A Self Sustaining Egalitarian Redistributive Food System

Last week, whilst working with 16-25 year olds in Supported Housing, I witnessed an act of such waste and profligacy that could only occur when it is other people’s money that is being spent. Let me explain, the thirty or so residents that live in this complex of small flats have to share four kitchens between them. That is, four or five residents share a considerably large kitchen. In each of these kitchens there is a large fridge freezer. They were all working perfectly well, apart from never having been cleaned or defrosted, but then that is par for the course working with most of these young people. They probably think it is someone else’s job. I can understand why they are confused, there are already several cleaners that do most of the work around the project.

To say the kitchens were a shared space almost conjures up images of disadvantaged youths working in solidarity to cook cheap and nutritious meals and dividing up cleaning and cooking responsibilities in an equitable fashion. This was not the reality or anything like it for the simple fact that the young people I work with are so profoundly solipsistic in their motivations that terms like responsibility, solidarity and community are not only words that some of them would struggle to read, but also hollow terms that hold no significance in their lives.

Perhaps I am being too harsh, in fact, I am. They did share food with each other almost every day. Sharing was so intrinsic to their value system that no one ever asked anyone else could they borrow anything, they just took it. However, in the few weeks that I have been working at this project several new residents are taking issue with this obviously perfect system of equitable distribution. They don’t seem to understand that this egalitarian distributive food sharing scheme works perfectly, even if it seems contrary to common sense. A bit like communism really. I mean look how great both Cuba and North Korea seem to be doing.

How the system works is on the day you get your Jobseeker’s Allowance or Income Support or Disability Living Allowance or any combination of benefit payments, after you have bought some super strong skunk weed and cheap alcohol you then make your way around to the local Iceland and stock up on nutritionless artery averse ready meals. Whilst shopping, it helps to have in mind what your fellow residents like to eat, as it is they who will be eating most of what you buy anyway. The fact that they also shop in Iceland means your margin of error will be slight. It also almost guarantees that you will get the food you want when you are stealing, erm, I mean sharing their food.

This is a perfect system as long as no one complains and everyone buys some food and is open to sharing. It is both an egalitarian self sustaining non-hierarchical redistributive exchange system as well an unfettered free market where Adam Smith’s invisible hand is hard at work in the pantries and refrigerators of unemployed young adults. It is a rare system that appeals to both far left anarchists and libertarians. There is only one slight snag with this model, as soon as even one resident questions the system i.e. complains, or uses the word ‘stolen’ then the whole system implodes. Complaints tend to arise when there is nothing left to borrow from your fellow residents. As with many supposed perfect economic models they are impeded by human beings and their behaviour.

As several new residents were averse to sharing or being robbed, depending on your perspective, the manager decided to deal with the issue. In each kitchen there was a large fridge freezer of about six foot. It had ample space for the cornucopia of cheap processed foods that provided our residents with the calories they needed to sit about stoned and/or drunk for most of the day. These fridge freezers worked fine, they just needed to be cleaned and defrosted and the residents needed to learn not to steal from each other. Instead, the manager decided we should buy each resident a small refrigerator without an icebox for their room. So, we did just that and bought thirty one Amica small fridges at a rough cost of four thousand pounds. The large fridge freezers in the kitchen were thrown out even though they all worked perfectly. We then spent roughly one thousand eight hundred pound replacing these with seven large freezer units. All of this money came from public funds. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it was judicious spending or not, as Im trying to be a lot less judgemental about things these days as my employers have informed me that judging a.k.a having an opinion based on standards is somehow negative.

The one thing I don’t understand is that won't the residents still steal each other’s frozen goods from the brand new communal freezers? Did management not consider this when they were deciding how to waste thousands of pounds of taxpayer’s money on how to police the shared pantries and kitchens of our young discarded on to the welfare state?

Profligate Waste and Resident Involvement Nonsense

The country is now indebted to the tune of well over a trillion pound, an unprecedented level of debt, and an enormous burden on children yet to be born. Now, with all this borrowing one would like to think that the money is going to be used wisely and on services that most reasonable people would agree are worthy and essential to the functioning of society. I'll leave it to you, the reader, to decide whether the following scenario is worthy of having a penny of public money spent on it.

