The devil is in the detail

The coalition is in trouble on several fronts. Boris has started his re-election campaign with a vengeance, out-Kenning Ken on the curbs on housing benefit. The plans to restrict child benefit to basic rate taxpayers are proving rather more complicated than they were presented. The politics of both policies is probably right, despite Labour's objections, but the government have erred because of a fundamental weakness: their inattention to detail.

I started to notice this in some of the consultation papers they issued, notably that on the pupil premium. The consultation paper says very little about the detail of the premium, leading the TES and John Howson to assume today that it will benefit some schools to the tune of £1 million while leading to many losers. The same inattention to detail compounded the agony of the Building Schools for the Future and GP fundholding announcements.

Had they thought things through with their housing benefit changes, they would have put a higher cap for inner London or applied the policy only to new applicants, and that would have forced Labour to say whether or not they opposed a change they long wanted to make themselves. At the same time, they would have applied sanctions for continued unemployment to JSA rather than housing benefit, something they could only have done if they guaranteed them at least one job offer or a community alternative. Instead, they have succeeded in giving Boris Johnson a fillip and uniting Lib Dems, Labour and inner London MPs against a policy that sounds harsher by the day.

There are similar problems on child benefit: for parties that criticised the complexity of Gordon Brown's tax credits to apply new layers of expensive bureaucracy - which will be trebled with separated couples - is bizarre. But it suggests that they have assumed that if they have an idea, they just need to announce it and the details will worry about themselves. With six years experience as an adviser in government, I can share a little secret: they won't.

Which brings me to the pupil premium, the next accident waiting to happen. I think a pupil premium is a good idea. But, let's not forget that in practice Labour shifted large sums to schools - far more than the maximum premium - with large numbers of pupils on free school meals, which is why their budgets are already significantly higher than others. If funding for schools were rising across the board and there were a genuinely open admissions system, it would make sense simply to have a pupil premium starting at say, £1000 a year, rising to £2500 a year for every FSM pupil by 2015, as the Liberal Democrats envisaged it. Since it isn't, this could cause chaos in coalition constituencies.

For not only is funding not rising, but the government has slashed a host of grants including specialist school funding and school development funds upon which all schools relied. The local authority is to be allowed to redistribute this money (with the local school forum) as it sees fit. Local formulae already build in significant premiums for poorer pupils. So the only way to avoid complete chaos in the school system and an uprising among government backbenchers that would make this week seem like a picnic, is to build in a minimum funding guarantee assuring all schools that they would get at least a standstill per-pupil budget (bearing in mind the teachers' pay freeze) for the next four years. And even then, the likelihood is that schools will simply see the premium as a replacement for other cuts and it will have no effect on narrowing the attainment gap, unless there are other levers and sanctions, such as published data on FSM pupils' achievements by school and financial penalties for those not improving poorer pupils' results.

Either the government opts for simplicity - earning education secretary Michael Gove his inner Aneurin Bevan as the editor of the TES has it - or complexity that keeps restive backbenchers and anxious headteachers happy. This week should have taught the coalition a lesson that they seem not to have learned before now. The devil is definitely in the detail.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

The anti-police party

There was a time back in the 1980s when some so-called 'loony left' London boroughs acquired a reputation for their opposition to the Police. Some schools kept them off the premises. Extreme left leaders made a fetish of their opposition to the Police, providing an easy target for a Tory government determined to reduce the powers of local government.

Now it would appear that the Tories have decided to become the anti-police party, as the Damian Green affair has already shown. I'm indebted to Toby Harris for some shocking evidence of how much contempt the current Tory chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority has for the rule of law.

Will YouGov have egg on its face?

For some years, I have enjoyed filling in Yougov's surveys. I even received a cheque for fifty quid for my trouble last year. But the online pollster faces a make-or-break week. For it is not just Ken v Boris that will be decided on Thursday, but the veracity of Yougov polls versus the rest. Most polls have shown Ken recovering in recent weeks, with Boris trailing on issues like leadership and transport (though winning on crime). But tonight's Evening Boris has another poll giving the Tory pretender a whopping 10-point lead. If they are right, it will not just be curtains for the Mayor and a bad night for Gordon; it will be a disaster for traditional pollsters and another feather in Yougov's cap. But if they are wrong, and Ken wins, taking the wind out of Cameron's sails, there will be some fairly searching questions about the accuracy of Internet polling.

Boris doesn't do his maths homework

It is quite extraordinary that Boris Johnson is leading the polls for London mayor; one can only assume the voters haven't heard him much. I have just watched the most inept, extraordinary performance I have seen by any politician in years on Newsnight. Boris hadn't a clue how much his treasured Routemasters cost. He said the mayor should earn less, but had no idea to what. All the time, one had the impression of a politician making it up as he went along, including a 90 second intro that he had plenty of time to rehearse. Goodness knows what this buffoonery would lead to in City Hall. I can see why he doesn't like doing too many debates in this election, but surely that was one thing Eton was supposed to equip you for?

