Monthly archive for November 2013
Showing results 1 - 5 of 14 for the month of November, 2013.
28 Nov 2013
For our last piece in our month’s theme of austerity and how Transition responds to it, we head to Totnes, one of the first Transition initiatives. What does austerity look like there, and how is Transition Town Totnes responding to it? We asked Frances Northrop, TTT Project Manager.
While from the outside Totnes may be thought of as a relatively affluent and unaffected by public spending cuts, that’s not entirely the case. The reality is more complex. With Transition Town Totnes increasingly seeing its work in this context, it felt like an appropriate way to wrap up our austerity month. As usual, you can either listen to/download this podcast, or read the transcript below. And please, let us know what you think. Comments welcome below.
What does austerity look like in Totnes?
That’s such an interesting question. It’s a question we should ask ourselves more, wherever we live. I think a lot of it’s hidden. I think austerity has been happening for a lot of people for a very long time, and there’s really entrenched poverty across the UK in different places. I think that because we don’t see it, it’s a bit like the classic walking past somebody who’s homeless in the street and you don’t engage with it – it’s easy enough to engage with it.
If your work doesn’t bring you into that arena then it just coexists happily, or unhappily, with other people’s everyday lives. I think what it looks like, particularly in Totnes, is that people are really reliant on part-time work, on zero-hours contracts and seasonal work, because a lot of the work is in agriculture or in the tourist sector. In-work benefits are probably quite a large scale of people’s income.
Also, the housing stock isn’t great. When we did the Local Economic Blueprint, we did some research for that about what the standard of housing was, using the Thermal Homes comfort statistics. It showed that it was staggeringly low-quality housing, that there wasn’t very much insulation, people were living in very cold houses. A lot are off gas, people living in the villages and outer areas of Totnes, so they’re spending more money on energy than other people. Also, payment meters are a classic way for people who haven’t got very much money, that they pay a lot more for their energy full stop, even if they’re on mains electricity.
The perception from outside is that Totnes is doing alright for itself really. To what extent is that image of Totnes misleading and possibly even dangerous in terms of masking that?
It is misleading, and it becomes dangerous when people think that everything’s ok. Partly because it’s like something that somebody talked to me a long time ago about rural communities, affluent rural communities, when I was working in the home counties. It’s double deprivation. If you haven’t got very much money and you live in the big city where lots of other people don’t have very much money, you’ve got access to cheap stuff, whether or not that’s the stuff that you want people to have in an ideal world. Cheap supermarkets and cheap goods.
Also, there are more people to trade with, so if you’re trading your skills or bartering, there’s more people to do that with. Whereas in a town like Totnes, there’s less people like that, so you haven’t got the economies of scale to make it worthwhile for a low-cost supermarket to come or cheaper shops, so you end up with very high-end shops where you can’t afford the things or you perceive that you can’t afford them because – particularly around local food – of perceptions about seasonality and it being a middle-class thing.
So people end up being doubly deprived. Also, psychologically, living alongside such affluence, when you’ve got people here who’ve sold houses and been able to buy places and do them up, that slight gentrification of areas and the perennial thing that Totnes has always had of second-home owners and affluent older people retiring here. Psychologically, that’s really quite damaging.
How has the work of TTT sought to address that, what are some of the ways in which that’s happening?
I think it’s happening in lots of really subtle ways. It’s building on the trust and goodwill of work that’s gone before, and the networks that we’re building. Our food work, principally, started as the strongest group of Transition Town Totnes. It principally started because people wanted to grow more of their own food, so the Garden Share project and the allotments association. But since then, it’s formed a real network of people. We recently held an event called Food for the Future and part of that discussion was about crop gaps and what crops we could grow more locally that might have grown here before and don’t any more.
But there was a full representation of everybody from the whole cycle of food, from people who grow the food right through to what we do with that surplus food and what we do with the compost to go back into the soil to create the circle again. There was a real willingness there, there were people there who work at the drop-in centre for the homeless, who give out hot meals to people who are homeless. There’s Food in Community which is a really fantastic, relatively new enterprise who work with Riverford, taking their surplus vegetables and distributing them to community projects, people who work with people with mental health problems and the local children’s centre and schools.
So the interest that was there, Riverford was there as well, and some of the restaurants and the cafes. The conversations there weren’t just about how can we grow the local food economy, they were about how can we enable that local food economy to also help people who haven’t got enough to eat.
One of the things that seems like TTT is doing at the moment is what some people call “the Power to Convene”. Actually TTT, thanks to its networks and connections, has the ability to get people in a room. You did that recently with the Caring Town conference. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
That was I think a real tribute to the trust and goodwill that TTT has built up over the last 6-7 years since we started. Basically, one of the strands of the blueprint was looking at health and care and how important that is for the resilience of a place. People need to stay well, they need to stay personally resilient and healthy. We need to acknowledge how much we need to care for each other and get back to a situation where people are looking out for each other more.
