Tuesday 25 July – What If Oil Just Stopped?
What if, when you wake up tomorrow morning, oil, gas and coal no longer existed? What would happen? My first thought is, it would solve a lot of big problems: a main cause of the eye-watering inequality across the world, and the reason powering the horrible and divisive politics stemming from supporting a kleptocratic and strongman class across the developed world would be gone. And, more importantly, it would be a lot less likely the planet would be unable to sustain life by the end of this decade and we wouldn’t all die horribly of starvation and disease.
The smaller things will affect us all differently according to who we are, our lifestyles, material wealth, where we live and time. For example, Amazonian aboriginals might not notice much change whereas Rishi Sunak may struggle to heat his indoor pool. The residents of Uxbridge and South Ruislip would resent not getting to drive the most polluting vehicles around London. And Kylian Mbappe, perhaps the second best footballer in Europe (behind Harry Kane) would unlikely to be lost to sportswashing and the lows of Asian professional football.
But what about for someone pretty average like me? I am a middle-aged man living in a flat in Greater London working as a council officer. When I wake up tomorrow morning, the electricity and gas would be off. There would be no hot shower. There wouldn’t be any water whatsoever because pumps are powered by electricity. There would be no tea. Breakfast would be cold, likely cereal, but the milk warm because the fridge would be off, and all my food on the turn. Supermarkets wouldn’t be able to receive deliveries, not just because there are no delivery lorries, but because the front sliding door wouldn’t open. Cycling to wherever I had to be that morning would be a lot easier and safer because the cars strewn across the road would all be still, but there would be nowhere to go. The swimming pool would be closed for a hundred different reasons. Can’t log in to work because there would be no internet. No hospitals or emergency services and no communications whatsoever: WhatsApp, phones, travel. All our immediate thoughts would be where do I get drinking water and food now and how do I contact friends and family? In days, nuclear power plants across the world would go into meltdown because they would have no cooling pumps and the planet would be destroyed.
It would be pandemonium: riots, killings, looting. But not necessarily. Food and water are still there. Water can still be pumped. There are other forms of energy other than burning oil, gas and coal. Today, 51.5% of the UK National Grid is powered by renewable sources, and that’s with 13 years of a Tory Government not just not trying to generate or invest in renewable energy but actively curbing it and subsidising fossil fuel exploration and mining, much to their own profit. We just need to re-coordinate and do it quickly. And life would be much easier, fairer and it is hard to see how it wouldn’t be idyllic because, now, someone in Uxbridge said she voted Tory in the last byelection as a protest against ULEZ because, she said in an LBC Radio call-in, that she has a twenty-year-old car and can’t afford a new one but must visit her elderly relative across the other side of the borough to where no public transport goes to provide care because the relative has been abandoned by an under-resourced public transport infrastructure and NHS care system because the richest people on the planet, wealth rooted in fossil fuels, have lobbied for lower taxes or no-tax exile laws, and bribe, or fund campaigns for really dumb, impressionable and vulnerable people to become Prime Minister, to keep this completely transparent and nebulous low-tax and offshore tax evasion arrangement ruse an actual thing.
Wouldn’t it be good, too, if we just did social
value? It seems to me it would solve a
lot of problems caused by plain greed. As
I’ve previously said, councillors at Hammersmith & Fulham Council have
decided we just do it: the written policy is quite simplistic in that sense
and, as far as I know, as far as they know, we are doing it. But we’re not and officers at the council who
make decisions, in juxtaposition to the simplicity of the Social Value policy,
have gone to elaborate lengths to invent complexities and, so, fudge it.
