In the new issue of Total Politics out today, I interview Neil O'Brien, director of Policy Exchange. As the head of one of Westminster's biggest and most influential think tanks, he is a man whose views are listened to in government. The interview was fairly wide ranging but with last night's vote on the government's welfare reforms in the Lords, I'm posting up a section that didn't make it into the print version. It's a discussion on fairness, one of the most keenly-fought political battlegrounds. Whether its bankers' bonuses, child benefit or social care, just about every issue going is judged through the prism of 'fairness'. Below you will find O'Brien's view.
N O'B: We did a big piece of work last year called Just Deserts? which explored what people thought was fair. Politicians constantly talk about fairness. This is unfair, that is unfair, without any real sense of what the public think about these things and the public have a very strong reciprocal idea of what fairness is.
BD: How would you describe the politicians’ view of fairness?
Gordon Brown’s idea of fairness is to look at a graph showing how the impact of any policy change impacts in decile terms. It’s all about distribution, it’s all about a socialist or egalitarian idea of what fairness is and nothing to do with just deserts, or these people work for this or try hard. The public are much more committed to that second view. We felt the whole political debate, including the right wing, had been sucked too far towards fairness just being something the Institute for Fiscal Studies can show you on a chart which it really isn’t.
Do you put David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the same political space as Gordon Brown then when talking about their ideas of fairness?
I think they’ve moved on quite a bit. They're sort of somewhere in the middle. They oscillate between sometimes playing that Brownite game and both of them having a personal commitment to the idea of just deserts. Both Cameron and Clegg have gone on the record to say something to the effect of fairness is about getting what you deserve. You try hard, you’re rewarded. That cuts in both directions.
One of the things we discovered from our report on fairness was that people thought it was unfair to give people council housing that was either very expensive or in an expensive area. There’s an opportunity there. We’ve talked a little bit about this in public, as stock becomes vacant, about 4% a year, to sell off that council housing in expensive areas and use the money to build more social housing elsewhere.
There are lots of other arguments for it. You’re not doing anyone any favours by putting them in an expensive area. There’s an estate I know that has been gentrified all around it. The local supermarket is a Waitrose which isn’t very helpful if you’re in social housing, having a ten quid chicken. And also, you don’t get mixed communities, you get parallel communities. The gap between market and social rent is one of the reasons why you have, even in the middle of Europe’s largest and richest city, pockets of incredible unemployment. So we're going to be looking at what we can do with social housing to try and use that asset, which is worth £400bn, a little bit more effectively.
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