Wednesday 1 February 2023 – Culture and Technology Lock

A long time ago in New Barnet, I worked in a customer service call centre for British Gas.  This was in the Inbetween Time.  After British Gas was the national gas supplier when you paid your bill in a high street gas showroom, and before the Druids invented the Internet, when you moved house, you had to call a customer service call centre and tell them your new address.

Our call centre covered an area mysteriously named by British Gas as “North Thames”.  Why this was was never explained to us (in fact nothing was explained to us and it was shocking to see how people were simply rounded up off the street and put on the phones – I’d never even seen a gas bill before – and told to help customers with their gas bills and pre-payment metres) which turned out to be what was Essex before Greater London was created in 1965: from the River Lee to Southend-on-Sea.  In this old county are many different accents and so a phonetic alphabet evolved to help with spelling out addresses on the phone.  The NATO phonetic alphabet wasn’t used except in parts but, what was weird was, everyone in the call centre and across the county commonly understood what the alphabet was.  It went thus:

          a for apple

          b for boy

          c for cat

          d for dog

          e for elephant

          f for Freddy

          g for George

          h for ‘edge

          i for igloo

          j for Johnny

          k for knickers

          l for Lima

          m for mother

          n for nobody

          o for orange

          p for Peter

          q for Queenie

          r for Robert

          s for sugar

          t for Tommy

          u for omborella

          v for Victor

          w for William

          x for I don’t know what

          y for Yankee

          zee for zeebra

Corporations, when contained, evolve their own cultures and languages to cater for the peculiarities of what they are trying to achieve; the more peculiar and warped from reality the objectives, the more peculiar and warped from mainstream culture and understanding the language.  The international nature and constant movement (we were always very busy) of the modern and deprived population of East London meant there was almost a desperate refugee camp-feel about the customers who would call us and, with it, it made sense that they reverted to Americanisms like “zee” and “zeebra” like refugees around the world revert to the American dollar as an international currency.  The NATO phonetic alphabet is designed to aid comprehension over the airwaves, not to make it easy to remember.  That is why it is “u” for “uniform”; to use the pronunciation of the letter in the word.  And “c” for “Charlie”; to differentiate the soft “c” from the hard “k” for “kilo”.  Reverting to the nursery words to learn the alphabet, and common English names, albeit with a slightly ethnic bent, makes sense because they are easier to remember and we all share these same experiences, and we’re not in a war zone, so hearing it over the phone as opposed to a field radio is less of a problem.  Some of them are a bit random because, once upon a time, somebody couldn’t think on the spot what a letter stood for and panicked, and their outburst fell into folklore and it stuck.  But, ultimately, despite my efforts here to explain how a culture evolves, it is complicated, lost to time and of its people.  Nonetheless, let us compare the diverging cultures of two English-speaking regions: North America and the UK.

“American football is too dangerous, and it should be abolished” was the Guardian’s Dave Bry’s conclusion in his review of Will Smith’s new movie, Concussion in 2016.  It “is based on one of the many books detailing the mountain of scientific evidence proving that the sport shortens lives.  Efforts to make it safer with better equipment will not work, because the damage happens inside the players’ skulls… [and I call] for an end to the NFL.

“But… [t]he onus is on us, the fans… who pay the players to hurt themselves for our enjoyment… That’s where the NFL tips into immorality… We don’t need to watch football – we choose to – and everything we get out of it is non-essential… It satisfies something deep inside us: bloodlust…”.

 

Er, no it doesn’t.  This was an opinion piece online where you can post a comment at the bottom which I felt compelled to do: “If wanting to watch American football is inherent to the human condition, why do only Americans do it, hence the name?”  It was supposed to be a rhetorical point hence the “hence the name” bit, however, it got 14 replies ranging from ‘it’s already here, Wembley gets sold out’, ‘it’s coming’, and, ‘the NFL has failed many times over the years to establish the game internationally”.

I think it is fair to say we like and/or find intriguing American culture in the UK more than, say, Togoan or Romanian.  As a Tottenham Hotspur (Association Football Club) supporter, in the 2002/3 season I remember fans chanting “U! S! A!” proudly at the first team and USA international goalkeeper, Kasey Keller.  Although great players for Spurs (at least occasionally), we never enjoyed so much the vicarious jingoism of cheering on Emmanuel Adebayor or Ilie Dumitrescu.  Today, as part of the new stadium development, White Hart Lane hosts NFL games, but, unlike association football, I still feel that the appeal of American football is far from mainstream in this country.  NFL showcasing competitive matches at Wembley watched by a full house is impressive and has come to sell-out crowds at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.  But it is still only shown in the early hours of the morning on ITV4 and, as big a capacity as Wembley and Tottenham Hotspur stadiums have, this is still a niche audience on a national scale. American football has yet to permeate into our culture and society. I certainly do not think it is evidence that the thirst for violence satisfied by the NFL is inherent in the human psyche and compels us to watch it because of its brain-sloshing effects (that is, on the players).

But do we Brits know what we are missing?  If American football were broadcast to a larger audience and we managed to overcome the initial boredom of how long a game is, how many timeouts there are to determine tactics and “go to a commercial break” and watch a game where the main aim of the players is to conceal the whereabouts of the ball from the opposition and, therefore, the audience, would we crave more airtime and a greater capacity for violence in the rules of the game to satisfy our bloodlust?  The answer is, we don’t know, hence the NFL’s tepid commercial foray into the British market.  We don’t know what we will demand until it is supplied.

The culture associated with American football evolved in America because of environmental and social forces.  So, what is it about the American environment and society that makes their mores and demands so different to ours?  I’ve been to America once; to Las Vegas, where I stayed in a friend’s family’s house off of a strip of tarmac laid through the Nevada desert, in a cluster of other houses, that passes for suburbia there.  One morning, our host took us shopping to the local supermarket (such is the appeal of a week in Las Vegas).  We drove, naturally, because that is the norm there.  But what needs to be remembered is that that norm is born of the environment.  This is partly the physical environment.  Just to open the front door required the family to devise a system of warnings for everyone else in the house to put on their sunglasses.  Even if you wanted to get to the supermarket by means other than car, you couldn’t.  There is no public transport because there aren’t that many residents in the desert to pay for it.  And why would they when cars (and “trucks”, “SUVs” and “gas”) are relatively cheap?  In any case, you can’t walk because there is no sidewalk.  This is mostly because no-one would even think about walking because of the heat and the distance.  The supermarket might be “local” but that just means it is a 20-minute drive.  In North London, a 20-minute drive equates to 24 feet, 9 inches.  In the Nevada desert on a wide strip of tarmac so long and with so little traffic they didn’t even bother painting road markings on it, it equates to 16 miles.  The distance, heat and lack of highway infrastructure also excludes bicycles.  I certainly didn’t see any.  I think cycling and walking might even be illegal on the roads there which might be life-preserving, rather than punitive, legislation if it is.

Subsequently, everything in Nevada is done in a car.  On our way, we “pulled in” to a drive-thru Starbucks.  Our host and driver didn’t ask us if we minded because it was simply part of her shopping routine and, anyway, it seemed natural to even me as the behemoth Starbucks blocked the horizon on which the supermarket sat.  She drove up to the window and asked for a “Venti Hot Chocolate”.  This turned out to be what they call a 20oz cup (a pint), and a quarter of a healthy woman’s calorific intake for the day.  What was most impressive, though, was when she flicked a button on the dashboard and a cup-holder sprung out that held the cup perfectly.  Her car was compatible with Starbucks!  Or Starbucks was compatible with her car, I don’t know which, but I assume all drive-thru drinks purveyors and car manufacturers have colluded so that Americans can use their car like a home wherever they roam.  In the UK, we don’t even have compatible phone chargers yet.  We don’t shout across the office “Has anyone got a phone charger?”, we shout, “Has anyone got a charger for an iPhone 8?”  “No” comes a reply, “I have a Samsung.”

What Americans like has been formed by their environment and wouldn’t necessarily be popular in this country.  By whatever metamorphic process transformed the wide open spaces into a purpose-built service sector catering to their comforts assuring Americans that all customers are created equally egalitarianism made this happen, NFL makes the big bucks there, and we, with our inner cities and class consciousness, the enormously rich Premier League here.

I’m sure it is more complicated than the physical environment and class alone, but I don’t know what else it is.  I grew up in the 80s and we weren’t exposed to American culture on telly like we are now.  Friends and Frasier were yet to arrive in the 90s and I was a bit too young to get Cheers.  Grease, Happy Days and Scooby-Doo gave us a taste of 50s and 60s Americana, Starsky & Hutch and Cagney & Lacey showed us that Americans from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts are a bit feral because they eat their dinner in the street, something we had never seen before.  I assumed we weren’t supposed to know what The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team and Knight Rider were supposed to be about, but I didn’t care because a car jumped over something in every episode! And we learned that people in any line of work could regularly investigate major crimes, including murder, from Quincy, M.E., Murder She Wrote and CHiPs.  But these programmes were light entertainment with an emphasis on “light” and “formulaic” and we didn’t learn that much about the American people beyond the accents (perhaps with the exception of Cagney & Lacey which was genuinely groundbreaking for its time for a few reasons).

Although we were not like the French savouring a couple of hours over lunch each day with a glass of wine, street food and eating on the go was a novelty we saw on American telly and not part of our culture in the early 80s.

For something less episodic, we had Dallas and Dynasty, but their antics were indiscernible to me to the nonsense of Soap and Benson.  The latter were supposed to be parodies of the former but when all of them are as unreal, and sometimes even surreal, as each other to a boy growing up in the North London inner city, how does one recognise what the latter are being satirical about?  I didn’t understand why Soowelhan spent her day living in a stately home moodily plotting revenge while sipping bourbon (isn’t that a type of biscuit?) with ice from a crystal-cut bowl on a silver trolley in the foyer.  If I was supposed to infer from this that JR was driving her to alcoholism, then why did Miss Ellie make the maids keep fresh ice in the hall all day?  In my formative years, shouldn’t I understand from this that drinking at any time of the day is not just normal, but expected, especially since the maids would have had to replenish the ice often in the Texan heat?  I thought it was just their affluence that meant that ice was universally available.  In Tottenham, we only had ice in our drinks at Christmas because we were so poor.  The rest of the year round, we drank our Rola Cola at room temperature.

Sue Ellen drinking bourbon in the foyer of Southfork.

Dallas to me was simply a mythical place populated by people with exotic names (except for Jock who I didn’t really know since he died in 1981 and any reference to him since conjured up an image in my mind of Russ Abbot’s C. U. Jimmy) from which deriving any sense of culture in America, never mind satire of it, was an irrelevance.  (Incidentally, I watched the first episode of the reboot of Dallas in 2012 to see what the appeal might have been of the original.  It started off with some characters from the original including Bobby, JR and Sue Ellen, and introduced the next generation including a grown-up John Ross Junior and his contemporaries, acquaintances and colleagues, discovering a new oil well on Ewing land, and the development of an alternative fossil fuel by “Big MegaCorp Corporation” (a bigger threat to the Ewing empire than even Cliff Barnes’s set-up).  So far, so good.  However, it plunged so quickly into a diluvian flood of networked twists and both Machiavellian and internecine plots amongst the new characters whose actors all looked and acted the same and obviously all shared Joey Tribbiani as their acting coach to learn the art of reacting (this does not mean acting again) by arching their eyebrows equally to show scorn, vengeance, bad news and pain, and proving his dictum that to work in American soap operas means that those applicants who didn’t manage to out-perform these “actors” in an audition are going to have to become a lot more attractive, that the commitment needed from me to follow what was going on was going to require an Excel spreadsheet.)

Instead, we had homegrown programmes like Blackadder from which we learned from Ade Edmondson’s Red Baron that, for the Germans, the toilet is a mundane and functional item.  For us lucky English, we find it so amusing, it is a basis of an entire culture.  This, I could relate to.  The British people’s relationship with the toilet throughout history has been one of disgust and necessary evil with which to deal.  Our sewerage system has been slow to develop; from what Monty Python showed us it to be with peasant muck collectors in The Holy Grail, a lack of sanitation and the Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages, and the cholera outbreaks in London that led to the building of the London network of sewers by Bazalgette in Victorian times.  Our culture has evolved with a black humour in our toileting and ablutions that confounds other nationalities.  To them, the bathroom is functional and even luxurious.  To we British, the toilet is to be secreted away outside or at the back of the building.  We only have toilets in public spaces at all, such as shopping centres and sports stadia, or else the public wouldn’t or simply couldn’t come to them.  Even then, toilet facilities are provided by service providers and retailers with reluctant disdain.  They are grubby at best.  A register is often taped to the wall on which a truculent Saturday-Job-teenager’s signature is scrawled to assure us that, despite that smell, they are meeting the minimum requirements of the law that you don’t catch TB.  Starbucks in the USA can’t do enough to provide every convenience and comfort to their customers.  In a UK Starbucks, the toilet is a converted broom cupboard which combines as the ladies, gents, disabled toilet, baby changing facility and broom cupboard.  Why are the baby changing facilities in the toilet?  Cram a hundred people in a room and give them each a coffee while one dad is in the only toilet changing baby!  And we didn’t have Starbucks in the Dark Ages; this set-up is a modern arrangement to cosset customers.  We British just put up with it, and occasionally make jokes, because it has always been this way.  We don’t know any better, so we don’t demand anything better.

Bereft of our history, North Americans expect more and, like with the Red Baron, these differences can cause discombobulation.  When I was a student in the early 90s, I had a summer job in a restaurant in Hyde Park.  Most of our customers were tourists; some from the USA.  However, like I have pointed out, I still had a parochial naivety.  A man approached me at the counter and asked me in an American drawl, “Can you tell me where the restrooms are?”  I looked at him blankly, and he at me, but he had no idea what my confusion was and so didn’t offer any further explanation of his needs, but I didn’t know what he was asking for.  Eventually I had to say something, so I told him, if he was tired, he could sit at one of the tables.  It was his turn to not know what I was talking about and we continued to stare at each other in a confused and desperate need of one another to say something.  Anything!  It would never have occurred to me that the smelly closet at the back of the restaurant just by the back door next to the bins could be thought of by anyone as restful.  It was the customer toilet.  And he needed my help to locate it, but he didn’t know what these limey foreigners were saying or why they couldn’t understand English.

The Red Baron (right) confused by why the British find the toilet so amusing.  For the Germans, it is a mundane, functional thing.

More recently, a Canadian acquaintance living here, and visiting my flat, told me they wouldn’t put up with it there.  “It’s medeeval!  And why do you have separate hot and cold faucets?  Do you enjoy either scolding or freezing your hands when you wash them?  If not, what is the benefit of them over a faucet mixer?”  We have had tap mixers in England since I can remember; they are not a new thing.  They are universally better than separate hot and cold taps.  If for some reason I have yet to discern you only want scolding hot water, you can just turn on the hot water tap.  The same goes for freezing cold water.  But if, in the more likely, and only situation when using a tap I can think of, you want a mixture of hot and cold to make warm, a mixer mixes the two extremes.  But still we have separate hot and cold taps!  When I moved into my flat I own now, the kitchen sink had a tap mixer, but the bathroom sink, where I more often wash my hands, didn’t.  The bathroom looked like it was renovated relatively recently, and at roughly the same time as the kitchen, and certainly not before the 70s, so why did the previous occupants choose separate hot and cold taps for the bathroom?  The gents in all the shopping centres I have been to have separate taps (mostly with the push-down plunger), as do the changing rooms in our local leisure centre and toilets in the pubs in London.

