A brilliant little ad for one of the most successful techniques used by the beauty industry to get the perfect body. Care should be taken that you do not over apply.
Comment
Oct31
Why we can’t take a risk on a film at the #LFF
on October 31st, 2011 at 6:48 pmPosted In: Modern Life, Opinion
I’ve developed sponsor blindness… which is a bit of a shame for the London Film Festival which has just sent round its annual post-festival feedback survey. I couldn’t identify a single one of their sponsors without prompting, which is mostly because I didn’t see as many films in the festival as I usually do, but it is partly due to the low profile the festival seemed to have this year.
It could be that their awful cinema ad put people off, and, now I mention it, organiser the British Film Institute has an ident that’s a bit ambiguous and perhaps confused people. Nevertheless, it may not bode well for the festival’s future financial security if its sponsors are not getting a lot of eyeballs on their name.
Something I did bring up in the survey, as I do every year, is that the high cost of ‘taking a gamble’ on a film from a director you don’t know of with a cast you’ve never heard of and from a country you probably couldn’t place on a map with certainty. It’s not that the screenings are empty; it’s more that most of the audience are likely to be people who would probably go and see the film anyway when it’s on general release, and part of the festival’s remit is to expand the audience for film.
Your average punter is unlikely to spend north of £10 on a primetime ticket for, say, Sanjeewa Pushpakumara’s Flying Fish, with no-one they’ve ever heard of, when at the same time and price, they can check out the safer bet of Tilda Swinton in a based-on-the-best-selling-novel film of We Need To Talk About Kevin. I don’t know what the ‘cost-risk threshold’ might be for an occupant of the Clapham Ominbus such that they might consider something outside the mainstream for a night’s entertainment, but something close to a fiver might just do it.
Obviously, my first point about the finances of the festival and what I’ve said about ticket prices are linked. However, I think the danger is that the festival fails to reach a sufficiently new and diverse audience if the ticket pricing regime doesn’t encourage experimentation. Otherwise, it will become a festival of film-lovers showing films that other film-lovers would probably go and see anyway, which isn’t a particularly healthy use of public funds or sponsor pounds (and aren’t there a lot of them – I’m a bit embarassed that I couldn’t remember any of them!). Perhaps the public subsidy ought to be more targeted, or the sponsor’s exposure made more valuable, so that the ticket pricing for non-mainstream films can be more flexible and attract a new audience.
Either way, I’m already looking forward to what might be on offer next year; I just hope that I can afford to take a risk and see a gem or two!
Lewisham councillors received a presentation on Monday 10th October from five of the borough’s housing providers about their response to the changes in the rules around provision of social housing put forward by the government. The housing providers present were Affinity Sutton, Family Mosaic, Hyde Housing, Hexagon and London & Quadrant, and the evening was introduced and put into context by Lewisham’s Head of Strategic Housing. I live tweeted the event on #lewishamhousing.
The social housing and housing support system will be substantially changed by the Localism Bill which is shortly to receive Royal Assent. Broadly speaking, changes include a move to move from lifetime tenancies to flexible fixed term tenancies for all social housing, a rise in the rent cap for new tenances to 80% of market rents and a tightening of the criteria for Local Housing Allowances and Housing Benefit. Government capital funding for building new stock is being sharply reduced, but in turn, social landlords will have greater freedom to borrow against their rents to fund new builds.
The national context for this, of course, is that there is rising demand for housing and not enough supply, and whilst mortgage rates are low at the moment, a focus on affordabilty by risk-averse lenders is resulting in a sluggish market in sales. This in turn puts greater pressure on the private rented sector where rents are rising, with knock-on social consequenes.
In Lewisham, the context is a rising population (forecast to be 290,000 by 2020, up from 266,500 now), a stagnant but long housing waiting list and insufficient new supply. Interestingly figures were presented at the meeting showing that the share of the population in social housing or owner/occupiers is falling, with a commensurate rise in private renting. With the average house price in Lewisham being nearly 11 times the medium salary, this perhaps seems less surprising.
So, with a lot of demand about, but less government cash to fund, and perhaps limited land identified to allow, new housing, what is the response of the major housing providers in the borough (the “RSLs”)?
Firstly, though they’re not very keen on the changes (who would want less money to fund their major activity?), they accept that it is a continuation of the trend of the previous government’s policy, and also the only game in town (though, they have been, and still are, collectively lobbying the government for improvements).
Secondly, as organisations with a charitable or social mission. they are committed to mitigating the impact of the changes on current and new tenants as far as possible. This is largely expressed as a desire to keep the increase in rents as close to their targets for what is affordable as much as possible (as opposed the generally higher ‘affordable rent’ target given by the government – the 80% of market rents), and also to allow exisiting tenants to roll-over their new five-year tenancies as far as possible.
The new regime for calculating rents coupled with the above misson can have some perverse effects. For example, rents for 3 or 4-bed houses may become lower than for 2-bed flats: Hexagon gave an example of how the ‘affordable rent for a 2-bed flat could become £165.48 per week, whereas that for a 3-bed property could become £162.07 per week. The focus on affordability may also mean that the social housing providers may actually need to attract higher earning families to fill all their stock.
Thirdly, the RSLs will try to subsidise their social rented properties with income from private sales – they already do this to some extent with their current schemes, but building properties for sale will be a greater part of the mix in their future schemes. Though this will still increase the local supply, it does diminish the future income streams from rents which are supposed, under the new rules, to be available to support borrowing for new social housing schemes.
All in all, though the new freedoms for housing providers under the Bill are welcome, the impact on growth of the borough’s stock of good housing is not. Furthermore, they changes do nothing to ease the problem of housing costs for everyone – whether renting privately or socially – being too high, and may in fact, within London at least, make it worse.
