richardfjbrown

Stand back, make room

[Published by OnLondon and Centre for London, 12 May 2020]

London has been at the forefront of the UK’s Covid-19 epidemic. Cases and deaths rose fast and peaked early in the capital. But the city seems to have adapted quickly to lockdown and continuing recruitment activity shows some of the resilience the capital demonstrated after the financial crisis of 2008. And, after the wave of infections hit London first, it now seems to be retreating quickest, with new cases being identified at half the rate of some UK regions.

But what comes next could be a lot tougher. Having plunged much of day-to-day life into the deep freeze, the government is seeking a way to defrost it, of getting the country back to work. The much-debated change in government messaging gives an indication of the direction of change: from an unambiguous instruction to stay at home, to a cautious emergence.

As London’s economy tentatively tries to get back on its feet, some of its gaps and inequities will start to show through. During the crisis, working from home has been an inconvenience for workers like me, whose jobs involve talking, reading, writing and analysing. For other workers, such remote working is impossible. Some have been put at risk by continuing to work, while others have been furloughed. For those people to go back to work safely, they will have to travel.

And that’s where the problem is. From his experience as the Mayor of London, the Prime Minister will know that telling people to “avoid public transport if at all possible” is a really tall order in the capital. London’s commuters are heavily dependent on public transport: 46 per cent of London’s workers use trains, light rail or the Tube to get to work, and a further 12 per cent use buses, compared to around three per cent and six per cent respectively for the rest of Great Britain.

Avoiding public transport means that almost 60 per cent of London’s workers have to find an alternative way to work. Even if Tube, rail and buses are operating at around 15 per cent capacity, as some estimates suggest, 2.5 million London commuters will be displaced.

Some of the slack can be taken up by an increase in walking and cycling, which together account for around 14 per cent of London commutes. There is certainly a strong argument for this, for re-allocation of road space to encourage new cyclists (though it is not clear whether the funding support announced by Grant Shapps on Friday will be deployed in the capital), and for a more rapid roll-out of new rules for e-scooters.

But cycling would need to increase almost tenfold to replace the lost public transport capacity. Data from the 2011 census indicated the average London commuting distance was more than 11 miles (and is likely to be higher for many rail and Tube commuters), so there are a limited number of journeys where cycling will be a viable option – particularly for those new to the saddle and to London’s traffic.

There may be some increase in car-based commuting in the short-term, but this is not what any policy-makers want. It would not only unpick the progress made on air quality and carbon emissions in recent years, but also quite quickly result in gridlock – especially as roads are being remodelled to prioritise walking and cycling. In any case, there simply aren’t the workplace parking spaces in Central London for any mass switch.

So some form of “demand management” (a phrase heavily used when trying to limit travel during the London Olympics) will be needed, if London’s economy is to return to anything like normal. Changing work patterns will be part of this, and may need extensions of the night tube and some relaxation of current regulations on deliveries, as London shifts further towards becoming a 24-hour city.

But, as London rebuilds public transport capacity and public confidence, we may also need to prioritise some workers over others. The capital has been helped to date by the fact that many of us can work remotely. Given the risk of overwhelming the transport system, those who can do so should perhaps hold back from using public transport to get to work, however much we long for the social interactions that make the city what it is.

The Tube has been kept running for essential workers during the crisis. As the crisis eases, this priority should be extended to people who work in shops, factories, construction sites, and workshops – those who need to have access to their workplaces and to be able to travel to them safely.

You could even see permits to travel introduced, but such a system would be intrusive, complex and hard to enforce. However, the successful implementation of the government’s lockdown measures has shown that limiting use of the Tube can be self-policing. To enable essential workers to reach their destinations safely, perhaps those of us who trade in words, calculations and conversations should stand back and wait our turn.

Missing crowds still

[First used as a monologue script for OnLondon, broadcast in April 2020]

Early morning on Hove seafront, and the broad walkway is dotted with dog-walkers, joggers, and couples taking a stroll in the morning sun. Everybody is complying with the two metre rule, more or less, setting and adjusting their courses to minimise proximity. Occasionally someone stops dead, or abruptly switches direction, and ten others carefully re-order their routing to respond to the change.

It is a stately but slightly stuffy sight, and I suddenly know what it reminds me of – a slow-motion, spatially exploded version of Victoria Station at rush hour. Here on the coast people frown if they see someone within four feet of them; there workers, tourists and day-trippers would surge simultaneously in every direction, somehow managing to avoid each other by inches or even millimetres, marking near misses and glancing collisions with apologetic smiles.

