This week in Wales there was an international conference sponsored by the International Mental Health Collaboration Network (IMHCN) and the International Centre for Recovery Action in Practice, Education and Research (ICRA). It took place at the National Botanical Gardens in south west Wales on 20 and 21 June.

It was a crowded agenda with a lot of ground to cover, from local practices in Wales through to presentations from Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Malaysia, Brazil and most harrowing from Serbia with images of mental hospital inmates being tied down with sheets last year. Some good practice was found in parts of England, notably in Plymouth.

There is too much detail from such a conference to cover in a blog post. Perhaps my key observation is that, at last, the various professional bodies are beginning to try and come to terms with the idea of recovery, an idea which has come from people who have experienced mental suffering. The danger now, as discussed at the conference, was that the mental health professions will try and systematise recovery and in doing so will suck the life forces out of it, killing the bits that work.

Interestingly, a common theme from around the world was how powerful it was when employment was included in a recovery journey.

There is a new LinkedIn group for IMHCN for those interested in joining.

The link below is a 20 page brochure with the conference agenda and speakers details.

Link – http://www.icra-wholelife.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Conference-booklet-Final-Final-LAST-WITH-LOGO.pdf

The BBC news website reports on findings from the Estates Gazette that UK planning permissions for large retail schemes are still favouring out-of-town areas as opposed to High Streets. An example is given of the Portas Pilot town of Margate, where it seems policy is pulling in two directions with a recent approval for an out-of-town Tesco store despite Portas’ work to reinvigorate Margate High Street. Another example is given of tension between ministers as shown in correspondence between them on possible developments on green field sites.

Has the planning system lost its way?

Essentially, it is meant to be a fair and just way of deciding between competing interests, without fear or favour. However, in recent years it has become seen predominantly as a system of entitlement for land owners to increase the value of their holdings (favour). Planning policy has been surrendered to become a fight between teams of expensive lawyers, and councillors are in danger of being intimidated by the costs of appeals and threats of damages (fear).

Planning policy has also become seen as essentially a local concern only, with national decisions restricted to major infrastructure decisions such as nuclear waste sites.

I suggest that we need our national decisions to decide on regional balances. For examples, promoting research and development sites north of Cambridge; promoting green fuel production in declining industrial areas; promoting existing airport usage not just in the South East; promoting public transport ahead of new roads even in corridors of congestion; and making consumer charging compulsory for car parking spaces in new out-of-town developments, then phased in for existing out-of-town schemes. Otherwise the Greater South East of England will continue to pull away from the rest of the UK.

Then, within this balanced national and regional framework, local planning committees can frame their decisions on particular developments. Additional local planning powers are also needed, such as limiting the number of arcades and betting shops, payday loan shops, and new powers to reconfigure High Streets to become fully functioning neighbourhood centres and not just retail centres.

National and regional planning policy needs to move on from 2010 and its knee jerk hatred of regional housing targets and regional development agencies.

Link:
Town centres ‘missing out on new retail development’ – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23010313

Chris Giles, writing in the Financial Times today, makes very good points on the UK government’s Help to Buy scheme. This programmes starts in January 2014 for three years, using £130bn to guarantee 20% of new mortgages. It was announced in the March 2013 Budget and is already showing an impact in rising house prices in and around London. The Governor of the Bank of England has criticised this programme as unsustainable and bubble-making.

Reported elsewhere was the delight within HM Treasury when the Office of National Statistics ruled that the £130bn was private debt, not public debt, even though the government are on the hook for any losses.

A key point made in the article is that this programme redistributes wealth from new buyers to existing owners.

Another key point would be to question the cuts in Housing Benefit (bedroom tax, weekly cap, etc) while pumping £130bn into the mortgage market in the run up to the next general election.

Source: FT, 25/26 May, p13.

Ian Brown, of the Stone Roses, has said that “Manchester has everything but a beach”. Some would add that it misses a large central park, unlike say London and its grand Royal Parks.

A small group of guerrilla park-makers in Manchester, ParkStarter, is asking whether every open space needs to be covered in black top and turned into a car park. The current classic example of this type of use is the site of the former BBC studios on Oxford Road. The group plans to start somewhere in the Northern Quarter in Manchester.

Previously the only way forward would be for the local authority to buy the land, or have it donated, and to find a capital source to make the site work as a park, and find a revenue source to keep it functioning. With the massive cuts in UK local government finance, especially in the northern cities, this option isn’t working at the moment.

However, some parts of the private sector property market appreciate the importance of pop-up shops (for profit) and meanwhile shops (not for profit). Maybe there is a parallel here for pop-up parks?

Links:http://parkstarter.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Manchester

http://www.meanwhile.org.uk/news/news-item-7

I’ve written previously on the good work being done at the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester by people such as Professor Kevin Anderson.

Recently he gave a presentation to a committee of councillors at Manchester City Council on different models of growth, and in particular on the environmental impacts of good and of bad growth models.

His talk emphasised that social goods (such as jobs, welfare, food, literacy, housing, transport, civil society) can be increased without also having to have people working long hours and emitting ever-more amounts of greenhouse gases which cause climate change. Youth unemployment should be addressed by large-scale programmes to retrofit homes for better energy efficiency, and by low-carbon transport works.

