Early Capable Guardian meeting at Acomb Library

We understand that Labour Councillors are refusing to support the Capable Guardian neighbourhood policing project which has made a huge contribution to reducing anti social behaviour and other types of crime in the Westfield and Dringhouses areas over the last few years.

The work is now being subsumed into Ward Committee processes which themselves have fallen into disrepute recently following cuts to funding and reductions in the number of meetings held and the number of newsletters issued.

The Capable Guardian Scheme started in 2008 and initially involved voluntary groups, businesses and public bodies like the Police, Council, and the Safer York Partnership. Resources were pooled to address the incidence of nuisance neighbours,

Later the scheme was developed to encompass a wider range of activities and was credited with the sharp fall in crime seen in the area between 2008 and 2011.

The York Council executive has taken the decision to introduce a window of opportunity in which expressions of interest to challenge service provision can be submitted. This will be between 1 March and 30 April each year, starting in 2013.

Challenges received could trigger a decision to procure some services on the open market, paving the way for communities to help shape and run local services for the local community.

Unfortunately, by then, services like Beckfield Lane recycling centre and the Acomb Council office will have been long gone.

Boundary of scheme. click to enlarge

It looks like it will be a low key launch tomorrow (Sunday 1st July) for the new “All York” bus ticket. At an introductory price of £4.50 Adult (usually £5.00) and £10.00 Family*, an All York Day ticket allows a day’s unlimited travel on most operators’ services for journeys wholly within the City of York area.

Most operators are now showing the new ticket option on their web sites. For example, information from First confirms the discount introductory offer of £4-50 will apply until the end of August and the ticket will be valid on Park and Ride Services. A weekly ticket will be available from the autumn. http://www.firstgroup.com/ukbus/york/tickets/all_york

There are still questions to be answered about the costs of the scheme which may affect the fare for about 4% of bus journeys made in the City.

The Councils web site also contains the following details.
(more…)

North Yorkshire Police will open the recruitment process for the Special Constabulary on Monday 2 July 2012.

See http://tinyurl.com/York-Special-Constable

The campaign launches as those who were recruited last year draw near to the completion of their training. The latest attestation ceremony took place at York Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday 27 June 2012, when 15 new special constables were sworn in. (more…)

A new piece of equipment which will reduce the amount of time police spend at the scene of collisions is now operational.

Officers have taken delivery of a 3D laser scanner which has the capability to picture the entire collision site, allowing officers to examine the scene back at the station on a computer.

This advance in the technology available to investigating officers means that following collisions police will be able to leave the scene much sooner, resulting in less disruption to the public and fewer diversions. (more…)

click to enlarge

The organisers of the Community Garden on Cornlands Road write;
“We have suffered some setbacks due to the crazy weather, vandalism issues and also changes to the Dig In team but the playground is slowly being transformed and we have been enjoying our weekly gardening clubs, we have some dedicated enthusiastic locals who are making the garden blossom. The broad beans are nearly ready and the peas are flowering, we have built a compost bin and we have lots of ideas for the future. We want more people to come along to garden and learn about food growing, or if you just fancy a cup of tea and a chat please join us.
We will be at the garden on either a Tuesday 5pm – 7pm or Thursday 3pm – 5pm each week.

If you use Facebook search for YWT Dig In and you can keep up to date with Cornlands and also the other two gardens we have created so far; Brailsford Crescent in Clifton and also Hull Road Park. We shall soon be starting work on the fourth community garden which will be in The Groves.

North Yorkshire Police will be carrying out mobile safety camera enforcement on the following routes between Wednesday 27 June and Tuesday 3 July 2012.

•A64 between Whitwell Hill and Barton Hill
•A64 between Barton-le-Willows and Jinnah
•A64 west-bound Bowbridge Farm Tadcaster
•A64 east-bound Bowbridge Farm Tadcaster
•York Road, Haxby, York
•A1237 Monks Cross, York
(more…)

There is something rather ‘Alice in Wonderland’ about the current UK economic debate. The Coalition argues that it is taking historically tough action to bring down the deficit and curb the national debt. The evidence just does not support this assertion. Labour meanwhile asserts that it is the Coalition’s fiscal toughness which has driven the UK back into recession, even though the differences between the Coalition’s approach and Labour’s are minimal.

In short, it suits both sides in this argument to pretend that the dividing lines between their two economic approaches are wider than they are: it maintains the pretence that the electorate faces a great ideological choice between the Coalition and Labour. This illusion is promoted by a media which is also much happier to portray imagined conflict than it is to present the messy reality.