As I explained previously in Culture and Technology Lock, Higgins Construction was commissioned to build the council’s new £43m Hartopp & Lannoy housing estate in Fulham. In their bid, they proposed employing on its construction 201 local hardest-to-reach residents facing specified barriers to employment. In the award report in January upon which senior management in the Contract Assurance Board (CAB) made a decision to award the contract, I commented simply that this proposal is unrealistic. It is unrealistic because I estimated that 201 residents employed accounted for about 60% of the entire labour needed to build the development. The Head of Corporate Procurement responded to my comment assuring me that the proposal would be “enshrined” in the contract and enforceable with financial remedies from Higgins to the same proxy value as the Employment and Skills social value measures proposed: £3,973,383.40 and, therefore, it would get delivered.
Seemingly, CAB awarded the contract, with their fantastical and enforceable Social Value proposal, to Higgins. In it, I assume, are the council’s S106 planning obligations that 10% of the labour on the development are Hammersmith & Fulham residents and a requirement to agree an Employment and Skills Plan (ESP) to engage, train and employ these residents with the council’s S106 Officer, me; a planning obligation that must be discharged before construction can be allowed to commence. The contract will also include their committed social value contributions which, worryingly, are commitments to train and employ on the development's construction even more local residents.
Higgins’s Director (no less) of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), arranged to meet me on 16 May to discuss the ESP. In the meeting, despite being a company director of ESG, she struggled to understand my queries about how she was going to incorporate the planning targets into the social value ones: is it the same residents that will be supported under both sets of targets and therefore the same plan? She seemed (or pretended; I honestly don’t know) to not understand my question but, after my explanation as above, and explained that the alternative would be that the two targets relate to two separate groups of residents, making the total target higher and harder, she said that she did. I agreed to send her a simple ESP template which would prompt some of the points she could include. She said she would draft a delivery plan for all the engagement, training and jobs for H&F residents Higgins has committed to in its contract with the council.
On 30 June, the Director sent me her draft ESP for the planning targets. As well as being little more than a confirmation of what the planning obligations are, a long list of construction trade jobs and a vague promise to speak to some training providers at some unspecified time during the development, there was no reference to the social value targets. Prompted by my template, she did include the forecast total labour for the development which is 200. This forecast would explain why she didn’t reference the social value targets because the 201 residents employed would account for, not 60% as I forecast, but 100.5% of the labour force. We’re now beyond the realms of the social value proposal being fantastical to being mathematically impossible. I’m not a lawyer, but I assume they are still enforceable with financial remedies in their contract; enough, the Head of Corporate Procurement thought in this case, to protect the sanctity of the Social Value policy. But, as usual with most senior council managers, he forgot to take into account reality.
On Friday 14 July, I fed back to the Director explaining that her draft ESP did not take into account her social value targets or what number of hard-to-reach residents would be engaged, their barriers to work overcome, trained and employed.
The following Wednesday she replied to me with an even longer list of random construction jobs to be employed on the development and blamed her lack of reference to the targets for which this was a delivery plan on my S106 template ESP which didn’t prompt her to state the social value targets. To have this level of initiative to specify all the targets, she is implying to me, is obviously not needed to be a director of a major homes developer in the UK. Now that I’ve told her, she still didn’t add them. She didn’t say why this time. She concluded:
“If you have any further points please do let me know as soon as possible, along with the project team we are keen to get the plan finalised to discharge the [planning] obligation [to agree an ESP to deliver the planning targets].”
No, I have no further points, but I still have my point that we agreed that this plan would incorporate both the planning and social value targets, an agreement she has chosen to ignore here without explanation.
I replied the same day, starting with:
“Thanks [Director],
“I note that the targets still do not include the social value targets. Sorry if the ESP template has not been useful and feel free to format a document as will best accommodate your plan.”
I went on to reiterate the social value targets, that we agreed that the ESP should and would include these, and why. I also gave feedback on why her document was also not a satisfactory plan for the planning targets alone, mostly because of how vague and non-committal it was.
She replied, again the same day, like in our initial meeting, suddenly reverting to ignorance of the social value targets:
“Further to our intro meeting, it seems the lines are being blurred between the S106 [planning] obligation and the Social Value tender offer.”
