Social mobility has stopped in its tracks, and most fair-minded people connect increases in inequality with decreases in social mobility. A report due to be given to Parliament this Thursday is said to warn that today’s children will be a generation that fares worse than their parents. There is a perfect storm of graduate debt, unemployment, and unaffordable housing. Once again, you will need rich parents to give you a good start in life.

One of the best starts in life is a good education.

It may seem a cliche that my generation was often the first to go to university. But for me it was true, and it was keenly felt by my parents and grandparents.

My mother’s father was one of eleven children. In the early 1910s he was offered a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School but his family were too poor to accept it. He left school at 13. In the 1930s he was unemployed and he had the offer of work as a trainee signalman at Preston, and apparently he loved the railways, but the offer was withdrawn by the employers because of the General Strike. When my mother was two years old he and the family moved from Lancashire to Essex to find various jobs, eventually as a baker.

My mother’s mother returned to her work in 1932 on four looms in a cotton mill ten days after giving birth to my mother. Her life was the church and as a volunteer in the Red Cross, long before the NHS.

My mother, a reporter for a local paper in Essex, was offered a trainee job on Fleet Street in the mid 1950s but the family could not afford to support both her and her older sister’s teacher training course.

My father’s father was a steel engineer who tested the quality of welds. He died young of throat cancer after someone stole the lead casing of the radioactive source used to X-ray welds. He had to drive it unprotected back to a factory and died shortly afterwards. Another relative in my father’s family died at sea on a trawler when the net’s ropes swung across, cutting into him like scissors against the side of the ship.

My father’s mother survived well, becoming active in the then Liberal Party in Newcastle and writing conference motions well into the 1980s, of which the one on cruise missiles ‘not on our soil’ was her proudest.

Neither of my parents and none of my grandparents went to university, and some barely had a school education. Libraries probably taught them more than schools.

To say they were pleased to see me get a place at university really doesn’t begin to explain how they felt. I had a grant. I could claim social security benefits during the Christmas and Easter breaks. I could find good jobs in the Summer break. But only up to 1980 when unemployment rose again and I had to pursue my interests as a volunteer on benefits for some years until a job came along.

So, when I read well-fed right-wing commentators and politicians decrying the 1960s and the 1970s I know what they are really scared of – my family being given a proper education, and frankly of people like us having a chance at getting their better-paid and comfortable jobs.

Link:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/12/middle-class-young-people-future-worse-parents

This blog post asks whether there is a win-win in ERDF projects using “fresh eyes” to save money by avoiding penalties. Previously these QA checks were done mostly in-house, but in the current jobs climate they may need to be re-invented.

Declaration: I am currently contracted to DCLG, and all comments here are strictly my personal thoughts only.

It is in the public domain that all types of EU budgets, including ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), have a target rate for financial irregularities set for them that is ideally below 2% and certainly expected to be below 5%. Also publicised is that there are three types of mistake, each with increasing consequences, and these are: errors, corrections, and irregularities.

An error can be remedied without penalty, but needs to be done by the project and early on in the process of claiming funds.

A correction is where time has run out to remedy a mistake as an error, or it is systemic, so there is a financial cost to the project.

An irregularity is the most severe form of mistake, usually found at audit rather than by the project, and this incurs the largest penalties, up to 100%.

People familiar with ERDF, and especially those people who keep up with the details, will know that the processes for claiming funds have recently become more involved. There is now a new 10% check of all the supporting documents. These new checks are mostly in the hope of changing the culture (where necessary) within projects so that mistakes are picked up at an early stage (as errors) before they can become irregularities.

However, some project cultures do not perceive this new 10% check as an opportunity to QA (quality assure) the other 90% of their claims, but rather as an additional item of bureaucracy. To some extent, again in my personal opinion, this is reinforced by public sector organisations generally having a depleted back-office capacity.

But in fairness it also has to be said that some organisational cultures have considered themselves, speaking bluntly, as somehow above and immune from the grubby details, even when they had more staff than now.

Now, while we are being fair, ERDF is not the easiest fund to access that the world has ever devised, and no-one in ERDF is in a position to claim perfection, whether we are in Brussels, London or Lower Pudlington on the Marsh. But if perfection isn’t possible, nevertheless substantial improvements certainly are possible and necessary.