Manchester City Council are reported to have received this presentation enthusiastically, and agreed to incorporate environmental indicators in the city’s overall Dashboard.

Link:
http://steadystatemanchester.net/2013/05/22/food-and-green-index-manchester-council-to-look-into-ssm-recommendations/

The previous UK government’s programme, Building Schools for the Future, was replaced by the current government with their new approach, relying much more on direct private investment by routes outside the Private Finance Initiative, as well as some funds through the revised method of PFI known as PF2.

However, the BBC reports today that the government minister has conceded there is not enough funding for all of the schools selected for new buildings, with a shortfall of over 100 schools where no money is left. Recent similar reports by the BBC were denied.

Currently the only prospect of funding for these schools will possibly be in a few years time, and relies on other departments of government giving up some of their future capital budget to favour the Department of Education instead.

All of which bodes badly for pupils trying to learn in dilapidated schools in the years ahead, and for the UK construction industry which is still deeply in recession.

More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22483690

The Local Government Association has warned today of the likely effects of announced cuts up to 2016 in non-statutory services such as museums, as well trimming mainstream budgets such as reduced street lighting after midnight.

The government, in response, has dismissed the claims as alarmist and said that local government should become more efficient, with better procurement given as an example. Really.

A bolder response by the government would be to put its money where its mouth has been on Localism. What the LGA are calling for is an end to ring-fenced budgets from central government to local government, from Whitehall to Town Hall. This is because the bulk of local government spending is in the two areas of education and social care. Councils are a people business through-and-through. But the Department of Health runs social care, and the Department of Education runs schools, and both treat local authorities merely as their local agents.

This enforced local compartmentalism causes difficulties, inefficiencies, and at times outright failures. How can troubled families be genuinely helped if some departments in Whitehall instruct ‘their’ funds not to engage?

What today’s response sadly shows is that, despite talk of Localism, the weak position of local government generally is reflected in Whitehall with the weakness of its sponsoring department for communities and local government. Sadly DCLG hasn’t the political power it needs to face down Health, Education, nor the Home Office on unpicking their ring-fenced budgets.

Link:
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22454459

“… if Miliband needs a golden policy key, housebuilding looks set to be it. Build a million homes to cut housing benefit waste, employ hundreds of thousands, create apprenticeships, breathe life into the real economy, stop house price bubbles, replace those right-to-buy social homes. Building is not just good policy, but the best symbol for optimism. Bookies don’t like to lose: a Labour majority is their strong favourite, so Labour should cheer up.”

http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/30/labour-golden-policy-build-optimist

The Guardian newspaper (24 April) includes a disturbing report on the dramatic decline in trust of the EU by its residents. The six largest countries in the EU include 350m of the 500m EU population, and now in all but Poland more people distrust than trust the EU. In Spain the level of distrust has dramatically grown from 23% in 2007 to 72% in 2012.

A key extract is:

” ‘ The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off,’ said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the ECFR’s Madrid office. ‘Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is conducted.’ EU leaders are aware of the problem, [but are] utterly at odds over what to do about it …”

ECFR is a thinktank, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and they analysed data produced by Eurobarometer, the EU’s official polling organisation.

This loss of trust is not confined to the EU, similar great losses are found in trust of national politics, of banks, and of international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.

But trust of the EU has held up the most in Poland and it is no coincidence that their country has received the largest injection of EU funds in recent years to develop their economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1989 we saw the crisis in communism, but fewer politicians have yet acknowledged that in 2007 we saw a crisis in capitalism.

After World War 2 it was realised that Europe’s devastated economy needed to be rebuilt, to avoid repeating the chaos and decline into political extremism that had followed the mis-managed political and economic arrangements after World War 1.

The Marshall Plan was the lesson we seem to have forgotten, or some political interests have chosen to ignore.

One hundred years later the people of Europe feel this mis-management is being repeated and there is little trust left.

Link:
http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/24/trust-eu-falls-record-low

Regular readers of the blog (!) will know that I am not News International’s greatest fan. However, The Times’ campaign for safer cycling investments in the UK, Cities Fit for Cycling, is one I fully welcome.

In my young days, being hit twice myself by lorries while cycling (Ardwick and Hendon) and knowing people who have died while cycling, this is very real to me. The injuries a year ago to their journalist, Mary Bowers, is a stark reminder of the dangers involved.

We do not have to rehearse all the arguments here – the all-party report published by Parliament today covers all the bases.

My contribution to the debate is to ask the Highways Agency what plans they have to make cycling in the UK as safe and as commonplace as in places such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen? They have the money. We saw the massive enlargement of the M60 between junctions 6 and 8, which is now surely a wider road than are some suburbs in Luxembourg. And more money is set to flow soon on the M60 further west.

Improving cycling infrastructure will always be gradual, a process of joining the dots so that individual improvements grow into a network. London Underground have taken this process to adapting their stations for access by disabled people. It has been going some years now and the fruit is ripening.

Of course, local authorities have a role on so-called minor roads as well as the Highways Agency for the major routes. A start would be to politically and financially interconnect LAs with the HA as much as the roads they invest in are interconnected.

One of the times I was hit by a lorry, I went forwards, and my bike went backwards under the lorry. It was a straight road, early morning, dry, not near a junction. The driver had a child in the cab. He jumped down and said to me, “you are lucky I have air brakes”.

We need a better policy than luck.