And it’s then I realise how much I miss London’s crowds, the ebb and flow of the city’s life. Cities are at once alienating and intimate. When I visited London as a child, I found the relentless busy-ness and pace of the city distressing, even exhausting. When I moved to London, I made my peace with the throng, learning to find refuge from and even within the most crowded places. Now that I have all the calm that I could need, it is those crowds that I find myself missing.

Peter Ackroyd devotes a whole section of his London biography to the mob, treating it as an essential element of the city. “The crowd”, he writes, “is not a single entity manifesting itself on particular occasions, but the actual condition of London itself.” The courteous bustle of London’s concourses is in some ways far removed the unruly mobs that Ackroyd records surging through the capital’s streets, their polar opposite even. In other ways, however, the crowd is the mob’s politely evolved descendant, a hivemind bent on efficient movement and orderly function, not on chaos and destruction.

Cities are masterclasses in this type of subconscious collaboration. Every day, millions of people displace themselves, barely acknowledging each other’s presence, but choreographing their movements nonetheless, in the tango of a crowded station concourse, the waltz of a busy bar, the dos-a-dos of letting the passengers off the train first.

When this crisis passes, as it will, London will begin to buzz with life again. But there may be a lingering loss of ease with the intimacy of strangers. None of us quite enjoyed the experience of cramming cheek-to-cheek on the tube, but it was treated as a brief inconvenience, not as a health hazard or a micro-aggression.

London may take some time to get close again.

Could the pandemic revitalise devolution debates

[Published by Centre for London, 27 April 2020]

Days during the pandemic have a certain rhythm, whether mid-week or during what we used to call ‘the weekend’. After the daily roll call of cases and fatalities, a government minister appears at a press conference to give the same virtual answers to the same virtual questions. Have we reached a peak? Is there enough personal protective equipment? How do we get out of this?

The charts and graphs tame the horror of deaths with a sense of rationality, and a wood panelled conference room can for a moment look like the command and control centre of a clearly-directed ‘war effort’ battle against an unseen enemy.

It is an illusion – a necessary and comforting illusion perhaps, but no more real for that, despite the wide range of powers granted to the government by the Coronavirus Act. And we should not be clinging to that illusion when we seek to learn lessons from the crisis.

While ministers pronounce targets and exhort compliance, hundreds of public sector workers across the country are making decisions and joining forces to respond to surges of infection as the spread across the country.

Again and again in recent weeks, I have heard similar stories – that measures that used to take months can now be achieved in days or hours, that proceduralism and protectiveness have gone out of the window, that public servants are taking action on the basis that “asking forgiveness is easier than asking permission.”

Officials talk of the value of a sense of shared endeavour and objectives, and health service managers distinguish centralised strategy and allocation of resources from localised decision-making and leadership.

This breathless rush of innovation and adaptation has lessons for how we think about public services coming out of the crisis. In particular, it should revitalise longer-term debates on devolution, and the new constitutional settlement that the country will need when both Brexit and COVID-19 are under control.

Creating tailored local services

Advocates of devolution sometimes make the case in the abstract, simply asserting but local is better. At one level this is surely true: power and decisions should be made as close to citizens and communities as is compatible with national fairness. This is what the European Union refers to the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ (though one that the European Commission is often accused of abusing).

But there’s more to it than that. A second argument for devolution is the argument for particularity – for enabling local services to be tailored to local circumstances. In London, local authorities have worked together to help hospitals clear space in critical care wards, to identify and find hotel rooms for homeless and other vulnerable people, to get food and PPE where they are most needed, and to coordinate volunteer services. All these tasks have depended on detailed local knowledge – of communities and resources, assets and risks – that could never be found in Whitehall.

Allied to this is an argument for integration – enabling local services to complement rather than conflict with each other. Citizens may need support from housing, social care, health services, education, probation, policing, and any number of other services. If these can be brought together, the results should not just be more efficient, but also more responsive to the needs of people and communities. This is never more true than at a time of crisis, when the commitment to deliver results can overcome organisational boundaries. But there is a risk of retreat when the crisis passes.

There is a flipside to all these arguments. Some point out that the centralised direction of the NHS has helped it cope better than Italy’s more fragmented health care system. Locally tailored services can easily look like a ‘postcode lottery’, and incompetently run localised services are no more accountable or efficient than their national counterparts. Even federalised countries like Germany have seen some controversy over regionally-varying lockdown regulations, though the country’s dispersed public health lab capacity has been seen as one of its success factors.

