Baby P and the lessons for planning
Town & Country Planning, January 2009
I am writing at what I think and hope is the end of a prolonged period of moral panic, related – as they so often are – to children. The stories that gave rise to the panic are appalling enough, but there seems to be something else going on too.
Having lived with the whole thing, as we all have – from Baby P to Shannon Matthews – I have a feeling that we are getting a glimpse behind one of the engines of UK centralisation. And it is sheer snobbery.
I am not aware, for example, that there were any complaints to the BBC when the chief constable covering Dewsbury condemned Karen Matthews' neighbours, a whole class of families, because "they never go out"?
It seems to me pretty extraordinary that he could use a phrase like"these ... people" and condemn a whole neighbourhood on the implied basis that they were, presumably without exception, feckless unimaginative types. Especially when, as the father of a young family myself, I also find that I very rarely go out either.
Especially when we know that the neighbours rallied round when Shannon Matthews' disappeared', organised searches and campaigns and much else besides. The fact that Shannon had not actually disappeared was not exactly their fault, after all.
The truth is that the estate where the Matthews family lived was being used, by politicians and media alike, as a symbol of what David Cameron calls 'broken Britain'. The truth is not only that is wasn't actually broken, but that people lead loving, neighbourly family lives in places a good deal worse than that one.
We have, in fact, become so used to the idea that society is
unravelling around us that we are almost blind to the fact that, most
families – even in classes other than our own – are secure, loving
places, with caring and supportive neighbours. If they were not,
Britain would be unliveable.
But there are more serious problems about this, because bundled up with the snobbery is some far more dangerous stuff about ordinary children and ordinary families, which provides a little clue about the whole Baby P saga. One that doesn't appear to be being learned by Ed Balls.
Nobody, for example, pointed out just how fatuous that leaked social workers report on Shannon's mother Karen was: the one which criticised her for a fatal "inability to successfully place the children's needs above her own"?
In practice, do you know any mothers who systematically put their children's needs always before their own? They are ill, depressed, stressed and sleep deprived. Good mothers understand how their children depend on them to look after themselves, rather than entirely subsuming their own physical and mental needs. That is good parenting.
But no, we are in New Labour fantasy-land, where mothers have to be virginal paragons of saintliness or must risk interference from the state.
Just as nobody seems to be speaking up for the poorer neighbourhoods
vilified by the chief constable, nobody is speaking up for ordinary
parents and their children in the midst of this nonsense either.
Who, for example, is pointing out that this kind of moralistic
disconnection from the real world is likely to damage children as much
as 'save' them? Those who think along those lines are keeping their
heads down.
So before policy-makers run too far down this path, it might be worth looking at the practical implications of policies based on this kind of rhetoric:
1. Those who need public services most begin to sense that
professionals are not on their side. Which is probably why my own new
local children's centre, shiny, well-equipped and packed with
professionals, is almost entirely empty of punters.
2. There will be more children removed from ordinary, loving families simply because medical professionals don't know what's wrong with them.
3. Because all families are suspects, child protection agencies will continue to be overwhelmed, and we'll get another Baby P and another and another...
This is a policy mistake born of snobbish ignorance of ordinary neighbourhoods, which takes us right back to the 1960s – with the added moral imperative that ordinary people are not just believed to be living feckless lives, they are also supposed to be abusing their own children.
Yet despite this, policy seems quite content to condemn the poor children to living in high density concrete Prescottville, which – according to fascinating new research – undermines the health of adults and children alike.
I'm referring to a study in the Lancet by two Scottish researchers (Richard Mitchell and Frank Popham) which shows that the proximity of even a little green space, park or woodland, can reduce strokes and heart disease, and buck the trend whereby poorer people tend to be less healthy.
This is not research that comes out of the blue (or green, come to that). It confirms a whole range of other findings, often from the Netherlands, over the past two decades. But do we translate that into planning policy for bringing up children? Do we bring it into the current debate about children, parenting and neighbourhoods?
No, is the short answer. Instead, we seem – if the media is to be believed – to cluster round the same failed solutions: more joined up thinking by agencies, more vigilance by professionals, more awareness that abuse is alive and well among the feckless, and the feckless are alive and well on our outlying estates.
It really is dangerous nonsense, born of the kind of flaccid
metropolitan snobbery that has made Britain one of the most
centralised and ineffective states in Europe. Welcome to 2009!
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Toward the setting Sun. www.david-boyle.co.uk