In fact, the changes in the rules in the Biill though important are cosmetic compared to the problem of high housing costs – the need for social housing, affordability, mobility and so on – and lack of supply is the cause: not enough good quality housing has been built by either the private or public sectors for many decades. There has been a ‘market failure’ when it comes to housing and successive governments have been too timid to address it.
This may be the moment, however, for the government to shed its timidity. It is rightly getting to grips with the revenue deficit, but still has a substantial commitment to captial expenditure; with the mood music turning to economic stimulus by accelerating capital projects… why not fund the construction of more housing?
We don’t have to emulate past governments faced with a housing crisis – whether it’s Homes for Heros, villa conservativsm, garden cities, new towns – but we can learn from past architectural and planning mistakes. And Keynesians should be happy, as should businesses, and others should applaud the liberating consequences of good housing instead of market failure.
We don’t have to trample all over the green belt, but we do have to get serious about density and height where it can be sustained. We should also demand better standards of housing – larger rooms, thicker internal walls, higher environmental standards – and perhaps be slightly less wedded to our unenvironmentally friendly Victorian and Edwardian terraces.
It will be difficult to achieve, perhaps even requiring social change, but it will be worth it (even the Dailiy Mail headlines about house prices). The housing problem is becoming a crisis, and the coming crisis will be acute, perhaps even with some unpalatable consequences.
Nick Clegg’s conference announcement of £50m to fund summer schools for the disadvantaged caught the headlines (even in the Daily Mail!), and received some support in editorials and from some Lib Dem bloggers. However, though it might be a crowd pleaser and a nice idea, in truth it’s little more than a sticking plaster for deeper problems.
Would I have them rather than nothing at all? Possibly, but I’d rather the money stayed in the Pupil Premium where it is at least targeted through mechanisms (schools) that are already set up to identify and address students needs. Perhaps even better if some money was spent on ultra targeted extra tutoring – for example, in the secondary school where I am a governor, a hour’s extra regular maths tuition targeted at the right students in Year 10 has seen an improvement of up to 1.5 GCSE grades (and of course schools can if they wish spend their Pupil Premium funding on such tutoring).
Summer schools risk diverting money away from a scheme – the Pupil Premium – which is designed to bring a sustained focus of resources to bear on young people in need who can be identified and catered for within the existing framework, and instead puts it into a brief flash of educational support that may well not, as it is voluntary, even attract those who need it most. The content of the two weeks is also an issue: students moving from primary school to secondary school have finished and been assessed on the work of Key Stage 2 (primary school) and have yet to start the work of Key Stage 3, so what would be taught? Recapping primary school is unlikely to appeal, and given the students in question, starting Key Stage 3 work early may be beyond their abilities at that point.
Summer schools, by themselves, are unlikely to tackle more than a tiny fraction of the multi-variant and multi-modal causes of the summer’s riots and looting. The media coverage for the announcement included lots of references to it being our response to the riots – I hope this is slightly over-enthusiastic spinning by a newly reinforced comms team rather than representing our actual considered response to the riots and looting.
There is an issue at transition from primary school to secondary school for some young people – either their attainment drops in Years 7 and 8 from what would have been expected given their SATs results – the ‘dip’ – usually attributed to a problem with loss of knowledge over the summer of transition. Or, their SATs results are inaccurate and / or primary schools are failing to prepare their students properly for secondary school.
This issue of itself isn’t a direct cause of the disaffection commonly identified in the teenagers and young adults implicated in the riots and looting. But, the related problem of young people being turned off education, and the opportunities for improving one life changes that it offers, can have a root in the problems of settling in to secondary school and coping with the change in pace and intellectual demands. This won’t be solved through the proposed summer school, particularly as by being voluntary it will be yet another ‘targeted’ scheme that fails to reach the famously ‘hard to reach’ problem families.
Back to where we are now, however. If they are going to happen, they need to be properly organised and the educational activities tuned to each student’s needs. As this comment on the Guardian website by a consultant brought in by Labour to deliver a similar project back in the 90s observes, we need to avoid falling into Labour’s bad habits in government of announcing a policy to make a headline but then fail to follow through on the delivery.
For this idea to have some, any, effect on the problems you’re addressing, Nick, you need to get some real Whitehall muscle behind it. Not just money, but political focus and attention – make those in charge of delivery accountable, just as you, and we, will be.
Tim Lund over on the Sydenham Town Forum has highlighted a South London Press report (sorry for the photo) on some work on mutualism that the Lewisham Council committee I chair recently completed. The full report of the Public Accounts Committee can be found here (pdf).
We received some fascinating evidence from a range of sources, including Lewisham Council’s Chief Executive, Barry Quirk, and representatives from the Co-operative movement and local social enterprises. There was general agreement that nearly any service could be delivered through a mutual model, but the most successful enterprises tended to work because they had sufficient revenues, assets, customers etc to be sustainable in the long term. This is in contrast to many outsourced contracts for soft services which research suggests don’t necessarily result in better services.
Tim’s observation is that supporting moves to mutualise council services is a bit of a dead end, as there is a high risk of failure and the council should be concentrating on improving services internally or saving money on its own account, including get rid of poorly performing staff, rather than using the charade of spin outs to do it for them. I’ve responded to this point on the STF, so won’t repeat it here.
One point of further interest is how often, or how easily, mutuals are conflated with social enterprises. This was often done in our discussions and from those who gave us evidence – everyone had their own idea about what it meant and was probably working with the one that they most favoured. However, they are not necessarily the same thing.
We elected to not be proscriptive on this issue in our report – let a thousand flowers bloom and all that – but our emphasis on the need for such enterprises being sustainable if the idea of mutuals delivering public services has any merit shows our concern that they should be run properly as though they were businesses.