“And why do you not have diffusers!?” he screamed as he turned on the tap and the water bounced off the ceramic of the sink all over his trousers so it looked like he wet himself.  For those who don’t know, a tap diffuser is a small mesh that fits in the spout of a tap that transforms the water into a softer flow so as not to spray everywhere.  “How much does it cost to fit one; half a loon, eh?”

“I wouldn’t know where to buy one or fit it.”, I replied meekly.

Our acceptance of the crapness of the crapper demonstrates a culture consistency that stalls attempts by suppliers to innovate.  We can’t demand what we don’t know.  So how can neo-liberal economic policy supply it?  In neoclassical economics, any reason the consumer insists on using a less good technology is due to cultural familiarity.  This, they call, “Technology Lock”.  Innovation is denoted by the constant, “A”.  It is outside of the scope of the invisible hand.  Nonetheless, it is the free market that self-styled political economists like Daniel Hannan attribute to human kind’s slow crawl out of poverty, deprivation and economic exclusion but, although it has been constant, left to the devices of the market, it seems to me the evolution of British plumbing remains unnecessarily slow.

Hannan is a former Conservative MEP, current adviser to the Board of Trade and thinker for the Tory Party.  Leaning heavily into teachings of the economist Friedrich von Hayek (most famously an adviser to, and one of Margaret Thatcher’s “Seven Wise Men”), Hannan told us in 2015 in a blog on Christmas Eve that “the world in 2015 was a better place than in 2014; and the world in 2016 will be better still.”  Statistics will tell you that the world is more peaceful, better fed, is greener and healthier, as well as measurably getting better in other measurable positive attributes.  He tells us, “In 1990, 43 per cent of people in developing countries lived in extreme poverty, defined as an income of $1 a day or less at 1990 prices.  Today, that proportion has fallen to 21 per cent.  Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty – now $1.90 a day – will have fallen, this year, to less than 10 per cent.”  He goes on to explain what brought about this “miracle”, “Not state aid or U.N. programmes, but free trade and specialisation.  Decades of government-to-government grants barely dented poverty in Africa.  But the spread of mobile telephones – whose companies are motivated unashamedly by profit – has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of squalor.”

I don’t doubt that, through human ingenuity motivated by personal gain, we have solved some of the problems faced by our ancestors, and development in scientific sectors has converged to make life easier for most of us medically, socially and economically.

This is the basic premise of neo-liberalism: government intervention barely makes a dent, but free trade will find a way to improve our lot.  If only we would just let the people get on with trying to make a profit, everyone will profit from these people’s ingenuity.  It is this “trickle-down effect” our Government is trying to promote.  To take this idea to the next logical step, knowing this, if a group, even those elected democratically, were to then intervene, their purpose must be to be authoritarian.  Hayek told us that, “The various modern authoritarian or dictatorial governments have of course no less proclaimed ‘social justice’ as their chief aim.  We have it on the authority of Mr Andrei Sakharov [a Soviet dissident] that Soviet [communist] Russians are the victims of terror that attempts to conceal itself behind the slogan of social justice”.

From this, Hannan might describe the future as at risk of being terrorised by a government with the aim of intervening in the natural way of things trying to improve things for the less fortunate when, after all, the market, if left to its own devices, will find a way to do this better than any room of elected men commanding the economy.  Men in a room cannot know enough about all the moving parts in a modern economy because the parts are too many.  With the best will in the world and the grand pledges of left-wing politicians to force and forge improvement, the dynamics of businesses, motivated simply by profit, will find the best way.  With finite opportunities to make a profit, businesses pitted against one another to profit from them will compete to find the best outcome for those who consume them who, in turn, are free to choose the outcomes offered by those competing businesses.  Some businesses will fail because individual men in business know no more than those men in a room in a civic centre.  And, through perseverance and learning because there is a profit to be made, as well as sheer chance that cannot be actualised unless you give it a go (you have to be in it to win it), other businesses and entrepreneurs will find an outcome that people want the most.  Those that succeed make a profit and, through this proactivity and ingenuity, make the world a better place for all of us.  The market finds the best way.