But the crisis has shown what can be done, and in its aftermath, we need a more rational debate about the balance between national standards and local innovation, between centralised strategy and operational autonomy, and between the myths of control and the reality of adaptation.

London’s left-behind places

[First published by onlondon, 5 March 2020]

London is an economic powerhouse, accounting for 23 per cent of the UK economy with only 13 per cent of the UK population. Productivity figures released last week show that four of the ten most productive UK districts (in terms of economic output per hour worked) are in the capital: Hounslow, Tower Hamlets, City of London and Westminster.

But this is not the whole story. Other London boroughs, such as Haringey and Lewisham, appear much further down the list, among “left behind” places such as Blackburn, Stafford and Rhondda Cynon Taf. And while UK productivity grew by about 21 per cent between 2008 and 2018 (not accounting for inflation), it fell in Newham, Barking & Dagenham and Merton, and barely moved in Lewisham.

A slowdown in productivity growth in high performing places would not be a huge surprise: growth is harder to achieve when you are already operating at high productivity; the gains you can squeeze from marginal increases in efficiency are much less impressive than those that can come from new enterprises in regenerating areas.

This – alongside the bigger issues of the financial crisis – probably explains why the City of London’s productivity shrunk more than any other UK local authority’s over the decade. But it doesn’t explain some of the other changes. Productivity surged by more than average in some Inner London boroughs that were already doing well: Camden, Kensington & Chelsea, and Hammersmith & Fulham. The boroughs where productivity fell, on the other hand – Newham, Barking & Dagenham, and Merton – were struggling to start with. London’s economy is becoming more and more concentrated in the city centre.

Struggling Outer London boroughs are not uniformly poor any more than northern towns are, but these productivity figures reflect the very different economic lives lived by rich and poor Londoners. Each borough will have wealthy residents, whose economic activity shows up where they work, not where they live. Their economic fortunes are in sharp contrast to people working in precarious and low-paid employment locally, whose labour is reflected in these local figures. These may not be “left behind places”, but some of the people living in them have every right to feel marginalised.

This dichotomy – between a globally competitive city centre and a struggling periphery –raises questions for local, regional and national policymakers. London’s suburban centres and high streets are being hollowed out by the same forces of retail restructuring as town centres across the country.

But the light of London’s central business district can leave its hinterland in shadow when it comes to government policy. Nowhere in London was among the 100 places invited to bid for £3.6 billion ‘Towns Fund’ last year. How can Outer London’s centres adapt and revive, supporting enterprises and services that will bring commercial and community life – and better productivity and wages – back to London’s suburbs and London’s suburban communities? Centre for London’s forthcoming project on Outer London centres will be focusing on this issue.

There is a broader point too. London is a rich city with a lot of poor people in it, having higher poverty rates than any other UK nation or region after housing costs. Being poor in a rich area does perhaps offer opportunity (though this is debated), but it can also add to stress when local services don’t meet your needs, as explored in a recent report by the Southern Policy Centre.

So the government should be cautious about rushing to refocus spending on “left-behind places” at the expense of thinking about the people and communities who are struggling – even if they are doing so within eyesight of central London’s temples of global trade.

Housing in a time of coronavirus

[First published by Centre for London, 6 April 2020]

In 2006, the City of Sao Paulo adopted the Cidade Limpia(“clean city”) statute, banning the billboard advertising that lined the city’s highways. Citizens and visitors alike saw a new city, a city of stark concrete structures and even starker social divisions. The favelas, slums and squatted buildings that had been shrouded by advertising were made unavoidably visible.

Coronavirus may be having a similar impact for London. The city has been in the front line of infection. On 20 March, the capital had just under half of all reported cases in England, though that proportion had fallen to around a third two weeks later. Even to enthusiastic advocates of dense urban living, what once looked like creative proximity and intermingling now looks risky verging on toxic.

But density has different aspects and different impacts. If the density of connections, and of social and economic life – in crowded offices, pubs and tube trains – helped the virus to race round London in the middle of March, it is the density of living space that has made the government’s lockdown rules tough for many Londoners since then. The disease has shone a spotlight on the increasingly unequal distribution of space in the city.