It was also about how existing resources that go into health and care from the public sector, over the years have very much been one-size-fits-all. You’re old so you have a day centre, you’re a learning disabled adult, you can have the same day centre. Those ideas that that’s enough for people, that you’re providing some care.
What we wanted to do was get people together in a room and ask “if you looked at a place and said what would it look like if it was at its most caring?” We put an invitation out and invited voluntary groups from the town who are involved in broader wellbeing and health and care work, and we invited people from the public sector who are also involved in that kind of work, so people who work in mental health, but also the fire service, the police, drug and alcohol workers, homelessness support, general social care.
Lots of people responded to that question, “what would a caring town look like?”, they obviously wanted to have that conversation. What happened when we gave them permission, convened them in the first place which was lovely to be able to do that, their being given permission to just imagine what it would be like if their service, as a public sector professional, could be delivered in a different way that was place-based and crossed over other people’s services, so people weren’t delivering in silos and the public sector was working with the voluntary sector, and then the community beneath that were looking out for each other.
It was just joyous. There was a real, palpable sense that it was a way that people wanted to work in the future, and at the end of it, I think there were about 50 people there and 95% of them signed up to be part of the next steps to look at how that might manifest.
One of the tensions austerity throws up is that it’s about cutting back on public spending, and the private sector will pick up on any of the profitable bits, and communities are somehow supposed to come together and pick up all the leftover bits in any spare time they have beyond doing anything else. That seems to be the model. From what you get a taste of from here or what you think is going into the future, is that the best way to do it? What’s the tension between picking up things the public sector is dropping but which the private sector doesn’t want? Does it mean that we end up just colluding with the wider agenda?
That’s such a big question. It’s the biggest thing that troubles me, that you’re enabling, that you’re complicit. Complicit’s a good word. I’ve morally struggled with it. I think where I am at the moment with it personally is that yes, it is enabling to an extent, but if you can do it in a way that’s quite clever then you might be able to change the ideas of the public sector about how they commission, or whether they do always commission from the private sector.
The other thing that drives me to do it is that there are some people out there who are desperately vulnerable and we have to help. If we’re the people who can assist with that then we have a responsibility. It is a massive tension.
Before I started working at TTT, my work was working with the public sector, looking at how social and community enterprise could scale up and then voluntary activity on the ground could be the right solution to delivering public services, to meet the needs of people. So, not having this one-size-fits-all, but having a real needs-based approach – actually what do people need in a place.
Unfortunately, that work was happening too early. That work was happening really well, the Social Enterprise Coalition and Locality are doing loads of really great work around how that could be enabled. But austerity kicked in too soon for local authorities to be won over to that, so they still commission large contracts to big companies based on a silo-based way of working. Care homes for old people, children’s services, under fives. They don’t look at it in a holistic kind of way.
In some ways, this is exciting with some of the people in the room at Caring Town conference because they’ve probably been thinking the same thing. What would it look like if it actually was meeting people’s needs and was holistic and place-based? In that way it’s really exciting. That’s enough to make me think there’s a chance there to try and win some minds over from that big scale contracting out and stuff.
One of the things that’s unique about TTT is that it has the role that you occupy, that role of Project Manager sitting in the centre, avoiding that doughnut effect that we see in other places where all the energy rushes outside to the projects and you don’t have anybody at the centre linking it all together. What’s your sense, from having done that role for nearly three years now, about the value that it brings?
I was going to say it’s invaluable but I would say that, wouldn’t I! Actually, it is invaluable because people need to feel held. There are some people doing some incredible work in Totnes, within Transition and the broader community. What a lot of them need is to know that the centre is being held, that there is somebody or some people who hold the narrative, and all the time they’re spinning this work into the narrative so that when we’re talking about the work of Transition we’re celebrating what people are doing. That what they’re doing isn’t just for the goodness of what they’re doing – which is enough, actually – but to say it’s part of this greater whole, and this is how it fits together and this is why the work we’re doing is so important.
What did the Local Economic Blueprint highlight or reveal that is so important in actually designing meaningful responses to austerity, do you think?
I think the Blueprint and the associated work that we’ve done around Reconomy has shown, I think it’s a term you used actually, that it’s about internal investment rather than inward investment. I really liked that. Our whole society is geared towards big-scale solutions to everything instead of those interactions that you have every day that actually build something more beautiful.
The Blueprint, for me, to be able to show in it that actually these big employers that came before, that have gone, they were never actually the big employers. It was this network of small businesses that were something like 70% family owned, 80% small businesses with 10 or under employees. It was showing that it was those businesses that interact every day and build community and circulate money locally, and provide the infrastructure that communities really need, rather than somebody coming and building a factory, employing some people, and then probably pulling out a few years later and ripping out some of the fabric.