Those businesses and entrepreneurs that fail will no longer exist in the market.  Those that succeed will remain such that all that remain will be the successful, the innovators, those that found the most successful way.  Then, continuing in the market to satisfy their own greed, they will see best for the good of the electorate because the successful in the market, motivated by reward, will survive.  The competition starts again and the outcomes for consumers improves once more, thus, what we have to consume must constantly be improving because it is continuously preferred by consumers.  Without market competition, there is no reason to think those elected, just because they intended to find the best way, will know how.  Hannan explains that only those elected that know who knows best, and roll back the frontiers of the state and get out of the way of a competitive and motivated market, understand how to lift people out of poverty.  So why doesn’t the free market work when the council tries to use it?

Yesterday, the Senior Development Manager leading on the Hartopp & Lannoy housing development sent me his draft award report for CAB for me to comment on the social value measures proposed by the developer which won the competitive bidding process.  If you remember from RIP Social Value, this was a condemned housing estate being rebuilt with a plan for half of the new flats to be sold or rented for private sale and the other half rented for social rent.  He has been planning the development since its demolition was completed in 2021 and, last year, I intervened to suggest we don’t leave it to market competition in the open bidding process to determine what social value is offered by the winning bidder.  Unlike Hannan, I didn’t trust market forces to find the best outcome.  Appealing to him and a member of his team, the Regeneration Manager, I suggested adding direction in the tender specification on what we, the local government, with all its strategies, wanted, to the value of 10%.  Initially, they, more conservative than I, thought it was a terrible idea to tell developers what to bid.  So I changed tactics and I asked them what did their team want from social value contributions?  This got them thinking.  The Regeneration Manager talked about a disused caretaker’s lodge on site that was not part of the plans or budget, but we would benefit from the developer refurbishing it for affordable accommodation for key workers, in particular teachers.  Bidders could be invited to propose in-kind contributions and volunteering expert staff hours to refurbish it.  This would easily be covered by 10% of the value of the cost of development of the main estate.

Satisfied, I left them to it and yesterday I saw the proposal.  There was no mention of the caretaker’s lodge.  Instead, the winning bidder, Higgins Construction, proposed that they would employ 201 local residents on the construction of the development consisting exclusively of 40 long-term benefit claimants, 40 young residents not in employment, education or training, 40 ex-offenders, 10 disabled residents, 20 homeless residents, 14 mothers returning to work, 15 18-year-olds leaving local authority care and an additional 22 apprentices who fall into at least one of the above categories.  This is about 60% of the entire labour force required to build it.  The S106 target is 10% and almost all developers struggle to achieve even this.  If they are serious about this offer, which the Senior Development Manager has chosen, and stated in his award report, that they are, I wonder what is going to happen when 40 school-leavers turn up on Day 1 of construction with their lunch in one hand and a blueprint in the other, and the foreman points them to the big hole in the ground and tells them to build the thing in the plans?  What was the Senior Development Manager thinking?!  He actually wrote this proposal, in detail as I have done above, in the report.  I added my comments, simply saying that I didn’t think the offer was realistic.  Do I need to say more?  Or even this much?  And I replied to his email acknowledging that I had added my comments to his report.

I suspected what he was thinking: he thinks the council will not enforce social value so the whole exercise is academic, a procurement hoop to jump through, and CAB hasn’t been paying any attention to social value comments recently.  But that changed today.  The Head of Corporate Procurement, copied into the email with the report, replied to me copying everyone in:

“Paul,

“Just by way of a P.S. we intend to enshrine the [social value] offer made in the awarded bidders’ tender into a Schedule in the Contract [his capitalisations] and make as enforceable as we can. :) [His smiley face emoji.]