What Ken needs to do to win

Perhaps as one of those New Labour types whom Ken cheerfully enjoyed smashing into the ground in 2000, I should be sitting this mayoral election out, particularly since I don't have a vote in the capital any more. I helped Frank Dobson win the Labour nomination at the time (though was not part of his mayoral campaign team) fearing that Ken might resort to cronyism, gesture politics and consorting with extremists if he became Mayor, having remembered the less attractive features of the eighties GLC. But while Ken has been his 1980s self to an extent, he has also made a big difference to the capital. The congestion charge has been a success, buses are more frequent, the Oyster card is great, crime is down and the capital will host the 2012 Olympics. True, taxi fares are also utterly extortionate now, but this is a success list any mayor would die for. And one look at his motley crew of opponents, including the charming but utterly unconvincing Boris Johnson, makes it clear that Ken is the only candidate capable of leading the capital. So I hope he takes Jonathan Freedland's excellent advice on how he needs to do it in today's Guardian: debate more, promise this is your last term, offer to hire Brian Paddick, get out the vote and be your cheeky, populist self. He needs all the help he can get.

Reasons to be cheerful?

It has not been the best of weeks for the Government. What with Peter Hain's resignation, the stock market jitters, Martin Bright's sudden discovery that he didn't like Ken and Polly Toynbee becoming upset that Gordon is building prisons and keeping police pay in check, one might expect Labour to be in the doldrums. But the polls are suggesting something different.

• Today's ICM poll for the Guardian has the Tory lead down at a mere two points (although another poll suggests a larger if falling lead).


• In London, Ken has actually extended his lead over Boris. And today we learn that Boris is not exactly whiter than white when it comes to potential conflicts of interest.

Ken's Achilles Heel

I will freely admit that I underestimated Ken Livingstone when he was bidding for the London Mayorship in 2000. His congestion charge, even if its impact has lessened over time, was a bold and wise move for a major capital. Some public spaces, such as Trafalgar Square, are the better for having less traffic. Buses are plentiful, though the bendy-buses are a menace at pedestrian crossings. With David Blunkett's help at the Home Office, London policing is largely better, and most crime is down. In many ways, London has regained the civic identity that it had lost when the Greater London Council was launched. But, there are worrying signs that Ken has retained some of his less attractive practices from the GLC days, and has surrounded himself with advisers who could drag him down. And today's report on the Today programme - following a lengthy series of Evening Standard reports (albeit with the overweaning bias of one Andrew Gilligan, whose reputation precedes him) on unsuccessful companies backed with London Development Agency money - that Ken's race adviser Lee Jasper (right) had been trying to use public money to launch a campaign to discredit Trevor Phillips (left) is deeply worrying. This is said to have happened - and the emails read out on the programme sound pretty clear in these matters - when Trevor was in the running to head the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, a job he now holds. Ken should suspend Jasper now and launch an independent investigation into this and other recent allegations about his race adviser. The danger is that if he pretends these are not important issues, he will hand the election to Boris on a plate. And however entertaining Boris may be on Have I Got News For You, I'm with Luke Akehurst in his assessment of what his election would mean for London.

I agree with Boris

I know that this may lead to a permanent fissure with those of my old LCC comrades who now run the Compass organisation in the vain hope that it will drag Gordon Brown irrevocably leftwards and back to the halcyon days when Labour lost one general election after another. After all, their research team laboured long and hard to produce a booklet of Boris Johnson's right-wing lunacies(pdf). And what does Boris do? He writes an eminently sensible article about university degrees in the very organ that prides itself on downplaying the achievements of today's young people, and whose readers prop up bars moaning about Mickey Mouse degrees.

"It is notable how often a critic of university expansion is still keen for his or her own children to go there, while a vocational qualification is viewed as an excellent option for someone else's children. It is patronising, in that you really can't tell, just by reading a course title, whether it is any good or not, and whether it will be of any intellectual or financial benefit to the student.....Of course there are mistakes, and of course there are a great many students who drop out, get depressed, or feel they have done the wrong thing with their lives. But the final judge of the value of a degree is the market, and in spite of all the expansion it is still the case that university graduates have a big salary premium over non-graduates. The market is working more efficiently now that students have a direct financial stake in the matter, a financial risk, and an incentive not to waste their time on a course that no employer will value.

We can laugh at degrees in Aromatherapy and Equine Science, but they are just as vocational as degrees in Law or Medicine, except that they are tailored to the enormous expansion of the service economy. It is rubbish to claim that these odd-sounding courses are somehow devaluing the Great British Degree. Everyone knows that a First Class degree in Physics from Cambridge is not the same as a First in Equine Management from the University of Lincoln, and the real scandal is that they both cost the student the same."

So, on this occasion, I have to say, I agree with Boris. Is this the first sign of another big Tory u-turn in favour of university expansion?