David Cameron’s now talked about us being in a state of “permanent austerity” and it looks like an incoming Labour government would uphold most of the cuts that are already in place. From the 7 years of Transition here and your sense of it and the learnings from what’s happened here, what more general lessons do you think Totnes can offer to communities up and down the country who are faced by austerity?
There’s something about Totnes being quite particular that is true, but then I look at other places like Bradford, where I’m from. I was at a conference in Leeds, which is nearby, about the food work that we’ve been doing here, and somebody said, well it’s alright, you can do it in Totnes, but what about places like Bradford and Leeds?
Actually, access to land is easier in places like that. There’s more land, more unused land that could be appropriated. There’s more of a history of self-organising in those places, that if you could revive that again, which is happening, that’s happening with other organisations within Transition, that the things that we can model here because it’s uniquely geographically like it is and because it’s surrounded by a lot of growing land and traditionally agricultural, and all the different reasons why Totnes is like it is, if we can model it here and then parts of bits of that are done elsewhere then I’d be happy with that.
What I wouldn’t be happy with is if we’re doing everything that we do here and it didn’t inspire people elsewhere to be self-organising, and all that happened was the government saying ”they can do it in Totnes so why can’t you do it everywhere else?” I think we really have to guard against that and think about how we can pull together. I think that’s about working, not just with our colleagues in Transition, but ones who are in the Co-operative movement and the Community Land Trusts and in Development Trusts, social enterprise movements, so those other models, if we can pull together, we’ve got a really strong voice.
In the beginning, TTT was really framed as being a response to peak oil and climate change. Would you say that it’s now equally a response to austerity as well? Where does it sit there in terms of being a driver for TTT these days?
I almost think the thing about peak oil and climate change was a consequence of the world we’ve managed to construct because we had cheap fossil fuels, and we’ve been able to construct this economy gone completely insane, the free market economy. So it’s part of the broader picture. It’s a response to living well, really. To being resilient. But we want everybody to be resilient, not just, “this is our place and we’re going to forget about you”.
It’s about the things that are important to people. What do we need and what’s important. Increasingly that’s what everybody is talking about. I think Transition was there first, and everybody now is talking about energy and climate change and the impacts of climate change, because it’s happening now. It was happening before, but now people are acknowledging it more. You don’t need to talk about that, but you can talk about how we’ve gone too far with this excess of everything that was fuelled by that fuel, and so it’s a symptom.
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27 Nov 2013
This month’s immersion in austerity has taken us in numerous directions. We’ve heard from all sorts of people, and now we’d like to hear from you.
We’ve had James Meadway’s ‘Austerity Basics’, which have given us a grounding in the thinking behind the whole approach. We’ve heard from a Conservative MP on her take as to why austerity is necessary and could be the spark for all manner of community enterprise. We’ve heard from food journalist Felicity Lawrence about the impact the austerity cuts are having on the safety and regulation of our food. We spoke to Jeremy Leggett about the importance of challenging the stranglehold the Big Six energy companies have over our energy supply. Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden told us how they are seeing urban food production in the context of a response to austerity. Prof Tim Lang told us about how food policy needs to reevaluated in the light of austerity. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall shared her thoughts on what we can learn from the austerity of 1939-1945 that might apply today. We have yet to hear from Frances Northrop at Transition Town Totnes about how TTT are seeing their work in the context of austerity. Our Social Reporters also reflected on the subject (for example here). We heard how Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition are responding to austerity, and Jason Roberts told us about lessons from the Better Block project.
So now it’s over to you. How do you think Transition initiatives should be responding? What are you doing in your initiative?
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22 Nov 2013
Sarah Wollaston, Conservative Member of Parliament for Totnes, is not your everyday Tory MP. She was the first MP to be chosen as a candidate through a US-style open primary. She was recently one of 15 joint winners of The Spectator’s Parliamentarians of the Year Award for going “through the ‘no’ lobby to prove that our ancient tradition of press freedom is not abolished without a fight”. She spoke more sense about the proposed intervention in Syria than anyone else on both sides of the debate. She writes regularly for the Guardian. She’s also a great supporter of Transition. I caught up with her recently and heard her 7 thoughts on austerity, why it’s happening and how we might respond to it.
1. We have no choice but austerity
She told me:
“If you look at the figures on debt and it’s 85% of our GNP, what does that mean? Does it mean that you can just keep on pretending that you can carry on increasing government spending above what a government’s earning? Inevitably that leads you to the situation where Greece is. Do I feel that something had to be done about that? I’m afraid I do. I think it was inevitable that that had to happen.
You can therefore either increase taxation, you can shrink what government spends, or you can try and get a balance between the two. I think, unfortunately, we do need to shrink our spend. I’m afraid I do think those decisions had to be made. Undoubtedly it’s impacting people’s lives, it’s very painful”.
