A Better Choice of Choice

New Ground 63
Summer 2002

New Labour’s emphasis on individual choice is making life worse for everyone, including the middle-class voters the policy is supposed to attract, says Roger Levett

‘‘Evidence-based policy’ is just the Treasury’s way of stopping people doing things. I prefer anecdote-based policy.’

Inspired by that recent comment from one of the cleverest public servants I’ve met, I’m writing this piece about choice, consumption, well-being and environment as personal reportage, rather than summarising the current formal research that I’m involved in. My excuse is that I’m exactly the sort of bourgeois, entrepreneurial Middle Englander that New Labour aims to please. If people like me aren’t satisfied, ‘the project’ has problems.

Labour keeps promising me more choice. Sure enough, I’m seeing more of it. There are now at least 30 variants of pork sausage in my local Sainsburys: thin ones and thick ones, in bigger or smaller packets, frozen or not, with more or less of various herbs, and more or less cereal plumping out the meat. And a fivefold price range.

Does this make me happy? There is a mild pleasure in buying ones that the whole family likes. But the pleasure is in the sausages, not the choice. The presence or absence on the shelves of the other 29 kinds makes no difference to the aroma of our favourite Sainsburys Lincolnshire ones sizzling in the pan. Choosing is only a means to get what you want. If you can have it, other choices are irrelevant. If you can’t, they are no consolation.

This opulent choice of sausages is the achievement of an agriculture and food industry that precludes other choices. Gazing in bemusement at the cornucopia of sausages, I can’t be sure that any of the pigs had happy lives and humane deaths, that the ingredients were not trucked all over western Europe, or that any of them were free of growth hormones or antibiotics, or that ‘GM free’ means not even containing a bit accidentally because of clerical error, commercial chicanery, or pollen wantonly and delinquently going wherever the wind blew it, rather than dropping obediently to earth at the edge of the GM trial plot in compliance with DEFRA regulations.

We have also recently exercised parental choice in education. This entailed months anxiously parading our eldest child round desirable secondary schools, hoping they would condescend to choose him out of the thousands trying for the same places. There was a particular frisson one Saturday when, public transport having collapsed again, a neighbour kindly gave our boy a lift to a school for entrance tests . . . which he passed, possibly thereby displacing the neighbour’s child, who didn’t.

We were among the winners, emerging from this wretched scramble with a place at one of the best state schools in the London area. It’s a shame that it is a long and tiring journey away (in Potters Bar, a particular shame at the time I’m writing). It’s more of a shame that our decision, and similar decisions by most other families with the option, is helping ensure that the comprehensive school 10 minutes walk from our house will never get an intake that will allow it to scrape itself off the bottom of the league tables, however hard the teachers try.

But isn’t choice the best – perhaps only – way to ensure that providers respond to different needs and preferences? For sausages, this argument is valid. Evidently there are people who prefer those revolting mint-and-tarragon ones. If only my favourites, or theirs, were available, some of us would get less joy in the sausage department of life, although anyone for whom this is a major tragedy should get out more. But this doesn’t apply to schools. I suspect that 90% of parents, including us, actually want 90% of the same things from a secondary school; a safe, orderly, responsible, but also relaxed and courteous atmosphere, teachers with the ambition and ability (and the time and energy) to help every child to develop to their own full capacity, enough spare capacity to spot and respond to individual needs before they become problems, enough space in the timetable, the buildings and the budget for kids to pursue their chosen cultural and sporting endeavours to a level of excellence – and within a short safe walk from home.

But this cannot be achieved through ‘choice’. Indeed it is the exercise of ‘parental choice’ that makes it unattainable. The lucky 20% of families get perhaps 80% of what we want, while the other 80% make do with perhaps 30%. Schools choice is a worse than zero-sum game. It doesn’t just help the already advantaged at the expense of the already disadvantaged, which should be grounds enough for Labour suspicion. It leaves even the better off worse off than they could be under a different regime. But the ch-word forecloses any critical debate.