I have recently started writing some fiction, just out of interest as both my parents were writers, and my first book is around 80,000 words. And no, this isn’t a joke about bidding… One lesson I have come across for new writers from experienced people such as senior publishers, and it is given time and again, is to always have a Copy Editor review your work. Even the best authors have them, and need them. Much lower down the food chain, I found a glass of orange juice of mine had turned into a cup of coffee on the next page. There are bound to be more mistakes like this which I just cannot see. Missing commas. Repeated phases repeatedly.

Copy editing is also an art form in diplomacy, how to nicely let someone know their mistakes, which is mostly saying that, actually, everyone makes them.

So, at the level of each project we have a choice. We can either (a) moan and complain about EU funding and its lower level of tolerance for mistakes than we find in UK funds, or (b) we can take up arms and rebuild into the processes of many projects a respectful, professional, knowledgable QA role.

Clearly I favour the latter, and the scope should start with current and recent claims, then moving on to prepare all the project files in readiness for any full audit. Perhaps if I was more selfish I might instead favour the former – sit back and complain – creating more work for auditors!

Manchester City Council is consulting on various ideas for the regeneration of the neighbourhood around Manchester Piccadilly rail station. Two large documents can be downloaded at www.manchester.gov.uk/hs2piccadillyconsultation and responses are asked for by 8 November 2013.

In the previous post I looked at the Mayfield area to the south side and its Strategic Regeneration Framework. In this post I cover the HS2 proposals to the north side of the station.

So now, to the HS2 proposals.

Overall the 76 page of options and proposals gives a very thorough and thoughtful coverage of the key issues. The HS2 addition of four new platforms to the existing rail station is handled well. A key challenge is that international high-speed trains have a standard length of 400m, a quarter of a mile long, whereas the longest platform at the station currently is ‘only’ around 240m long. This extra length is mainly resolved by bringing the four new platforms much closer to London Road, demolishing Gateway House in the process.

I hesitate to add a ‘however’ in the current febrile political climate regarding HS2. Like any long-term area regeneration programme it is essential to obtain a cross-party consensus, and HS2 is a regeneration programme with 20 years ahead of it. But we cannot allow the ‘antis’ to close down debate and discussion, though of course we must be careful not to feed their machine.

So, in strong support of HS2, I would emphasise two design points which I feel need further attention.

Firstly, HS2 track will carry national and international trains. Absolute care must be taken to comply 100% with UK Border policy requirements, which requires total border control at the station, not later on the train. Therefore, the proposals for an open flow between the existing platforms and the new HS2 platforms, however desirable, is substantially forbidden. One of the reasons that the Regional Eurostar service failed in the 1990s, even though millions of pounds had been invested, is that wrong assumptions were made at a very high level in the project team about on-train border control being possible, when it was never going to be allowed. I have some more details if needed.

The pattern of service, particularly in the early years, may well be one where departures to London are mostly during the day, and international departures via the Channel Tunnel are mostly at the ‘shoulder’ times of early morning and late evening. It may be that one or two of the four HS2 platforms become placed behind a secure glass wall (as at St Pancras) but this should be integral to the design. Segregated passenger handling will also be required, with police and HMRC as well as UK Border Agency facilities.

Secondly, the proposed design for the new HS2 platforms has them placed on a raised level with an undercroft to allow for permeability and active frontages. One design option is to enlarge and relocate the existing Metrolink stop into this new undercroft. This undercroft should be built carefully in order for clear paths for another four HS2 platforms to be easily added at a future date below the first four on the raised level, with interim uses meantime. To avoid extra cost and disruption the Metrolink stop should be enhanced underneath the main station, basically staying roughly where it is now. Active frontages can be maintained, but clearly there are implications for permeability, and design solutions for this would be welcome now.

It is important to future-proof transport infrastructure as much as possible. When the M25 was built it was politically necessary to build it as three lanes wide in each direction. But the engineers built the bridges across the new M25 wider than strictly necessary, enough to span four lanes and a hard shoulder in each direction, saving on costs and disruption when the inevitable widening happened a few years later. The same for HS2 here would be sensible.

Manchester City Council is consulting on various ideas for the regeneration of the neighbourhood around Manchester Piccadilly rail station. Two large documents can be downloaded at www.manchester.gov.uk/hs2piccadillyconsultation and responses are asked for by 8 November 2013.

