Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Jacob]

Although - wouldn't the lack of Northern Waitroses (because why would you need one when you have Booths - also very pleased at them scrapping self-serve tills) make Waitrose more Tory and the gap with M&S smaller?

Yeah, that was my point. If there no Waitroses in less Tory supporting area, wouldn't you expect Waitrose to come in less Tory than M&S?

[Tamas]

Although - wouldn't the lack of Northern Waitroses (because why would you need one when you have Booths - also very pleased at them scrapping self-serve tills) make Waitrose more Tory and the gap with M&S smaller?

I know objectively self service is bad. The data does suggest it's played havoc on jobs, especially for women with low education....

But dammit I love getting out of the shop quicker and not having any obligation to chat. At fast food places it's particularly wonderful.

And no Booths up here. Posh southern stuff that :whippet:

I mean, by that logic we should stop buying milk at shops and make sure we buy it from milkmen again - their jobs have been decimated. Getting gas as your heating wreaked absolute havoc on people making coal deliveries etc. etc.

[Josquius]

Although - wouldn't the lack of Northern Waitroses (because why would you need one when you have Booths - also very pleased at them scrapping self-serve tills) make Waitrose more Tory and the gap with M&S smaller?

I know objectively self service is bad. The data does suggest it's played havoc on jobs, especially for women with low education....

But dammit I love getting out of the shop quicker and not having any obligation to chat. At fast food places it's particularly wonderful.

And no Booths up here. Posh southern stuff that :whippet:

I mean, by that logic we should stop buying milk at shops and make sure we buy it from milkmen again - their jobs have been decimated. Getting gas as your heating wreaked absolute havoc on people making coal deliveries etc. etc.

Milk from the milkman is the best. My parents always had one. If we had one proper one round here I'd be signing up.
I believe farmers get a fairer price from them too and supermarkets are famous for fucking dairy farmers. So.....

I get the point that it's natural some jobs die out. The trouble at the current stage is a lack of much forseeable to take their place.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I'm quite sceptical about the north-south divide when it comes to ordinary people. Clearly the most wealthy and well-paid are centered around London, but they are not a majority of even the local population. Anyway, the Guardian has this :

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2023/nov/21/find-out-where-you-can-afford-to-buy-or-rent-in-great-britain

You need to scroll down a bit to get to the explorable map, which also permits the entry of postcodes. You can also enter your particular household's housing requirements. Note that, importantly, local incomes are also taken into account.

[Sheilbh]

On splits within areas and around the country the ONS did an amazing visualisation runnin through a lot of this:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc1371/#/E07000223

[Sheilbh]

Separately - and having moaned about the New Statesman, from them (although this is one of the good writers) - this is pretty damning:

Demolition Britain – where newbuild schools are too dangerous for pupils
Schools under two years old are being condemned while students shiver in tents or fall behind on lessons at home.
By Anoosh Chakelian

Tuesday 14 November should have been a normal school day. For pupils at the Sir Frederick Gibberd College in Harlow, Essex, however, it was the first time they'd been into their school in over two weeks.

Since the start of the academic year, all pupils (apart from year sevens) at the school have missed out on the best part of a month of in-person teaching. They have been living their own private lockdown, thanks to a £3bn scandal at the heart of government.

On Monday 21 August, as the long summer break stretched to a close, parents were looking ahead to the start of term in two weeks, wrapping up family holidays and childcare plans. But that day they received a letter from Dee Conlon, the headteacher, and Helena Mills, chief executive of the school's trust, BMAT Education: the school would no longer open on 6 September. No new date was confirmed.

The main building and sports hall had been closed, with immediate effect, on instruction from the Department for Education (DfE). Cracks had appeared in the walls, and the gym had flooded. Inspections over Easter by the department found such poor workmanship that it would impact "the longevity of the buildings", structural defects and fire safety concerns. The buildings were deemed too weak to withstand high winds, major snowfall or a vehicle collision.

The inspection reports, by private consultancies Arup and Aecom, haven't been made public. The DfE refused to release them through a freedom of information request, responding that "releasing the information would damage our commercial relationship" with the companies.

Year sevens were sent to a separate school, a 20-minute bus-ride away. The rest were stuck at home in remote lessons from 6-14 September and from 30 October to 14 November. Robert Halfon, the local Conservative MP and an education minister, has said in the past that "remote learning is a poor substitute to classrooms... disadvantaged pupils learn the least... It also puts an enormous burden on the parents". He declined an interview request, but the New Statesman understands his colleague in the Lords, Diana Barran, the minister responsible for school buildings, will address parents at a meeting on 30 November.

This is a brand-new school. It cost £29m to build and was completed in 2021. As a free school with the capacity for 1,700 pupils in Harlow – a deprived postwar new town that was once the future – it was a timber-clad temple to the aspirational Tory dream. Now, it awaits a demolition notice.

As drizzle coated the Rich Tea-golden façades of the box-fresh college, pupils sat in long white marquees lining the sodden playing fields. This was their second taste of tent-based learning. The first had been disastrous.

