine. It will be an opportunity to ask questions, learn more about their coordination mechanisms and exchange contact information."

B. Greenwich Association of Disabled People – GAD, and its sister org Metro.

I was honoured to be invited to the recent launch of a Metro-GAD exhibition on the history of GAD, and the a PDF file is available with a series of rough photographs of the exhibit panels, photos, t-shirts and objects on display.

It is a modest exhibition, being in the corridor of their offices, with photos, panels, t-shirts etc hung on the wall plus a few objects on display. Some people will recognise the photo of Brenda Hilditch, and the work of Alison Blake, both of this parish.

Three posters were of particular interest – these posters are from a project Sue Elsegood, Steve Gray and April Bird were involved in 1998 – 2001. There is also a fourth poster but there wasn’t room to include it. The project was with the Brook Advisory organisation, specific to London, though for example the mum and daughter who agreed to be photographed were living in Wales at the time.

The building is opposite the Woolwich Arsenal bus and train station in south London, but as a working office with security doors people are asked to contact beforehand if planning to visit the exhibition.

Cheers all

Tony

***

SUPPLEMENT ONE:

Dear all,

Headline is: an estimated 100,000 disabled children living in institutions in Ukraine; plus an unknown number of disabled adults.

Details: this is an update on the Research Bulletin two days ago, based on messages received since then, with thanks:

1. An additional meeting on Disabled Children in Ukraine, Thurs 5 May (details below). “It is rather astonishing that there are supposed to be 100,000 disabled children [living] in institutions in the Ukraine before the war! Goodness knows where they are now and what shape they are in?”

2. “The organisation from Hungary is saying they transport people in their accessible vans, and then take them to institutions in Hungary and also neighbouring countries. This is at the instruction of the Government. [We asked if] there’s any way people could be taken to Scandinavia. But [name] just wrote that people are [being] placed in nursing homes even in Sweden!”

3. “On the number of people in institutions, there is … no [exact] number for adults, but there are many, many institutions [in Ukraine]. Also, children graduate from children’s institutions into adult ones. … most [disability] organisations are parent [-led] ones and [not DPOs].

***

SUPPLEMENT TWO:

Some further information on disabled children and adults in and leaving Ukraine:

Bear in mind this is second-hand reporting, and thanks to my contacts.

The main focus for international agencies is on unaccompanied children, including unaccompanied disabled children.

From reports in Poland, around 1 in 8 displaced persons are disabled people (all ages). This very probably includes frail elderly people.

The effort is on trying to build international standards, so there can be consistency and portability for displaced disabled people (ie adults and children) as they move between countries.

Slovakia has a good system for their child protection services knowing children’s needs, and this may be replicated in nearby countries. By contrast, in Ukraine reportedly only 1% of disabled children were registered with the authorities.

Many of the displaced disabled people (all ages) are moving currently into Germany and Poland.

As the war started, a Refugee Response Plan was developed in March 2022 by various international agencies, with a "small chapter" on disabled refugees.

"BLUE DOT" Hubs

There are (it seems from reports) 19 BLUE DOT or hub locations currently, and a total of 31 is planned for, where displaced people can get information, support and services. These include assessment and referral, mental health support, legal aid, counselling, restoring family links, child and family-friendly spaces.

There are also some LIGHT BLUE DOT hubs planned which will have a smaller number of services, and work is underway to develop a DIGITAL BLUE DOT version.

From experience so far in Poland, about 1 in 8 of the displaced people passing through and registering with their Blue Dots hubs are disabled people (all ages).

Disabled people are being prioritised for air transport evacuation from Moldova to other EU countries, so far about 1,000 disabled people.

In terms of disabled people’s needs and common standards, the Blue Dot hubs are using the "Washington Group Questions" as their common system to describe the needs of disabled people, on the basis that every country can make use this, avoiding the use of conflicting local schemes as disabled people move between countries.

The focus of some of the UN agencies is try to sustain the support services in-country within Ukraine for the disabled people who still live there, and for those who plan to return. This is starting with the priority on the basic needs of people in institutions. "Emergency clusters" are also planned, details are not known.

Neighbouring countries are also supporting additional services to document violations, including GBV (gender-based violence), counter-trafficking and child protection.

***

Also a frank note from me based on some emails seen between officials – it seems the international agencies are not expected much practical help from the UK agencies, but in return the UK government is being fully expected to pay significant funds in aid to international agencies to provide this support.

TB