This is mine, with some background first.

The proposals are in two parts: the Mayfield area to the south and the HS2 area to the north. The Mayfield area is set to change first, not least because of Network Rail’s imminent plans to add two extra platforms to the station on the south side, and the impact that change will have on the surrounding area. HS2 will come later, on the north side, but has to dovetail in.

So, to the Mayfield proposal. It is an update on a previous plan from 2010, and towards the end of the document there are, to my mind, the most thoughtful elements. Some of the early pages contain statements that are somewhat ‘any-place’. Does anyone still expect “mixed retail and leisure” will make a scheme viable in the near future? Later on, as I say, there is a sense that market conditions will be very challenging, along with some lighter design touches to what earlier appears to be some heavily massed buildings. The urban park approach is to be highly welcomed, but not one in permanent shade.

The proposals rightly emphasise in the proximity of the train station as an asset for any new offices nearby. But this proximity is also an asset in the evenings. People can meet up, talk or socialise to around 9.30pm, then catch a train over the road and be tucked up safely in bed up to 50 miles away early enough for a ‘school night’.

A niche music quarter

No-one wants a city quarter that just displaces activity from other quarters. So, how about a niche quarter for music? Music today does not require the bespoke complex studios of a few years ago, and to a large extent the recording and transmission of music is covered by the digital economy. But the experience of live music, of musicians as well as music, is these days somewhat limited to large venues and large acts. The micro cultures of trad jazz, of electric folk, of R&B, never mind say African or Japanese inspired music, are hard to nurture yet bring wonderful cultural and social benefits.

Prof Richard Florida and others have written extensively on culturally driven urban renaissance, and there is strong evidence that much of the British 1960s pop culture grew out of cities with international ports, cultures and music shops where music of black origin, especially the American South blues, gained a foothold in youth culture.

So imagine an area of the city where just 100 like-minded people drawn from a 50 mile radius can meet after work in an evening and share a liking for hard core soul music, or whatever, times twenty or thirty. Similarly, most musicians will be holding down a day job while pursuing their passion. The residential properties within the Mayfield area would appeal to some such performers with a day job in the city if evening performance and networking were possible.

In a nutshell, the suggestion is for a number of small scale, flexible indoor spaces aimed at audiences of 50 to 150 roughly. The Robert Bolt theatre (in Sale, M33) gives an example of this small, multi-use format. And the anchor tenant could be the Royal Northern College of Music.

(The next post will be on the HS2 proposals for north of the station.)

Sir David King, a former UK government chief scientific adviser, and the respected economist Lord Richard Layard, are both proposing a worldwide Sunpower Programme to replace carbon fuels with solar energy in an article in the Observer online (29 Sept 2013). The aim of the programme would be to reach an economic tipping point in 2025 when the unit price of energy from solar becomes cheaper than from carbon fuel.

“The sun sends energy to the earth equal to about 5,000 times our total energy needs. It is inconceivable that we cannot collect enough of this energy for our needs, at a reasonable cost”, they are quoted as saying.

The article goes on to discuss how they acknowledge that a number of scientific breakthroughs will be needed to make cheap solar energy a global prospect. In particular, the report states, “scientists will have to find ways to reduce the cost of transmitting electricity from areas of high luminosity and low land value to the major population centres of the world. This will require new materials that are much better at conducting electricity, without loss of power, than present methods. This would be a major aim of the new solar energy programme.”

The premise is fundamentally right in two ways. Firstly, solar energy is our planet’s only sustainable source of energy, and along with consumption rebalancing, it will provide a sound way forward. Secondly, poorer countries and communities living nearer the world’s equator stand to gain economically from capturing and selling solar energy.

However, maybe masses of pylons heading north (or a breakthrough replacement for energy transmission the scientists envisage) is not the best business model.

We should also consider what hydrogen has to offer as a means of transporting rather than transmitting solar-sourced energy. The attractions include using fuel cells to generate electricity at the point of consumption, both static for buildings and mobile for vehicles. Consumed in cities, whether using fuel cells or otherwise, it produces only heat and water. Hydrogen can be generated by a number of small and large scale methods, including using microbes in sunlight as well as in passing electricity through water.