A few months back I had a placement for a few weeks at a large supported housing unit with about forty residents. Quite a few agency staff had been drafted in, mostly to update files and get paperwork in order as most of the previous staff team, who had almost all been sacked, were too busy drinking with the residents to bother with the paperwork.

Writing 'support' plans that explain to members of the underclass how to go about signing on and how not to knock up your on-off girlfriend and her best friend is a thankless and soul destroying task and would lead the most virtuous to seek solace in the bottle. Socialising with residents is a massive no-no (why would anyone want to?) and having sex with them is most definitely out of the question but that didn't stop the security guard or a particular female member of staff, both now sacked. That's a whole other story.

Anyway, for the couple of weeks that I was working there, myself and my colleagues were meeting with the residents and updating their 'support' plans, as there was an imminent inspection from Supporting People (a regulatory branch of the Department of Communities and Local Government that allocate grants that keep these projects functioning).

Besides the team of six agency support workers, there was another team of three administrative staff and also three managers, all overseeing that the signatures were in the right place and that the sheets were dated and numbered correctly and that the proper cover sheets were in place in any given resident's 'support' plan. In terms of salary expenditure for all these staff, you would be looking in the region of £200-300,000 for the year. Money that could be better spent elsewhere. Pick your cause.

Meanwhile, whilst we were in the office ticking boxes and managers checked that we had ticked the right boxes so that external state bureaucrats would be happy that the right boxes were ticked, the residents were in their state sponsored bedsits getting high, drinking, missing appointments at the jobcentre, fighting and impregnating each other. It is like this in most large supported housing projects for 16-25 year olds, despite all the wonderful, expensive and well documented 'support' they get.

Now, the criteria by which the Department of Communities and Local Government evaluate supported housing projects is known as the Quality Assessment Framework or QAF as we call it in the industry. The QAF consists of many ridiculous 'performance indicators', the most ludicrous being an insistence that residents be involved in the running of the service. This can be evidenced by allowing residents to interview new staff, sit in on staff reviews, make suggestions on rules, organise events and so on. This all sounds great but you have to remember that the majority of people we deal with are dissolute and feckless individuals and giving them the impression that they have power is a recipe for disaster(Later posts will show why).

In order to evidence that the residents are involved in the running of the service I've been asked to help facilitate a meeting with them to listen to their ideas. At this meeting one of the things the residents are asked by a Senior Manager is what activities could the project provide for them to make their lives more fun. Is being drunk at noon, having multiple sexual partners and smoking joints first thing in the morning not enough fun for them?

By the end of the meeting the manager has committed to a Karaoke night and the purchasing of a communal Nintendo Wii video game. This meeting took place during the day when these young adults should have been working or training and not being interviewed by an agent of the nanny state which is now so over reaching it is even involved in helping people organise their recreational activities.

Many large supported housing projects employ what is called a Resident or Client Involvement Officer whose job is solely to bribe and coerce residents in to being involved in running the service so as to comply with the QAF. This post usually commands a salary of between £25-30k. And in the words of one Resident Involvment Officer I spoke to last year, "Any in house activity that the residents help organise is evidence of compliance with the QAF in relation to resident involvement. Last week in my project I helped the residents organise a DVD night and it was a great success. Mind you I had to put on some free soft drinks and Pizza to get a fair few residents to attend."

Of course he had to entice them out of their pot filled dens with free food. They all have TVs and DVDs in their rooms but by getting a few residents to stick up a few posters advertising a prosaic activity like watching a film he is able to tick a box entitled 'resident involvement'. It all helps to keep the funds flowing in to the project and keep the Resident Involvment Officer in a job. Nice work if you can get it and nice to know that some of the exorbitant public debt is being spent on such laudable and worthwhile initiatives.

I now await the usual comments from the Guardianista brigade telling me how worthwhile all this 'support' is.