One way to look at this is the ratio of people to homes. According to the Greater London Authority’s Housing in London 2019 data compendium, this has been falling for the last 30 years across England, reflecting later marriage and more people living alone at the end of their lives. London bucks the trend: the number of people per dwelling has increased from around 2.3 to 2.5 since the early 1990s. London does have some larger families, but a larger element of this growth can be seen as ‘supressed household formation’ – people continuing to live with their parents, or in shared houses and flats, when they would rather be on their own or with a partner.

Measures of overcrowding using the ‘bedroom standard’ (essentially a room for each couple or adult, with some sharing for children) tell a similar story: overcrowding has increased over the past twenty years, but this increase has been most concentrated in private rented accommodation (where 12 per cent of households were overcrowded in 2017/18 against five per cent in 1995/96), and in social rented housing where levels rose from 11 to 15 per cent. The opposite trend is visible for home-owners: over the same period, the proportion of owner-occupied households with two or more spare bedrooms has risen from 33 to 42 per cent.

Many commentators – including me, I suspect – have talked of how younger Londoners are happy to trade space for proximity to the city centre, of how pubs and parks, cafes and restaurants are the living rooms for a new generation. Why yearn for a private garden, when you have Hampstead Heath or London Fields on your doorstep? This ‘trade-off’ theory of urban living is probably true, or it probably was until self-isolation locked young Londoners in homes where every possible nook is being used as a bedroom – let alone the 58,000 households (two thirds of the English total) in cramped temporary accommodation.

London has great public spaces, the convivial tableaux of park, pub and street food market, but if the crisis has shone a light on London’s crowding problems, it may also make people rethink their trade-offs, and perhaps value private space more. The legacy growth in home working may fuel demand for homes with more spare rooms. Building taller and denser around outer London town centres may look like a more civilised way to accommodate growth than squeezing more and more renters into terraced houses designed for families. We should maybe start to worry less about the air space that buildings occupy, and more about the internal spaces they offer.

Coming out of the pandemic, the once triumphant paradigm of dense city living may find itself on the back foot. We may even see a drift from the city to smaller towns and villages. City living will have to remind the world of its benefits – as powerful now as ever – of the cultural and social life it can foster, of the environmental advantages and economic opportunities that it offers. But it will also need to show that it can be resilient to the next shock, that it can offer decent accommodation with space for seclusion as well as sociability to all its citizens.

City sickness, urban recovery

[First published by onlondon, 6 April 2020]

Coronavirus has not been good news for fans of cities. How ever important urban centres will be to the recovery, the rapid spread of the pandemic from Wuhan to Milan and from London to New York revives deep-rooted suspicions of them as close-packed seedbeds for disease (“pestilential human rookeries” in the words of one Victorian pamphleteer) and as the stomping grounds of rootless cosmopolitan types, with lifestyles and habits remote from the more “authentic” concerns of their provincial countrymen.

The early spread of coronavirus in London probably played up to both stereotypes, reflecting both density and connectivity. Reported cases of infection first soared in Kensington & Chelsea. By 10 March, 14 per cent of London’s known cases were among residents of the borough, who account for just 1.8 per cent of London’s population. Kensington & Chelsea is one of London’s most densely populated boroughs, but also one of the most cosmopolitan: nearly half of its residents were born outside the UK, and research by transport campaigners suggests they are the country’s most frequent flyers. For good and ill, London is the UK’s gateway to the world.

In the following days, cases surged in Camden, Westminster, Lambeth and Southwark (as well as Barnet). Central London’s intensity of movements and interactions probably played a role here. With a day time population that grows by 80 per cent every day and intensive mixing on public transport, in offices and in pubs, the conditions for rapid spread were in place in the city centre.

By mid-March, the epidemic was spreading fast across almost every London borough, with reported cases growing by a third every day in the week of 16 March, while they grew by a fifth to a quarter across the rest of England. The newspapers were full of talk of a lockdown being imposed on the capital.

The restrictions imposed by the government at the end of that week were nationwide rather than restricted to London, but their effect appears to have been strongest here. The rate of increase in cases dropped sharply and has remained lower than in the rest of England’s since then, as the graph below shows. Over the past week, the growth in new cases appears to have slowed nationwide, but remains lower in London: in the capital it grew by an average of nine per cent over the three days to 4 April, compared to an average of 14 per cent in the rest of the country.

Source: PHE website, updated to 8 April

There are all sorts of reasons not to get over-excited about these numbers. At best, they show that the disease is spreading more slowly. There are still hundreds more cases every day even in London, and that will translate to more deaths in the days and weeks to come. And it is quite possible that the slowdown has only been temporary, with a resurgent outbreak waiting in the wings.

But it is still worth considering why London has fallen back from the forefront of the epidemic’s spread. Are fewer tests being done in London? This is possible, but since mid-March testing has been undertaken for all patients requiring hospital admission, so the slow down in cases presumably reflects a slowdown in hospitalisations.

Maybe this is a result of London’s age profile. Londoners’ median age is 35 years, compared to 40 across the UK. Perhaps, after the initial surge, this relatively youthful population is being reflected in correspondingly slower growth in the number of serious cases. Or maybe Londoners, despite crowded housing conditions and continuing denunciations from the media, are actually sticking to the government restrictions and starting to suppress the spread of coronavirus: figures on transport use at the end of last month showed the steepest falls were for use of the Tube, compared to road travel and national rail.

Despite the tough weeks ahead, apparent slow-downs in infection rates in London and across England are good news. And if London can further stifle the spread of the disease, it may yet show how cities can be at the forefront of recovery as well as of infection.

Moving out of the crisis

[Originally published on Centre for London website, 30 March 2020]

Strange days, when a transport authority claims an 80 to 90 per cent drop in passenger numbers as a success, as Transport for London’s Mike Brown did on Thursday. It’s a success which could take a £1 billion bite out of TfL’s annual income just over the next three months (together with the loss of congestion charging revenue) – at a time when Crossrail delays were already hitting the balance sheet (and will even more while works are at a standstill).

Making up that shortfall will be one of a million urgent negotiations over coming months (and given ministerial demands to keep the Tube and buses running, the Treasury will surely have to pay a fair share), but it also prompts a more fundamental question – is it right that the operation of London’s transport system is so heavily dependent on fares and other user charges?

As Table 1 below shows, fares account for about 72 per cent of TfL’s revenues, with a further four per cent coming from congestion charging. The rest is made up of other commercial revenues, plus just over £1 billion (15 per cent of the total) coming from taxes – mainly retained business rates, with smaller amounts from general taxation and mayoral council tax.

Table 1: London transport revenue sources

millions	Transport for London (2020/21)
Fares	£5,124	72%
Congestion charge	£255	4%
Media and rental	£275	4%
Other	£515	7%
Retained business rates	£969	14%
Grants	£5	–
Council tax	£6	–
	£7,149	100%

Source: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/finalbudget_march20.pdf

But is that the right balance? Is transport a product to be bought by individual customers, or is it an urban service, something that is provided as much to the city as a whole as it is to individual passengers? Cities rely on mass transit just as tall buildings rely on lifts. Without transport systems that can move millions every day as efficiently as possible, cities grind to a halt – or hollow out as corporations flee congestion. In both cases, reliance on private cars rises, with all the pollution that entails.

Supporting mass transit is therefore in the interests of businesses, of the environment and of the city as a whole – whether or not individual citizens use the system, they rely to some extent on other people being able to move around the city (and on roads being kept free for freight). So there is a case for public sector support, of the system as a whole and for the people who cannot affordto pay full price.

But relying so heavily on passenger revenues does not just make TfL vulnerable to events such as the current crisis, but also makes revenue dependent on mass transit systems that are themselves under strain. To address those pressures and reduce carbon impacts, the Mayor and TfL have committed to promote ‘active travel’ (walking and cycling), but it is only public transport (and congestion charging) that makes money. With some of the highest fares in the world, TfL’s commercial and strategic interests are not well aligned.

It’s not always been this way. The reliance on passenger revenues is a relatively new phenomenon: as recently as 2010/11, more than 50 per cent of TfL’s revenues were in the form of a grant from central government.

And it’s not the way other cities operate either. Comparisons are imprecise and no city is perfect, but New York and Paris both have very different funding models (tables 2 and 3 below). Both cities have some subsidy from different tiers of government – around eight per cent of the NY total, and 18 per cent in Paris (or rather the larger region of Île de France).

Table 2: New York transport revenue sources

millions	Metropolitan Transport Authority (2018)
Fares	$6,200	41%
Tolls	$1,900	12%
Media, rental etc	$685	4%
Fuel taxes	$2,300	15%
Mortgage and property taxes	$1,002	7%
Payroll taxes	$1,700	11%
Other taxes	$306	2%
City and state subsidies	$1,200	8%
	$15,300	100%

Source: http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-funding/

Table 3: Paris (Île de France) transport revenue sources

millions	Île de France Mobilités (2017)
Fares	€3,664	36%
Media, fines etc	€249	2%
Fuel taxes (TICPE)	€94	1%
Payroll tax (VT)	€4,238	42%
Public subsidies	€1,893	18%
	€10,085	100%

Source: https://www.iledefrance-mobilites.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/presentation-idf-mobilites-2019_EN_20-03-2019.pdf

Both cities also draw some revenue from taxes on petrol and diesel: 15 per cent in New York compared to just one per cent in Paris. In the UK, fuel duty and vehicle excise duty are collected and retained nationally, with VED ring-fenced for road maintenance outside London. Allocating London its share would give the city around £500m extra per annum, but both fuel duty and VED are set to decline in coming years, as more efficient vehicles proliferate. Centre for London has arguedfor a comprehensive approach to road user charging, rather than tethering London’s transport to an eroding tax base.

New York draws another 7 per cent of its revenues from taxes on mortgages and property transactions, but both comparator cities also rely heavily on payroll taxes. In New York, employers pay from 0.11 to 0.34 per cent of payroll costs (depending on payroll size); in Île de France, rates range from 1.4 to 2.6 per cent (depending on location).

The sums generated by these business taxes are higher than retained business rates in London, much higher in the case of Paris, and could be argued to relate more directly to how far companies rely on the public transport network to enable employees (and customers) to travel across the city. Payroll taxes may not be the right answer for London, though a devolved alternative to business rates is long overdue, but the current crisis should prompt longer-term thinking about the right mix of taxes for a 21^stCentury transport system.

Seeking higher government grants is one way to reflect the civic value of London’s transport system, but seems likely to have limited mileage at a time of regional rebalancing (and persistent allegations that London already receives more than its share of transport funding). Even Paris draws less than 20 per cent of its funding from national, regional and local subsidies.

London should seek devolution to enable innovation, not a squabble about regional allocation. How much should businesses and residents pay for the infrastructure that keeps the city running? Should tourists and other visitors pay through a hotel tax? Should taxis and minicabs, and new arrivals such as electric bike and scooter companies, pay more for their use of London roads?

When London’s economy and civic life begin to defrost, and the Tube once again feels the – once tiresome but now longed-for – strain of urban rush hours, it will be time to think again about who pays what for the hundreds of millions of journeys that take place in London every year.

In recovery

What do you say to someone who has recovered from coronavirus, an email sent to a colleague asked this week? Probably something like ‘well done’, or ‘congratulations’. As most of us anxiously interrogate every cough and ache, some people have successfully ‘come out the other side’.

As of 22 March, 135 people had officiallyrecovered from Covid 19 (though government is looking for a new way to measure recovery). In any case, this must be a huge underestimate. Testing of people with symptoms has been abandoned for the last two weeks, unless they are ill enough for admission to critical care in hospital, so the figures for recovery must be the tip of the iceberg, just as figures for the total numbers of cases are.

Anecdotes are not data, but the fact that I know at least four people who appear to have had and recovered from the virus (three unconnected to each other) suggests there are many more cases below the waterline. What we don’t yet know is how many. A recent paper by Sunetra Gupta and others was first seized on as an indicator that the virus was much more widespread than was being revealed in official figures, then vilified as resting on some very dubious assumptions about fatality rates. In fact, as I understand it, the paper’s main argument was that we needed much more testing to understand which of various plausible epidemiological scenarios was correct.

And it seems we will soon have the infrastructure for such testing. 3.5 million antibody tests, which test for whether subjects have been infected in the past rather than are infected currently, have been ordered by the government, and are expected to become available from next week. There has been some confusion about how these are to be made available, with NHS staff obviously in the front line, and when. But there is surely an argument for wider distribution (ideally randomised) to establish what levels of infection have taken place across the population, what the real fatality rates are, and how near or far we might be from ‘herd immunity’.

Knowing this will help us think about our national recovery, which feels increasingly urgent. In recent weeks we have seen the impressive exercise of state power to bring trade, travel and social life to a grinding halt. Restarting may be a lot tougher. The current plan, in the UK at least, appears to be to maintain some level of restraint on mixing for a year or more, while a vaccine is developed and tested. It is possible that restrictions may be relaxed for a few months in the summer, but likely that they will have to be re-imposed as soon as new outbreaks flare up.

Seeing an economy and a nation in suspended animation for a few months is an extraordinary thing; the idea of this stretching over 12 to 18 months feels beyond belief. Even if restrictions are loosened, the crisis of contagion will be replaced by a crisis of confidence: who will buy a house, start a new business, or plan a holiday, a festival or a wedding, when a new outbreak could lead to cancellation with days’ or weeks’ notice?