Other ‘choices’ vex and disempower. I can choose any number of brands of car, bus, train or plane to travel to, say, Manchester, but I can’t be confident that any of them will get me there reliably on time, which is what I really care about. More locally, the choices most people make to drive to amenities encourages those amenities to move to places only easily accessible by car, whereupon the extra traffic generated makes it harder for everyone, drivers included, to reach them, and restricts my choice to cycle or walk pleasantly and safely, let my kids do so unescorted, breathe fresh air or live free of traffic noise. I can travel anywhere in the world for absurdly little cost, but the debilitating aggro surrounding air travel is a big disincentive, while the very ease of travel means you need to go ever further to find anything genuinely different or distinctive. A channel boat to Calais in the 1960s arguably provided more exotic adventure than a flight to Thailand does now.

I can choose between a plethora of suppliers of electricity, gas, water, digital telecommunications and broadcasting, in increasingly baroque combinations (though I’m still waiting to be offered a joint tariff for cable TV and sewerage on the basis that they are the same product). The best deal might save me a few tens of pounds if I spent time worth about the same amount puzzling over the small print, and got it right. I’ve chosen not to bother. But I can’t choose not to be pestered by reps on the phone.

I can choose between any number of pension companies to take money off me while I am working, wax fat on the proceeds of investing it, and only decide if they’re going to pay me enough of it back to retire on comfortably when it’s too late to make alternative arrangements. The one thing I can’t choose is what I really want: the certainty, not just probability, of modest financial security in my dotage. For this I would happily renounce the possibility of vast unearned wealth from successful share speculation when I’d be too old to have much fun with it anyway. Several of my friends thought they were making that deal when they chose to invest in pensions with a prudent, conservatively run mutual institution . . . Equitable Life.

To be fair, I’m already sitting on vast unearned wealth in another form: a nice house in inner London which I was lucky enough to buy before you needed a pension fund manager’s bonus to do so. But this paper wealth is no use unless I’m willing to move out of London, or to dissipate the only means I’ve got to give my kids as good a ‘life chance’ that I and my parents enjoyed: to live somewhere reasonably pleasant while doing work that I enjoy and think matters, rather than having to do what the market rewards most. The main consequence of this house price ‘wealth’ is that the public servants our quality of life depends on – primary teachers, nurses, public transport workers, council planners – can’t afford to live anywhere near, and therefore start work already knackered and grumpy from long commutes, if they are willing to work here at all.

As a result, when my wife was recently immobilised by an agonising spasm of back trouble while we were out cycling, one emergency response we didn’t even consider was calling an ambulance. We know ambulance drivers and accident and emergency staff are so sparse and overstretched that anything non-life-threatening must wait for a lull in the road accidents and heart attacks, which usually takes hours. Two years ago, waiting up all night at a great London hospital for a poke in the eye to be treated, in conditions of squalor and degradation that would put the average Indian bus station to shame, I discovered that nowadays you need to be very fit and healthy to cope with a hospital; it’s no place to be if you’re sick. And, short of retaining a personal physician, money can’t buy any of us out of this appalling vulnerability. Private hospitals don’t offer accident and emergency. There’s no profit in it.

I would be a lot better off, in any meaningful sense of the phrase, if my house was worth a quarter of its current value and public services could easily recruit good people locally. If I paid much more tax and knew public services would be prompt and good when I needed them. If the state simply told me which school to send my kids to, but I knew it would be both good and local. If there was only one brand of train, but it generally got there on time. If long haul flying cost five times as much, but the few times you did it, you actually felt you were somewhere else on arrival. The proud boast of the air industry that it shrinks the world is actually a theft and impoverishment. A shrunken world is . . . smaller.

I would even be better off if both I and the mint-and-tarragon perverts had to make do with a mere handful of kinds of sausage, but knew they were healthy and came from environmentally sustainable and humane farms within the region.

And, remember, I’m one of the people who does best out of the current dispensation. Now consider all the people who need medical attention more than once a decade; whose kids don’t shine at age 11; who didn’t get on the housing ladder (or rather escalator) before the mid 1980s; who don’t want to have to retrain and find a different job every few years, but want the security of a job for life and regard mediocrity and modest income as a price well worth paying for it. And consider the environmental waste and inefficiency of needless school runs, long commuting trips, food miles, unsustainable land use and frivolous flying.

Invoking ‘choice’ should not be the end of policy debate, but the start. Fetishising individual consumer choice in markets is giving us a superabundance of trivial options but foreclosing more important ones. We need a better choice of choice.

Roger Levett: roger@levett-therivel.fsnet.co.uk