But when you look at the physics of hydrogen it can be pretty horrible to handle. It will corrode steel pipes, unlike fossil fuel gases. It has to be incredibly cold before it becomes a liquid. It is usually transported at ultra-high pressure. When it burns you cannot see the flame. And in an accidental release it tends to explode rather than gently burn.

Not good news, you might think. But perhaps this horrible-ness is a strength. It means that micro production and micro transportation will be needed, favouring small and independent suppliers above the big energy companies. Of course, monopolies will tend to form, but they will have physics working against them. Small, independent solar energy firms could create and pump hydrogen into portable canisters which can then be shipped directly to markets as required and returned empty to any producer for refilling. Refuelling a car would mean replacing a small canister, around 5kg, so large, dangerous tanks of high-pressure hydrogen at filling stations in urban areas are not needed. Early adopters will not need to wait for a vast network of filling stations to be built, they just keep a spare canister in the boot (trunk). Full canisters could be sold at existing petrol (gasoline) stations, hardware shops and supermarkets.

All this technology already exists. Innovation in the energy sector is not so much about new discoveries, inventions, processes. It is much more about new business models that make use of existing knowledge, becoming mainstream because economically or culturally their time has come. In 1761 the Bridgewater Canal was started, connected the centre of Manchester to a coal mine in Worsley and halving the price of energy in the city. This development of having boats of coal pulled by horses would have been understood by Julius Caesar. But the industrial revolution required it, so it happened then. Now is the time for solar energy, and we may have more tools in our box than we realise.

Link:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/29/sunpower-programme-climate-change

The energy companies are reported to be unhappy with Labour’s policy announcement yesterday of a 20-month price freeze. There are claims that the needed replacement infrastructure will be jeopardised, such as new power stations.

This is possibly an opportunity to start a path back from ‘energy companies’ to ‘utilities’, an incremental approach. Similarly to the train franchising system, there could a public sector utility company in the wings ready to step in and run failing services, as currently on the East Coast mainline.

For a start, this not for profit utility company could build new power stations, pipelines, etc, and then lease them to the energy companies at a fair rate. It would provide certainty of supply and be in the national interest.

The energy companies are also not being very clear about how much the Labour policy will save them with the abolition of payments into ECO – the Energy Companies Obligation – to pay for better insulation for poorer people.

This is an opaque area of public funding, but while social housing and poor owner occupiers have seen some improvements in their home insulation, poor households in the private rented sector have been left behind, out in the cold, and the worst landlords need to be faced up to and dealt with.

In Manchester, the CUBE Gallery (the Centre for the Urban Built Environment) and CCI (the Centre for Construction Innovation) were two sides of the same coin, together promoting excellence in the design and construction of cities and towns. Based at 115-7 Portland Street, Manchester, thousands have passed through the doors for exhibitions, talks, seminars, meetings, launches, videos, even poetry.

After fourteen years, both are about to close.

This is not a potted history, though someone should surely pull that one together. Rather, as someone who worked at CCI for five years it is my eulogy. I had hoped that great words would have come from on high. But I hope these few words at least help a little.

The cause of the built environment, of sustainable cities, is not an easy one to promote now. The credit crunch hit the property and construction sectors hardest of all. And then for these two organisations, which in their prime days were sponsored by the University of Salford, the cuts in higher education tore away the last harbour wall that was protecting these two bedraggled ships. Manchester has already seen Urbis transform into the National Football Museum, subject to much the same economic forces.

At its best, CUBE and CCI wove a spell which brought together designers, architects, engineers, planners, builders, politicians, urban academics, community workers and many others, to hear each others’ stories and to learn together. If it had one slogan, it was collaborative working. Not blaming the ‘other’ profession when things were not good enough. Sure, we tricked the architects to visit the gallery while hoodwinking the engineers with a seminar of graphs, but we knew they would soon stumble across each other and realise they had a shared passion in making great places.

A diversity of backgrounds and outlooks, it has to be said, that was reflected in the CCI and CUBE staff teams, producing some watercooler moments which were pure theatre.

We pushed Passivhaus before it became, thankfully, fashionable. We promoted best practice clubs in each of the five counties, roughly, across the North West of England. We provided a venue where officials from the Treasury could speak directly to a built environment audience, and without charging, not excluding anyone from being able to speak their truth directly to power. We connected small and medium construction firms with major programmes such as Network Rail.