Which suggests to me that we may need a more proportional and variegated approach to the disease, once this initial outbreak has been brought under control. As more and more people establish immunity, could they begin to work and socialise normally? Could they be issued with certificates that would allow them to return to normal-ish life, as is rumoured to be planned in Germany? Could those yet to be infected stay home, or would a more resilient health service enable them to re-establish minimal contact at their own risk, while the strongest protections remain in place for the most vulnerable?

There’s something that feels a bit distasteful about this, for sure. The bureaucracy of certification feels intrusive and even authoritarian, and such a policy would be divisive, undermining the sense of collective sacrifice that the government has been so keen to nurture. But the fact of the matter is that we are not ‘all in it together’ now: people with large houses, extensive gardens and savings accounts are having a very different experience from those who have none of these. And without some rekindling of the UK and global economy, the only thing we will all be in together is an ever-deepening and intransigent recession.

My countries right or wrong?

I was surprised by the strength of emotion when my Irish passport arrived. I had never particularly thought about national identity before; in a rather unconsidered and snobby way, I probably felt myself to be beyond such atavistic notions. But the EU referendum, and the eddying and fractious national debate that followed, put paid to that.

The prospect of long queues at passport control, and loss of rights – to live and work abroad – that I have barely used, spurred me (like thousands of other Brits) to apply for an Irish passport. After some weeks, and very helpful discussions with the Department for Foreign Affairs (my family background is complicated by adoption), my passport arrived with a picture of me that somehow looks about five times more Irish than I ever have in the flesh. And I suddenly felt a forceful sense of attachment, a spark of connection to a country that I visit regularly but have never lived in. Did I feel Irish? Not really, but I felt something.

I’ve been turning this over in my mind since, as the debate over the future of nations and unions after Brexit has intensified, trying to assess my own perceptions of national identity, and considering how these might be affected by possible futures. My first conclusion is that we use the term ‘national identity’ too broadly. We treat it as one thing, when in fact the term covers quite distinct and potentially divergent affiliations. They don’t overlap or compete (though they can do both of those), but rather describe different types of relationship. I can count three (but I’m sure others have undertaken a more sophisticated analysis): cultural identity, personal identity and political identity.

My cultural identity is probably split between England and Ireland. I’ve always balked at the Shamrock ’n’ Shillelaghs sentimentalism of plastic paddies, but I do feel cultural affinity with Ireland. Sure, some of my favourite poets and writers are Irish, but some of my favourite singer-songwriters are Canadian so there must be more to it than that – a shared sense of humour perhaps, a love of wordplay, a dank melancholia, a complicated relationship with rain and catholicism. This identity has strengthened – or possibly felt able to ‘come out’ – in the past decades as Ireland emerged from the dour shadow of Eamon de Valera’s insular conservatism, to become highly internationalised and socially progressive.

My personal identity is more clearly English. I have lived in England all my life, and it is England’s urban and rural landscape that seems familiar and homely to me. To be fair, this is probably concentrated in southern England – between the Cotswolds, the Chilterns and the South Downs, with towns and villages of red brick, golden stone and steely flint. But I have lived as far north as County Durham, have a partner from Scarborough and holiday every year in the Lake District, so my tendrils of attachment stretch across the country.

Do I mean British by this? I really don’t think I do. I have enjoyed visiting Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but they are clearly distinct places – the shops, the language, the beer, even the banknotes are different. They may not feel as distinct as continental European countries, but they are not ‘home’ either.

And to be honest, devolution has deepened this sense of difference. If part of citizenship is knowing how to secure your rights from and undertake your duties to the state, then my citizenship feels increasingly limited to England. I no more understand the Scottish criminal justice or social care system than I do the French.

Which raises the question of political identity. Here my affiliation is to the United Kingdom. I vote for a UK government, carry a UK passport and pay my taxes to the UK state (while I was in favour of remaining in the EU, I’ve never really felt like a ‘citizen of Europe’). But that affiliation feels more and more contingent, and unrooted in any of the deeper affection that I feel towards England or even Ireland. I have none of the passion for ‘the Union’ that is ritually expressed by politicians. When I see Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish politicians arguing for independence, I find it hard to argue against them, and hard not to think that I would do the same in their place.