No, they are not being “blurred”; she and I agreed in that intro meeting that they are the same thing and the same residents, and that the ESP would therefore include both. She went on:
“Our last meeting concluded from my understanding, with agreement that the S106 ESP needed to reflect how the S106 targets would be met by also incorporating some of the requirements from the Social Value TOM’s we had put forward at tender (e.g. hard to reach groups). As a result I have clearly outlined this in the ESP, explaining how we would be targeting long term unemployed residents, NEETS, Care Leavers etc for each S106 obligation role (apprentices, work placements and local employment).”
It's an interesting thought experiment to be open-minded and accept that what she argues here might have validity. She says she has “clearly outlined” in the ESP how the social value targets will be achieved. The target is that 100.5% of the labour are local residents from hard-to-reach backgrounds. I take it back, that wasn’t an interesting experiment. She’s an idiot. Or she takes me for an idiot.
Or, perhaps not. On re-reading it, I think what she means is that, of the 10% planning target to which her draft ESP relates, she has outlined how hard-to-reach residents will be considered for each of the 10% of roles ringfenced for local residents. She means that her ESP doesn’t relate to the 100.5% social value target to employ hard-to-reach residents but, of the 10% planning target, residents from hard-to-reach groups will be employed who Higgins proposed to employ in their tender for the contract (although even this can barely be described as a "plan"). The key word in her email is “some”. She will commit to delivering “some” of the social value targets she magnanimously announces. 10% of them. The other 90.5 percentage points of the target she has abandoned. She doesn’t explain why except she goes on to elaborate that she is only interested in the planning obligations because that is what is holding up the Planning service giving Higgins the go-ahead to commence construction; she’ll worry about the financial remedies of not delivering social value the Head of Corporate Procurement “enshrined” in her contract another time because I’m sure she is confident the council is not going to strip Higgins of their profit margin. She goes on to confidently explain:
“As far as I can see it is not a requirement of the planning conditions, that we produce an ESP for the social value offer put forward at tender stage, therefore I haven’t detailed here how we will be delivering those social value TOM’s which go beyond the S106 obligations.”
This is true. Except that she doesn’t have a planning agreement; she has a contract with the council whereby Higgins has been commissioned by the council to build Hartopp & Lannoy according to the council’s specifications which include delivering the planning and social value targets. The Unilateral Undertaking of planning obligations was agreed by (and I quote from the actual planning agreement here) “The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in its capacity of landowner to The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in its capacity as local planning authority.” My S106 office is in the capacity of the local planning authority so I must take this up with the landowner, which is the council. I will refer this to the council’s contract management team for the development in the Housing & Regeneration Team. As my dad would say, I should talk to the engine driver, not the oily rag.
I emailed the issues to the team yesterday. I explained that Higgins’s ESP excludes the social value targets, practically writing them off as not going to be delivered, and that it is not my place to decide and agree with the developer that the council’s contracted targets for the development be written off. And I explained the reason I am contacting them is because Higgins has invoked the planning agreement but that the council has made the agreement, not them. I also said that the Head of Corporate Procurement had previously said he would be making the social value targets enforceable, taking nearly £4m out of the budget and putting the economic viability of the council’s development at risk. And, in the meantime, the draft ESP just for the S106 targets is still unsatisfactory. In response, they have agreed we discuss this with Higgins in a meeting next week.
To be continued, but this has so far been an elaborately tortuous journey and, no doubt, like Just Stop Oil protests and, as with the Uxbridge resident blaming ULEZ on voting Tory, I predict social value policy will be blamed for the mess the Hartopp & Lannoy contract is now in whereas, if we just applied it in its simplicity from the outset rather than constantly trying to fudge it to favour the extreme neoliberals supporting private businesses earning money from the council as profitably as possible by lobbying senior officers, we wouldn’t be in this situation for anything to be blamed in the first place. We would just have clean energy.
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