I'm told that mould appeared as condensation built up in the marquees, which had been supplied by the Department for Education. The temporary "Glastonbury-style" toilets – which pupils had to go outside for – were cold and unhygienic. Pupils struggled to concentrate over the noise of wind and neighbouring classes, while the marquees were either too hot or too cold. Plastic on the mesh in front of the overworked radiators melted. Metal floor tiles became slippery and some went missing.

Pupils feared the roof could "fly away" in high winds. A teacher reportedly slipped over on a ramp in heavy rain. One boy was so cold he wore gloves through every lesson. Mark Ingall, the father of a girl in year nine and a boy in year seven at the school, told me his daughter had burned herself on the melted plastic of the struggling heaters.

As winter drew in, the pupils were ousted from the tents and sent home. Ingall, a supply teacher, couldn't pick up shifts as he had to stay in to supervise his daughter. Parents received little notice of the closures. "I couldn't go to work," Ingall told me. "Parents have lost out on earnings."

Their children are falling behind. "The reality of teenagers working from home is they're on their phones to their friends and the teachers are droning on the laptop," said a grandfather of two GCSE-year students. "It's not learning – it's a disgrace."

They have returned this week to find not much as improved. I'm told the toilets are "still so awful" and the tents are "far from adequate". Numerous younger pupils are now on waiting lists for other schools, reluctant to spend their GCSE years in these conditions.

A trust spokesperson said portable cabins would begin to replace the tents next spring, and they were looking "forward to clarity in the future on our main buildings". They didn't criticise the government. One teacher told me the school was concerned about damaging the trust's relationship with the DfE, which it's relying on for the new temporary buildings and any remedial work.

Harlow's children aren't the only ones. As the story broke over the summer that hundreds of older schools built with unsafe concrete would have to close, another scandal was hitting newly built academies around the country.

In Cornwall, Newquay Primary Academy (begun in 2021 and meant to open that year) had to be torn down and started again, as did Launceston Primary School (also 2021). Sky Academy, a new school planned to open this year at the Eden Project, was described in the trade press as "flattened before it was finished". Buckton Fields Primary School in Northampton (completed 2021) and Haygrove School in Somerset (2020) have been forced to close their buildings while awaiting demolition decisions.

In all, nearly 5,000 pupils have been displaced, stuck at home, or left without a prospective school place while parents and staff are in limbo. None of the schools I've heard from have seen their inspection reports.

Responsibility for the condemned buildings lies with the Department for Education, which launched a £3bn school building programme in 2020. One of its approved contractors was Caledonian Modular, a firm specialising in "off-site construction". This is a vogueish building method – whereby structures are prefabricated at a plant then transported to the location semi-complete – now being promoted through numerous government programmes. It's cheaper and quicker than conventional development, but it's also riskier: if the main constructor goes bust, the entire project is jeopardised. Caledonian Modular went under last March, £20m in debt.

A DfE spokesperson said: "Following surveys conducted at our request, we identified concerns with building work carried out by a specific contractor that is no longer in business. We are currently investigating how this happened and consulting lawyers on next steps."

Exam-year pupils who have missed out on in-person teaching won't have this disruption taken into account in their grades. The department would not tell the New Statesman why it contracted Caledonian Modular for these projects in the first place. The company's accounts showed that in the year to March 2020 its income shrank by £5m and pre-tax losses rose from £739,000 to £2.8m. It was not a member of the UK's trade body for modular construction, Make UK Modular.

"We are continuing to press the DfE daily to confirm any medium- and long-term plans," said Aaron Reid, the headteacher of Haygrove School, a secondary school of 1,106 students. He has had to install temporary accommodation and introduce a "four-day week" at his school.

"We are still awaiting an update [on demolition] following the ongoing inspection work," said Paul Watson, chief executive of Preston Hedges Trust, which runs Buckton Fields Primary School. This update was due in November, but at the time of writing had not arrived. "We are keen to understand this and next steps."

As I dug further into public contracts for modular construction, I found havoc playing out across Britain beyond schools.

The Ministry of Defence is now assessing the safety of accommodation blocks for nearly 2,000 military personnel at the Worthy Down training base in Hampshire and the Defence College of Technical Training in Wiltshire, having paid Caledonian Modular £40.5m and £14m respectively for these projects since 2018. While no structural defects have yet been reported, a spokesperson said "we take safety extremely seriously and are working to identify whether there are any affected sites".

A thousand students and private residents were evacuated from the Caledonian-built Paragon Estate housing block in Brentford, west London, in October 2020 because of structural and fire safety defects and have never moved back. It will take £72m of refurbishment work to make the homes safe. The 528-bed Studytel student block in Penryn, Cornwall, known locally as the "Purple Carbuncle", which cost £40m and was due to open in 2021, has never been completed – it now sits rotting and graffitied.

