Ghost Town: Part Two
News of public-sector cuts is starting to drift in –at this stage, mostly in regard to local-council redundancies rather than the axe falling on public services. We are unlikely to know exactly what is going to be chopped, or chopped back, until after the general election. But I think all of us know that when the cuts are announced, they are going to be severe.
It’s very easy to take the view that the public sector is full of waste, red tape, political correctness gone mad and too many layers of management, and that cutting out the fat is something to be desired. If only life were as simple, as black and white, as this Daily Mail type of thinking makes out.
Of course, organisations the size of Birmingham City Council have areas where costs could be cut and where processes could be better. But large private-sector companies have also, in many cases, had to make huge costs-savings in the past year and have done so without having to put up with sniping about waste and red tape. The public sector, just like the private sector, is having to cut its cloth in recessionary times.
Many of the headlines about public-sector cuts will, quite rightly, focus on essential services, but in business terms, the development of our towns and cities is likely to be negatively affected for years to come. Birmingham City Council – the country’s largest authority – owns vast swathes of land in the city centre and may be forced to sell some of this to developers. Some good may come out of bad if it gets under-utilised land used for redevelopment and regeneration purposes. But this supposes there are developers out there looking to buy land.
What is clear is that the degree to which the public sector will be able to influence future development by partnering with the private sector and putting money into schemes will be severely curtailed
Ours is a region which still needs large-scale redevelopment. Brownfield land in the Black Country, North Staffordshire, North Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire needs to be redeveloped to provide homes for new businesses, which will create jobs and get the economy moving.
The alternative to this is unthinkable. I grew up in inner city Birmingham, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several years unemployed as part of UB40’s One in Ten generation. The Specials’ Ghost Town was very much the soundtrack to our existence. I would hate to see another generation living in a landscape of disused factories and boarded-up shops. Sadly, in some places, they already are.
My view is that the way out of a recession is to spend and get other people to spend. Whether it’s called Roosevelt New Dealism or Keynesian economics, it has worked before – think the US in the late 1930s and 1940s and the Marshall Plan in Germany after World War Two – but I accept that the political consensus seems to be to reduce debt.
Whatever your view, let’s not get into a them-and-us situation with regard to the public sector and the private sector. Radical – not reactionary – thinking is what is needed if we are to avoid Ghost Town: Part Two. Ominously, The Specials re-formed last year.
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