We had our low points too. When half a dozen staff decamped together around December 2011, and the legal tussle they had with the university afterwards, it was hard for those of us left not to think that ‘the high ups’ generally were only interested in counting the cutlery.

But our heyday was bright. A full gallery on a launch evening with people spilling out on to the pavement. A packed seminar room, standing at the back, while a key speaker holds the room spellbound. A calendar of events which was the envy of organisations three times our size. The chance to walk around a newly-built inner-city school and hear from the builders how they had applied an idea they had learnt from us.

I know in my bones that in a few years time some working group of bright young things will say, “Hey guys, we need a place for the urban built environment, for sustainable cities, a sort of neutral space where ideas can ferment, paths can cross, not for profit and open minded …”

So, it is not goodbye, but see you soon.

The first edition was also available as a paperback, but the PDF version has been more popular, not least because it was free I suspect.

So, updated as a second edition, please feel free to download and make full use of this guide.

As ever, all feedback is welcome, and its not for resale.

Cheers,

Tony

ERDF – An Independent Guide, 2nd Edition, 2013, by Tony Baldwinson

In the early days of home and office computers in the 1980s there was a voluntary and community sector national working group that looked at possible socially useful applications for these new machines, of which I was a member.

One surviving trace of our work was a published report on how to use these new word processors to print multi-lingual letters and leaflets in the non-Latin scripts used by people in Asian communities.

The other key piece of work we followed was the potential for these new computers to provide welfare rights advice, sadly not also reported at the time (unless colleagues have better records than mine).

On the face of it it looked so easy. There were quite a few welfare rights services which produced a poster every year with the current benefit rates, a bit like a large menu. You could look for your circumstances and fairly easily get a sense of how much money you could expect to receive, such a single parent with two children, one being disabled. It looked so easy to convert this ‘menu’ of benefit rates into a computer program. It should just be a simple logic tree of yes / no questions for someone sitting at the computer to answer until the program gets to the grand total.

However, the more we looked at it, the worse it got. Because behind this simple menu was a massively complicated rule book, one that welfare rights advisors kept partly in their heads and partly in large folders on a shelves. Citizens Advice Bureaux had a system of a nationally standardised filing cabinet if I remember correctly, one in each centre and updated by post.

We started with the simplest benefit at the time, Child Benefit, which was pretty much £x per child plus £y for the first child. But even this had something like 30 rules which had to be applied. Our working group soon concluded that our goal of a “welfare rights calculator” was an over-optimistic approach, and that more trained people were the best way forward.

So, roughly 25 years on, what are the lessons for the Universal Credit project to unify welfare benefits into one monthly payment, synchronised with any earnings received that month?

Well, one big change has been the growth of self-adjusting algorithms and of probability systems. Many large computer systems now use their own (secret) algorithms to decide everything from ranking Google web searches to Wonga credit worthiness. These systems have the advantage that they self-adapt, and the better systems also can spot trends early such that minority requests are not automatically disregarded. These probabilistic systems are highly sophisticated, often working with over 200 factors to arrive at a decision.

So, my conclusion here is that Universal Credit would work better as a probabilistic algorithm than as a deterministic rules machine. This would basically retain the underlying welfare benefits and their rules as applied, but get it roughly right very quickly and then smooth out the cash-flow. So, a single parent renting a flat at £a a month with two toddlers and an elderly parent would typically get £x a month based on thousands of people just like them. Safety limits would make no payment less than £b without a human authorisation. The rest is adjusted as you go along, and future claimants gain an improved service from the learning involved.

It would be introduced as a shadow scheme, sucking up data from the various current live benefits schemes to build up its knowledge base, and providing the opportunity for officials to “dummy run” the program to check it against real claims. I feel this is more ethical than trying the Universal Credit machine live on people, albeit in limited circumstances to start with.

Perhaps the political disadvantage is that the underlying benefits regimes remain as inputs, with a continuing resource cost. However, from the 1980s experience, the idea of a deterministic machine that can automate the entire benefits system without any catastrophic failure (such as people starving) was old-fashioned even then, as we found out, and as shown by the different path subsequently taken by leading commercial computing organisations.