As ageing public infrastructure like hospitals, schools and prisons creak under years of under-investment, the term "crumbling Britain" has become commonplace. For a country that struggles to build, it's a dire indictment that even its newest additions to the public estate are crumbling too.

This may be specific to that company (and interesting to follow up on them), as prefab construction is common in other countries like Germany and Japan. My understanding is German and Japanese companies have looked at working in the UK, but haven't been able to make it work. From what I've read the challenge those companies have in the UK is that for prefab to work, you need a constant flow of predictable orders which doesn't describe construction in the UK - my understanding is we have a very stop-start construction sector.

But it is also a wider issue. It's why I'm a little dubious of new builds in general in the UK - which I think is unusual and in most countries you'd just assume better quality in newer properties. But you look at the aerated concrete from 60s-90s construction (and in lots of the public estate) but is less safe than was believed, but it was also cheaper (I think). I think that Building School for the Future buildings also had a fairly bad record on needing quite a lot of remedial work. And this - there is a pattern. Also in terms of maintenance, Carillion's collapse and reliance on contractors more generally.

This is what the school was meant to look like before it had to be shut down:


It also reminds me of the stories you get of Stirling Prize winning schools etc that are then functionally unusual. I think there was one under the BSF that was basically big open plan spaces and then the school had to spend a lot of money putting up walls because it turns out classrooms are good. There was also a university library which, again, won architectural prizes but had a large open plan atrium that basically just very efficiently funnelled noise to all the floors and was again, functionally, not really fit for purpose

Edit: Very quick search for Caledonian Modular and it turns out they'r apparently a company that had been running for decades and were considered the UK's leading prefab company. The story seems to be the emergence of sudden structural flaws (my guess - from cost-saving/lack of capital investment) leading to bankruptcy in the space of a couple of years. I feel like one of our major exports now is astonishingly on the nose "state of the nation" metaphors

[Josquius]

I've mentioned before my mam's school is one of those affected by the concrete scandal. Led to quite a messed up situation for them.
She drives to work in a village 4 miles away as normal...where every single morning she and the other staff meet the kids in a carpark across the road (they're not allowed on school grounds) where they all get into a collection of busses to drive to a school 4.5 miles away (10 minutes walk from my mam's house...) which happens to have a lot of spare space.
Then in the afternoon the same in reverse.
Every day is a school trip for those kids. Cannot be helping them.

That its happening with new ones too....Depressing on so many levels. Both the harm to kids and the sheer waste of it. I absolutely can't stand waste. How hard can it be to build a school?
An extra depressing point is that a modular company seems to be involved...we should be doing more modular building and one of them cutting corners and doing a shit job could bring down the already struggling sector.

[Richard Hakluyt]

On splits within areas and around the country the ONS did an amazing visualisation runnin through a lot of this:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc1371/#/E07000223

Nice piece of work by the ONS 

[Gups]

I could spend a lot of time on those visualisations..

Kind of amazing how many London boroughs most of us think of as weathy (like Islington) are in fact largely deprived.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah they are fascinating and the ONS is great.

Islington always strikes me because media discourse about it (since at least the 90s) has been nice townhouses, liberal left, champagne socialist territory etc. In reality it has huge numbers of people living in real deprivation.

They use the example of Kensington and Chelsea too which is incredibly striking.

[Josquius]

Have to imagine the reasons for the deprivation in inner London are quite different to the reasons for the deprivation in the north however.
Looking at them from a northern perspective it beggars belief with all that opportunity on their doorstep they still fall into poverty.
Though I imagine from their perspective they'd look our way and see the cheap housing and have similar thoughts.
Seems something where someone would have done the research.

[HVC]

Schools under two years old are being condemned while students shiver in tents or fall behind on lessons at home.

That's what happens when you send all your polish construction workers away

[Grey Fox]

Jos, so mam is your mother? I'd assumed it was your grand mother.

[Gups]

Have to imagine the reasons for the deprivation in inner London are quite different to the reasons for the deprivation in the north however.
Looking at them from a northern perspective it beggars belief with all that opportunity on their doorstep they still fall into poverty.
Though I imagine from their perspective they'd look our way and see the cheap housing and have similar thoughts.
Seems something where someone would have done the research.

Maybe your "northern perspective" is just wrong?

There are plenty of opportunities up north in the professions and in company HQs. Deprivation isn't about geography its about education, class and race. Leeds has the higghest salaries outside of London.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/20/leeds-tops-league-of-places-in-the-uk-with-the-best-paying-jobs-outside-london

[Richard Hakluyt]

There are a host of jobs where the pay is essentially the same in London as it is in the north. Cleaners, sheckout operators, non-specialist shop staff, restaurant staff  etc etc. Even people like nurses and teachers just get a small pay upgrade that does not compensate for the increased housing costs. Imagine being a succesful teacher on £45k but also being a single parent of two in London, without personal wealth that household would struggle.

Conversely, all healthcare and education work is on a national pay scale (apart from the minimal London weighting). The North is a great place for a well-educated person with no personal wealth to progress upwards financially.