2. It’s not helpful to blame or stigmatise those on the receiving end of it
She has been outspoken against what she has called the “divisive rhetoric” of ‘strivers and skivers’ which has emerged from some within her party and elsewhere:
“Just because words rhyme with each other doesn’t mean you should use them! I absolutely do not think we should be using any language of that sort, and most people who are not in work absolutely want to be in work. The issue is how do you make it that you are paid more for being in work than being on benefits? How do you make sure that you give people encouragement into work?”.
3. People need support and help to get back into work, not punishment
For Wollaston, it is not acceptable to scapegoat those looking for work. In another recent Guardian article about helping those with mental health issues back into work she wrote “Sometimes people need a push to get back into work, but that should not feel like a coercive or punitive shove”. She told me:
When you’ve had a period of depression (she herself has been very public about an episode of post natal depression that she suffered from herself) it can impact catastrophically on your self-confidence, and it can lead you to a position where you feel you really can’t go back to work. What you need is the encouragement, because for very many people it’s actually getting back into the workplace that helps restore confidence and make people feel better. It’s about the social contact that comes with work and employment. I don’t think it does anybody any favours to have to have a narrative around this that says that a government is being wicked if they are trying to encourage people back into the workplace. It’s a question of whether or not that encouragement feels like a big stick, or whether it feels like it’s genuinely supportive and helpful”.
4. Outsourcing public services is no bad thing
One of what many people see as the most alarming manifestations of austerity has been the outsourcing by many local authorities of work that was in the public sector and into the private sector. Barnet Council’s programme of “mass outsourcing” has been hugely controversial, but what are her thoughts on that approach?
“To say that it’s wrong for councils to outsource, I don’t agree with that argument. If other people can provide a better service with better value for money, I just see that as being inevitable. If that money could be spent better by bringing in other people I don’t have a reflex that it must automatically be wrong.
Clearly it’s incredibly painful for those individuals losing their jobs, but the evidence is over this period of austerity that although there’s been a great loss of employment in the state sector, there’s been a much greater corresponding increase in the private and independent sector.
But is the principle that you can shift people from being employed by the state, or the Council, to being employed in other organisations that can sometimes provide a better service and do things like increase the rate of recycling really so bad? Actually I think that’s a very reasonable way to approach austerity.
Having said that, she made clear that for her, it is also a question of making sure that this does not lead to abuse of low-paid workers. She raised the example of Healthcare Assistants, employed on zero hours contracts on a minimum wage, who are not paid for time spent travelling from one person to the next which, in effect, drives them below the minimum wage. She has been part of lobbying for the forthcoming Care Bill to outlaw this practice.
5. Austerity means it is more important that we vote, not less.
In the light of both Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman announcing that they never vote, I wondered whether being in parliament had strengthened or weakened her belief in the vote? She took a sharp intake of breath, clearly looking forward to getting something off her chest:
“Where do I start? I can see why people are cynical about politics and politicians. There are so many problems with the way politics works today. What I would say is if you take an attitude of “I’m just going to boycott the whole thing, I’m not going to bother”, how is it ever going to change? I would say what you need to be doing is not sitting at home taking a negative view. If you’re unhappy with it, you need to apply. That’s what I did. I’m there.
There are lots of things that deeply frustrate me about the way politics works, about the way patronage operates, about the lack of genuine representation. We haven’t got enough women, we haven’t got enough people in parliament from a diverse range of backgrounds, we are under-representing people from ethnic minorities, and I think that’s desperately important. But you don’t solve those issues by not voting. You solve those issues by getting involved politically yourself and campaigning for change. I think it was a deeply worrying thing for Russell Brand to have said, particularly as he’s such an influential individual. I’d like to see Russell Brand applying to become an MP”.
6. Approaches like Transition have a vital role to play in times of austerity
She has been an enthusiastic supporter of the work of Transition Town Totnes. What, I wondered, were her thoughts on Transition, and its role in times of austerity?
I think it’s hugely important, because the thing about austerity is that it’s less about what the state is providing for a community, and as that pot of money shrinks, inevitably communities have to fall back on their own resources and look at what they can contribute. What Transition shows is just how important that can be. I look at what’s here in Totnes and I compare that to what’s available in some other communities, and I just wish that every community had that kind of community resource.
Inevitably people have a downer on what government is doing and to focus on the negative things, but there are some positive opportunities that we should look at and say “what are the opportunities for Transition Town Totnes?” because that’s what you’re very good at, saying “how could we use that within Transition?”.
For Wollaston, the refocusing of austerity creates new spaces for communities to innovate and take back some degree of power. She is very animated about how personal care budgets could be reallocated and used to support a variety of new and existing social enterprises in at the community level. Some of the powers given through the Localism Act have similar potential, such as Community Right to Build Orders. These, and other powers offer the potential of “restoring real power to individuals, that’s going to be a real gamechanger”, as she put it.
7. We have to tread carefully to maintain public support for renewables in times of austerity
Our conversation then turned to energy. Dr Wollaston discussed the number of people who come to her surgeries raising the issue of “green levies” on energy bills and how unfair they consider them to be. “People who are fuel poor feel like they are subsidising people who are not fuel poor” she told me. “That is a voice we have to listen to”. She spoke of how, for her, renewable energy needs to be rolled out with the support of local communities, rather than in the face of opposition:
“Frankly, I am horrified, when you look at the impact on a community like Dipford (a village near Totnes), which suddenly finds itself surrounded by very large scale solar panels, and, if companies get their way, very tightly spaced. It’s a question of how we make this work so people accept it and it’s done in a sensitive manner, and it doesn’t act as an extra levy, a disproportionate levy in fuel poverty. I am not saying that we should scrap environmental levies, I am absolutely not saying that. What I am saying is that the balance at the moment is risking us seeing a collapse in public support for green energy, and I think that’s a danger…”
I pointed out that given that the world currently subsidises the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $500bn a year, six times more than is spent to subsidise the renewable energy sector. Much of the hysteria being whipped up around “green taxes” should be seen in the light of how in Germany, the push for renewables is making the big energy companies’ business model unravel, and has seen their profit halve. I suggested that lobbying instead for the end of subsidies for fossil fuels might be a better place to start, and that it would be a move towards a genuinely ‘level playing field’. We also discussed a different approach to how energy is charged for which will be put forward on this website in January, as part of our theme of ‘Scaling Up’.
Some closing thoughts
Time spent with Dr Wollaston is fascinating, especially in the light of our discussions this month on the theme of austerity. She represents very much the “glass is half full” side of the debates around austerity. David Cameron said in his speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet recently:
“We are sticking to the task. But that doesn’t just mean making difficult decisions on public spending. It also means something more profound. It means building a leaner, more efficient state. We need to do more with less. Not just now, but permanently.”
With the Labour Party stating that if they won the next election they will uphold most of the Coalition’s spending cuts, it appears that austerity is here to stay, indeed that it has only just begun. And its impacts have only just begun too. For example, the recently released State of Children’s Rights in England report accuses the government of using “economic pressures” to:
“justify not only a serious erosion of children’s economic and social rights, such as health, food and the right to play, but also fundamental changes to our justice system.”
As people on the ground doing Transition, trying to build resilience in the face of such rapid and deep change, that’s our context. Whether its cause is peak oil, or austerity, necessary or unnecessary, as Dr Wollaston says, “inevitably communities have to fall back on their own resources and look at what they can contribute”. While there is still much to be gained from trying, where possible, to oppose cuts to public services, Wollaston’s message that there is also an opportunity here, an opportunity being seized by companies like Circo but not so much by community-owned social enterprises, is one that resonates with Transition. This also, of course, opens a whole ethical minefield for initiatives, as to whether they are colluding with further cuts or providing a vital safety net for local communities.
From a Transition perspective though, of course, that needs to be done built on foundations of social justice and fairness, with an underpinning narrative about the urgent need to tackle climate change and build resilience to the end of cheap energy, and in a way that builds community resilience, rather than undermining it. None of those appear to be priorities for the current administration, typified in David Cameron’s alleged recent “get rid of all the green crap” comments. But certainly talking to Dr Wollaston, you get a sense that there’s more support for them than you might previously imagine, in some quarters at least. .
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22 Nov 2013
Naresh Giangrande of Transition Training reports on a Transition Thrive training he recently co-facilitated in Scotland:
The University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland is certainly posh, and old (it is famously Scotland’s oldest university). So what is a Transition Initiative doing in the middle of all that? And what is a Transition University anyway?
I was met off the train by David who is part of Transition St Andrews and the first thing he showed as he drove me from the station was an old paper mill, the Guardbridge industrial estate that recently shut down and was bought by the university. They are turning it into a bio mass plant to heat all of the universities buildings. Was it combined heat and power I asked?
“No”, he said, “we have just got planning permission for a medium sized wind farm and we will get our electricity from that”. “All?” I said? “Yes”, he said. “The whole university will be carbon neutral in a couple of years time”, he casually dropped. I sat in his mini, green with envy having just been part of the thwarted attempt to erect a small wind farm in Totnes.
“How did you get that through?” I asked. He told me that the estates department has seen their energy costs skyrocket from £1.2million to £5.4 million in just eight years and he projected they would be around £20 million by 2020. It makes absolute economic sense to move to biomass and renewable energy. We lock in a much lower cost supply a decouple from the spiralling out of control world fossil fuel markets.
“So where are you going from there?” I asked. He told me of their rolling fund to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings (with a minimum requirement to meet BREAM excellent or outstanding) and upgrade infrastructure. And their Transition Initiative is part funded by the university and part funded by the Climate Challenge Fund, so they had an office and five paid workers, and embedded sustainable teaching in many of their degree courses. I turned green a second time, as Scottish Transition groups have had access to pots of money from the Scottish government that English, Welsh and Northern Irish groups can only dream of.
Mandy Dean and I facilitated a Transition Thrive training with them, as part group building and part ‘let’s explore where we can go from here what’s next’ workshop. Unsurprisingly their practical project and group dynamics were their strengths, so we didn’t spend much time exploring these parts of Transition. We took this mixed group of project workers, university staff and students on a journey around the Transition model and practice, based on the Transition animal. We deepened, and planned, talked and explored. We planned a new social enterprise or two, and envisioned how they could create more engagement with the town.
What’s unique about a Transition University? Well, one of their challenges was that they have students coming and going all the time in their Transition Initiative. We helped them redesign their TI to enable them to maintain their initiative while at the same time find a way for students to take as much away with them into whatever they did next- seeding new projects new ideas and new enterprises.
I left with a feeling of hope that something established over 600 years ago is taking on board some of the 21th century’s knottiest problems , and a deep appreciation for the work they have done in preparing students for the risks and opportunities of 21st century living.
As I walked past the oldest golf course in the world, St Andrews, on my last morning, next to one of the most beautiful unspoilt towns in the British isles, I couldn’t help but be seduced by the grandeur and serenity of something that old and magnificent. I could, also feel the cold winds of change that are certainly sweeping, unbidden and unseen by most, through that old landscape.
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20 Nov 2013
Felicity Lawrence is a food writer and Guardian investigative journalist. When it comes to understanding the dark side of how the food industry works, she is the place to turn (unfortunately, the Skype connection was too bad to allow a usable podcast). What I wanted to explore was how austerity measures are affecting what ends up on our plate. It was a conversation that inevitably started with the recent horsemeat scandal:
Felicity, you’re just about to publish an updated version of your book ‘Not On the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate‘. One of the things that it has that differentiates it from the previous one is a new special chapter all about the horsemeat scandal. What does the horsemeat scandal tell us about the state of our food industry today, do you think?
I think it’s a kind of warning of systems failure really, because what you’ve got is a system that’s set up with these very, very long and complex supply chains where everybody’s trying to add a bit of profit as the stuff moves around. But it was a system built on cheap oil in a period when energy was cheap and it made some sort of sense, economically at least, to do that, if not environmentally. Of course, that’s no longer true.
Many environmentalists were predicting, as the price of energy went up, that inevitably there would be fantastic strain in that system, and I think that’s what you’re seeing here. You’re seeing a period where wages are stagnating, consumers are feeling real pressure because the cost of their fuel bills is going up so much, the cost of food is going up so much. Costs for the industry have gone up enormously, so whether you’re a meat processor, your energy costs have gone through the roof, the cost of beef has gone up enormously as its demand globally has increased and as climate change takes its toll.
If you’re a supermarket, your energy costs have gone up enormously, you’re transporting food round and round in these great big loops, and you’ve got enormous refrigeration costs because you’ve got these extenuated supply chains. But you can’t put your prices up to reflect that overall, because people on the lowest incomes simply can’t afford to pay any more for their food, so if you put the prices up, they just buy less. The supermarkets are locked into this model where everything must be continuous growth. Even in a deep recession, the shareholders demand continuous growth, and their executives are rewarded on the basis of continuous growth, but they can’t achieve it. So the system is broken.
What you’ve ended up with is contracts for cheap processed meats such as burgers being re-negotiated every 12 weeks, and prices being proffered by supermarkets that were just too low, so the processer wasn’t able to make a proper margin on them. Then they’re putting a great squeeze on the people supplying them. Then some point down the line, someone was committing fraud.
The whole issue of austerity that’s being imposed, which you described in one thing I read recently as being used to “dismantle the state”, how has it impacted on the food sector?
You’ve seen this relentless drive to deregulate, which preceded austerity and the recession. It’s been the neoliberal trend here for decades. It certainly happened under the last government, not just this one, but it’s accelerated with the recession and austerity. You’ve seen enormous cuts in public services that might have kept alive our capacity to regulate industry. There’s a trend for industry only to be inspected on what’s a so-called ‘risk basis’, because any inspection was regarded as a burden and so there are less inspections in factories. You’ve got certain types of cutting plants that no longer have a daily inspection service.
You’ve see a dramatic fall in inspectors and a huge slashing of trading standards budgets, and the main regulating standards agency has been eviscerated: that was one of the first things that the coalition government did when it came to power as part of its ‘Bonfire of Quangos’, these pesky agencies that were regarded as a nuisance, added to industry costs, got in the way. So it had a lot of its powers taken away, and you can see in relation to this huge, huge fraud, one of the biggest food frauds for centuries, that they simply don’t have the powers or the capacity to actually work out who’s done what and hold anyone to account.
Is that something which is just an unfortunate by-product of the need to save money, or is that an intentional gutting of those institutions, do you think?
I think there’s been an ideological drive which precedes this government but has accelerated under it, the sense that the state should be removed and that business and industry can regulate itself. Here we’ve got a spectacular failure. Industry cannot regulate itself. Its interests are going to be very different to the interests of the public, that’s precisely why there is a role for the state.
One of the other things that has been deregulated along with the other things has been stuff around, although there’s been less ability to police, has been the issue about gang masters and slavery and food and everything.
The re-emergence of slavery in the last couple of decades is one of the most shocking aspects, for me, of the current food system. It’s become an enormous problem. It’s happened because methods of production have changed, and that’s changed the relationship between labour and capital.
What you get with these ‘just in time’ ordering systems, that are very sophisticated but for the supermarkets, it enables them to eliminate all risk and waste from their end of the chain, so they only ever order once you’ve already bought something, and the barcode on your product has been scanned. That then triggers an order that cascades down to a supplier down the line who might find out in the evening that he needs to double his delivery to the supermarket the next morning.
The only way that those suppliers can then meet that demand is by having a pool of surplus labour. They obviously can’t afford to employ those people directly, so they end up with this outsourcing system where they have the agencies. The only kind of people who are prepared to work those sorts of random shifts as they happen, 12 hours work one minute, no work the next, are generally migrants who’ve got no choice and who are desperate enough to take it. That’s really why this whole system has built up.
Once you’re relying on that kind of casual labour it’s not surprising that abuses creep in, because the gang masters have control over the labour, they have control over people’s lives. They have to be transported around from one factory to another in different parts of the country. They don’t have any accommodation except through the gang master.
You get into this system of control, and there are just repeated abuses which are very shocking. In some cases that I’ve looked at recently, there was one just last year, real proper slavery where people have no freedom of movement, they aren’t aware of where they’re being taken, they’re subject to physical threats and intimidation, have their documents taken away from them, and live in fear. That’s going on in modern Britain. It’s very shocking.
Is that something which is just an unfortunate by-product of the need to save money, or is that an intentional gutting of those institutions, do you think?
I’m not suggesting that everybody who works in it is a willing participant in it. Lots of hard-working farmers increasingly really struggle to survive unless they’re working on an enormous industrial scale, and I think scale matters. When you get to that huge scale, you lose the humanity in it, and that is reflected in what goes wrong.
There are an awful lot of people in the supermarkets who work hard or think they’re doing their best, but I think they’re trapped in a system that actually doesn’t work. It doesn’t work particularly for those on the lowest incomes. What we’re seeing is wages being held down or driven down, what used to be reasonable jobs in the sector being undercut by the system of casual labour, so that people don’t have enough money to buy the sort of food that keeps them healthy and well, and now we’ve got austerity on top of that, you’re seeing people having to make choices between food and fuel.
The argument in favour of the supermarkets is always that they’re much cheaper than all these independent shops and people like them and if they didn’t like them they wouldn’t go there. One of the things I’ve done in the new edition of Not on the Label is actually unpick some of that.
Their profits are very healthy. It’s very hard to say what’s going on with prices, but there has been very substantial food inflation, running considerably ahead of overall inflation, and that’s partly cost and a lot of it is energy cost, which, if we had a different system, that wouldn’t be such an issue. But also when they give you something on special offer with one hand, they can take it back somewhere else. By upping the price of things that we’re less able to compare on, or we’re not certain what they are. We’re seeing an awful lot of this yo-yoing of prices at the moment, which competition experts have described as anti-competitive.
There was an article I read that you wrote recently, I think the one about David Cameron and not knowing the price of a loaf of bread, where you said that ‘deep discounting has driven a race to the bottom’. What does that race to the bottom look like?
As I say, supermarkets remaining profitable despite a deep recession, consumers struggling to pay their bills, prices going up and down in a way that makes it very hard for anyone to know where best value is. The things that are being promoted to encourage us into the stores so that they get all your business and there are not many alternatives left – if you want to go and find a nice greengrocer it’s getting harder and harder – the things that they’re promoting are by and large the things we know we should be eating less of. It’s heavily processed foods, foods higher in fat, salt and sugar, and there are academics who’ve done the work on that and show that’s true.
It’s become increasingly difficult for people on low incomes to actually eat the sort of food they need to be healthy. The corollary of that is that we see these extraordinary inequalities that are widening in terms of health, so that if you’re on a lower income, in a lower socio-economic group, you’re much more likely to suffer a higher rate of diseases that relate to poor diet. You’re much more likely to suffer obesity. You’re much more likely to have low birth weight. All these complex issues. So there’s a real social justice problem there.
Part of that is that tension between people being on lower and lower incomes, so therefore needing to buy cheaper and cheaper food, therefore the argument is that we need supermarkets because they’re the only people that can feed people on those kind of incomes. Is there a way out of that cycle?
I think you have to frame the questions a bit differently. If people can’t eat, can’t afford to eat well enough to be healthy, then they’re not earning enough. We’ve seen this driving down of wages as I said, and we’ve seen the flight of capital with companies paying less tax. It’s not really good enough for them to say “they can’t afford more, let them eat junk, they can’t afford decent beef so let them eat horse”. That’s where we’ve ended up.
Of course, the people who ended up eating the burgers adulterated with horse were those on the lowest incomes. I think that’s one of the reasons it hasn’t had political traction. It’s not affluent people – they don’t eat those kinds of things, the cheapest burgers and processed meats. The people who are buying those are the people who can’t afford anything else.
Ed Miliband recently was talking about the idea of freezing the price of energy to make energy more available to people. Is there a case for the government intervening in the pricing of food as well, or basic healthy foods, do you think?
I think it’s very hard to see how governments can intervene in price controls. I think again that’s framing the question the wrong way round. There’s often an assumption that we’ve moved beyond government intervention in supermarkets. The real question is that we’ve got markets that have been captured by a handful of players in the sector, and that’s one of the real problems. There isn’t the alternative for people to be able to go out to a local store or local street market and buy cheap fruit and veg that’s not perfect but half price because it’s not cosmetically perfect. But they could afford it, and eat very well on it. Those alternatives have been swept away, because you’ve got these oligopolies that have emerged.
So rather than saying, do we want socialist, Marxist price control, the question’s upside down. Why have we not got free markets? Because Adam Smith wrote, all those centuries ago, that business tends to monopoly and you have to counter it. But we are in an era when governments either don’t have the political will to ensure that there is better competition, or define competition so narrowly that they don’t really take into account the public interest.
But also these are globalised businesses, and we’ve moved to an era of globalised food industry but without a corresponding globalisation of the institutions that might actually be able to regulate and hold them to account.
What can we learn from previous periods of austerity that is useful now, from the 1930s and so on? Are there any lessons that, as we enter a new period of austerity that we can learn from those times?
I think what we’ve learnt from previous periods of austerity is that you see this huge gap between the top and the bottom, but actually what’s generally associated with that is unrest, whether it’s political unrest or worse than that, war. We ignore that at our peril.
Can it be argued that there is an opportunity inherent in austerity? Is there a silver lining to it? Does it create a space to do things that weren’t possible before?
I think if there’s one thing that does come out of it, it’s that people are reassessing. It’s a time to reassess. The system is creaking. Supermarket directors privately will say, we actually know some of this is unsustainable, but we need help. We do need regulation to say “that sort of thing isn’t going to be possible in the long term”. They talk about this phrase that’s being introduced: ‘choice editing’. We may not be able to have food from all round the world whenever we want at a price we can afford. Actually, some of it may be too unsustainable because there’s not enough water or it requires too much energy for transporting it or growing it in the wrong season. Those things, we may have to stop assuming we can have. We never used to have them, it’s only a recent phenomenon that we are able to have those things.
I think the other thing is the attitude to waste is changing. We’ve had, just in the last couple of weeks, a major supermarket, Tesco, actually being very open about just how much of its bagged salad goes to waste, which was quite ironic for me as I wrote a whole chapter about bagged salad and how dependent on exploitative labour most of it has been. And now we’ve got people saying that a great deal of it is thrown away, and maybe we need to rethink.
So I think austerity, very painfully for those in the bottom half, is opening up these questions at all levels.
In the Portas review it said that 97% of all groceries are sold through just 8,000 supermarkets. We’ve arrived in that situation, and the government is less and less willing to regulate or intervene. What can communities do? What can they do to start to shift that?
I think communities are probably one of the few ways we can actually start to change this. This industry is so powerful. People are running frightened of facing it and changing it. Rebellion always starts with small changes, and it will have to be from the ground up. Interestingly enough, for me when I look at what’s been successful in terms of taking on these huge power bases, it is actually the sort of asymmetric power of people on the ground or small NGOs, who use the same technology that the food industry has used to globalise itself and create this very concentrated system. They’re being disrupted.
I’m thinking, for example, of the Greenpeace campaign against soya being sourced from deforested parts of the Amazon, where Greenpeace activists were able to globalise in the way that the industry has and pop up all over the place attacking, or protesting outside, key companies, factories and offices and embarrass them in a way that nobody else had done before.
I think creating food companies who are dealing directly with producers, all that can happen on a small scale. Something bigger will grow from it, but it will take a long time. That again may be possibly another silver lining of austerity, that people are more receptive to that sort of stuff. They’re having to work harder to think how they can find stuff they can afford. There is this great burgeoning of interest in the producer groups and food co-ops and street markets.
It is, to me, the most appalling indictment of our current political system that we’ve got half a million people in the UK, which is one of the most affluent countries in the world, using Food Banks because they simply can’t afford to eat. At the same time, if you go to developing countries that are some of the biggest food producers, you can find food there is being produced on wages so low that even people in work can’t afford to feed their families. That, to me, says the current system has to be rebuilt.
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