“[Head of Procurement]”

 

Hmmm, that will put the cat among the pigeons.  This is a £43m development (at least that is the price offered by Higgins).  These jobs and sundry smaller offers, which one can assume are not really meant either, amount to a proxy financial value of £4,071,218.95.  This means that, if Higgins doesn’t find this many mothers who want to return to the workplace on a construction site, and school leavers looking for their first job in skilled roles in most roles in a development including project managers, general labourers, plant drivers, traffic marshals, dryliners, electricians, groundworkers, pilers, CAD designers, site cleaners, supervisors, painters & decorators, steel fixers, scaffolders, fire marshals, landscapers, document controllers, concrete layers, data and electronic specialists, security, pipelayers, heating engineers, insulators and many, many more, the council will recoup this money from the developer’s budget.  And the Head of Procurement, sharing a smile in his email to me because he knows this is what I have been campaigning for for a year, is suddenly determined to make this his first contract to start on.  He’s right, it does make me smile.  But, unless someone tells the developer they have to make a grown-up offer instead of proposing this fantasy to CAB, then Higgins will have no intention of accepting this contract when they read the version with enforcement of social value newly enshrined in it.  I replied simply and as understated as I could muster,

“Thanks [Head of Corporate Procurement],

“The concern might be, though, if we suspect the social value proposal is unrealistic, we know in advance that financial remedies will be applied and that affects the financial viability of the project.”

 

To add to their woes, the procuring team doesn’t think the S106 contributions will realistically be delivered either (see RIP Social Value).  The Regeneration Manager followed up by emailing me:

“Hello Paul,

“Not sure I got this right.  Are we going to enforce S106 and get remedies for failure to achieve S106 targets using the construction contract?”

“Thanks,

“[Regeneration Manager]”

 

Where do I start?  No, we should enforce S106 using the S106 contract.  According to the Head of Corporate Procurement, we will enforce that they deliver what they proposed to deliver in the contract we enter into with them when we procure them to build Hartopp & Lannoy.  I don’t know what he means here by “construction contract” and I suspect neither does he so, assuming he just wants to know if we will ask for financial remedies for economic development S106 contributions we have already established his team had no intention of realistically imposing on the successful bidder either, I replied with a general answer, no longer caring if I was mansplaining because it was a stupid question, and there was no reason to think this case was any different from any other, so all I could do was assume he genuinely didn’t know or why else would he ask?:

“Hi [Regeneration Manager],

“Yes, planning conditions and obligations are enforced by a Local Planning Authority.  The financial remedies for non-delivery of S106 contributions are detailed in a S106 contract.”

 

He didn’t reply.  I don’t know if he, a senior local council officer responsible for procuring the construction of major developments, didn’t already know the basics of how planning works and this was actually useful information, if he thought I was taking the piss, or if he was asking about something else entirely which, if he was, I have no idea what that was (answers on a postcard please).

What a mess.  But, according to Hannan’s theory of the market, the council starting a competition for £43m should have unleashed the dogs of war.  These construction companies are well established; they are the survivors of an uncaring and harsh environment, the winners, the alpha males.  They have survived and thrived because they have historically found the best outcomes for their consumers, in this case, local authorities.  They command profits on developments of 14-20% because their entrepreneurial expertise and specialisms are worth it.  On this contract, that is up to £860,000 pure profit from public money.  In the battle with their competitors, they know they must submit the best offer, and it is these offerings that are dragging the world out of poverty.  How could I, a government officer, sitting in a room away from the action, a man shouting into the ether, vainly but dictatorially trying to apply the Local Authority’s authority, know that teachers need somewhere to live or else we won’t have teachers?  But the £860k, which could have easily been used to develop key worker accommodation, Hannan says is better placed with private developers as motivation to find the best outcome.  But then we learn that the free market solution is a meaningless fantasy?  Why?

Well, first of all, they won the contract.  And, secondly, they would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that meddling S106 and Social Value Officer, and they would want the contract.  But, otherwise, like American Football in the UK, councils don’t know what they want until businesses supply it and, until then, businesses don’t know if councils demand it.  And, like public toilets, tap mixers and diffusers in England, it has always been this way.  Private sector businesses do not have corporate social responsibility despite what they say (see Claiming Corporate Social Responsibility is Cheap) and we just accept it because it has always been this way.  It is our culture.