There are downsides to the calls for independence of course. Politically, loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland would tilt the English and Welsh rump further to the right: the Conservatives would have won a majority in every election since 2005 without Scotland and Northern Ireland. But then again, as a Scottish Nationalist MSP forcefully pointed out to me some time ago, it is not Scotland’s job to counterbalance a conservative majority in England and Wales.

It feels to me quite likely that calls for Irish reunification and Scottish independence will grow over the next Parliament, and it is hard to see how they can be resisted over the long term. Whether I carry a passport from the United Kingdom of England and Wales, or – who knows – the United Republic of Ireland and Scotland, may affect where my taxes are paid, who governs me and how easily I can travel abroad, but it won’t make much difference to the way that I think of myself and my countries.

–> –>

On the bold and the dutiful

I don’t find myself naturally warming to Dominic Cummings. Our politics are different, I’m suspicious of some of his tactics, and I find his airy dismissal of ‘London liberals’ every bit as glib and patronising as the elite attitudes he is so keen to denounce.

Since the beginning of the year, Cummings’ call out for ‘super-talented weirdos’ to work with him at the heart of government has provided a focal point for his many detractors (alongside the affectedly casual dress sense – the Steve Hilton de nos jours). The language is geeky and alienating; it flies in the face of proper recruitment practice; it betrays an over-familiarity with game theory and cyberpunk fiction, and an under-acquaintance with the realities of public administration.

All true up to a point (though the blog’s language is no more obscure than the half-digested formulas of regular HR-speak – “socialising key metrics with wider stakeholders to drive outcomes” etc). But behind the buzz-words, you can detect the anxiety faced by any reforming administration: how on earth can the machinery of government deliver radical change?

The caution and conservatism of the civil service is canonical. In episode after episode of ‘Yes Minister’, Minister Jim Hacker comes up with a seeming common-sense proposal, only to be talked out of it (“a very boldproposal, Minister”) by Sir Humphrey, permanent secretary and inertia incarnate. Yes Minister was broadcast forty years ago, but still resonates with anyone who works with or in government, despite endless civil service modernisation, change and transformation programmes.

My first encounter with ‘Yes Minister Live’ was a memo (or ‘minute’ to use the Whitehall terminology) that I found when setting up the Greater London Authority. It referred to one of Notting Hill Carnival’s periodic financial crises, and wondered whether there as a case for government intervention. A handwritten note by a senior civil servant concluded: “I think we should re-assure ourselves there is nothing we can do.”

A few years later, preparing for the London Olympics, I moved from the GLA, where the lawyers and finance teams did their best to find a way of legally doing what the mayor wanted to do, to a government department, which seemed beset by other departments – in particular the Treasury and the Treasury Solicitors (government legal service) – trying to make it difficult to do what the Cabinet had agreed and the Prime Minister had announced.

Part of this is cultural: few in Whitehall ever lost their job for doing nothing. But I don’t think it is good enough simply to demand culture change in the civil service. Nobody was acting irrationally, but in accordance with long-established principles about how public spending is agreed, monitored and reported – and how politics is performed. Any ministerial tendency to innovation quickly wilts when faced with a request for formal directions from civil servants or the rough music of a Public Accounts Committee hearing.

In any case, for all the enthusiastic praise of ‘disruption’, mantras like Facebook’s “move fast and break things” feel a bit off when applied to public services, given that the ‘things’ that might be broken are people’s lives, rather than clever widgets for a search engine. In public administration, there is an understandably greater tolerance for poor performance that can be corrected over time than there is for the risk of dramatic failure that requires a fresh start.

But, all that said, we do need policy-making and -delivery that is better informed, more agile, more capable of experimentation and adaptation. This requires internal changes in Whitehall, and fresh people thinking fresh ideas, but they will run into the sand without a transformation in the operating environment provided by Westminster and the media.

Ministers should feel as comfortable admitting the failures of policy initiatives as they are spinning (often dubious) successes. They should acknowledge complexity rather than signal-boosting simple solutions. Parliamentarians and press commentators should step aside from ‘gotcha’ denunciations to respect such honest admissions and discussions.

Yeah, and pigs should fly. It is hard to see any of this happening in such a febrile and fractious environment. But we need change if we are to re-tool government for the challenges of this decade, or even this century. Perhaps this Government, and this Prime Minister, with the security provided by their majority, could take the first steps in the way they talk about, implement and evaluate policy. Issues like post-Brexit trade, social care, climate change, and regional economic policy require innovation, agility and honesty, rather than the staleness, inertia and bad faith that dominate today.