The closer reality is that neither the Coalition nor Labour is at all sure how to respond to the current economic slowdown. The growth of the Blair/Brown years was driven by a massive expansion of personal and government debt, as Tim Morgan has noted here in his pamphlet The Quest for Change and Renewal:

Between 2000 and 2009, the big drivers of the economy were private borrowing and public spending. Reflecting this, the CREF (construction, real estate and finance) sectors expanded rapidly on the back of private borrowing while big increases in real public spending drove up output from HEPA (health, education and public administration) … the rapid growth between 2000 and 2009 in both CREF (+42%) and HEPA (+28%) masked a languishing in the rest of the economy (–5%), with real output from manufacturing plunging by 26%.

These differential rates of growth left a huge proportion of the economy incapable of growth. In 2009, the public spending driven HEPA sector accounted for 19% of all economic output, whilst borrowing-dependent CREF activities represented a further 40%. Add in a retail sector beleaguered by the squeeze on real disposable incomes and almost 70% of the economy is incapable of growth. Thus seen, Britain’s growth prospects are grim, because a huge proportion of the economy is skewed towards, and dependent upon, the dead-and-buried drivers of private borrowing and public spending. And growth is critical to the Coalition’s fiscal plan, because that plan cannot work unless revenues increase in response to a brisk expansion in output.

The usual attempts at an economic fix have failed, as consumers, companies and government de-leverage after a decade or more of maxing out their debt. The Government (both Coalition and then Labour) has tried to boost private spending by keeping interest rates at close to zero, while the Government (both Coalition and then Labour) has injected huge sums of public money into the economy — some £825bn through a combination of deficit spending and quantitative easing. So far none of this has worked, though it may of course have prevented the situation from becoming even worse.

Conclusion

The first step toward a diagnosis is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. Yet that isn’t currently happening in our debates on the economy. Political debate instead turns on the minute differences which separate the Coalition’s and Labour’s remarkably similar economic approach.

It suits the political parties, and it suits the media. But as a result myths are taking hold — that the Coalition is embarking on ‘slash and burn’ austerity, or that the national debt is being wiped clear — which distort the reality of the situation. And this only makes it harder to begin grappling with our problems.

http://stephentall.org/

Trying directly to compare and contrast two different economies such as the UK’s and US’s is tricky. Nonetheless, many, especially on the left, have pointed to Obama’s policies — and the relative success of the US economic recovery — as evidence that the Coalition’s supposedly more extreme austerity policies are therefore flawed.

Yet it’s hard to square this direct comparison with reality. In fact, Obama cut federal spending by 0.9 per cent in real terms from 2010/11 to 2011/12, identical to the UK’s average real term cuts across this parliament. And, as this graph shows, the US deficit reduction plan is forecast to be ‘faster and almost as far’ as the UK’s:

(Graph from The Spectator; no live web-link.)

Fiscally, then, there is more similarity between the US approach and the UK’s. If you want to look for an Obama comparison that holds, you’d be better placed looking at the similarities between his taxation policies and those of the Lib Dems.

The present dire state of the UK economy has led many to argue that Ed Balls’ repeated warnings, originally delivered in his Bloomberg speech in August 2010, that the Coalition Government is cutting ‘too far, too fast, have been justified. As we’ve seen, however, the reality is somewhat different: public spending in real terms does not even start to reduce until next year (2012-13), and even then it shrinks by just 1% of GDP.

It is true, though, that Labour’s publicly declared plans for the deficit at the 2010 general election were more modest in scope than those adopted by the Coalition. It is quite another question whether they would have stuck to them: after all, it was Labour’s Alistair Darling who warned of ‘cuts deeper than Thatcher’, and Liam Byrne who admitted there was no money left. But let us assume Labour would have done what they said they would: what then would have been the result for the British economy?

(Graph from Centre for Policy Studies; data from Ernst&Young ITEM club.)

This is a counter-factual question which has been assessed by the Ernst&Young ITEM team using a model identical to the Treasury’s to work out the macroeconomic impact of sticking to Labour’s fiscal plans between 2010 and 2012.

The results? Well, under the most likely scenario of Labour’s looser fiscal policy (identified in the graph below as Labour 2), economic growth would have been fractionally lower (2.0%) than under the Coalition (2.1%) in 2010, identical in 2011 (0.7%) and slightly higher in 2012 (0.7% cf 0.4%):

Overall, the marginally higher growth of Labour’s looser fiscal policy would have resulted in 70,000 fewer unemployed. However, that reduction would have been obtained with an increase in debt across the three years of £26 billion — the equivalent of £370,000 per job — to be repaid by the nation later.

In any case, Labour’s ‘too far, too fast’ mantra is built on sand. The reality is the Coalition has so slowed down its original deficit reduction programme that it is now less stringent than Alistair Darling’s. Yes, that’s right — the Coalition’s fiscal plans under David Cameron are looser than Labour’s fiscal plans were under Gordon Brown: