A de-indexed Christmas?

Ferdinand Mount

Being an architect used to be such a nice profession. You could refer proudly to 'my son the architect' in a way that you could not to 'my son the traffic warden'. But these days the architect's lot is not such a happy one. Take Sir Hugh Casson — President of the Royal Academy, designed the Elephant House at the Zoo, knows everybody, charming chap, clearly just the man to design the new Parliamentary building across the road from Big Ben. And he knows the ropes too, which is so important when you come to the tricky business of presenting your scheme to the public.

The first thing to do is to brighten up your brochure with pictures of those old buildings which you are not allowed to knock down (Victorian prints look best). This establishes you as a conservationist. But you must not, repeat not, put in any pictures at all of the old buildings which you intend to demolish; otherwise, ignorant persons might wax sentimental about them and fail to concentrate on your own magnificent designs.

Even Sir Hugh slipped up momentarily before the House of Comthons Services Committee when he admitted, in agreeing with one MP, to a certain 'affection' for the doomed St Stephen's Club, but he rallied quickly by agreeing with another MP that it was a 'grotty' building. In the Casson feasibility study, on the other hand, the sole mention of the buildings to be demolished is that 'the rest of the buildings on the site, we believe, will be greatly missed. (See Appendix 2 for particulars of all those buildings).' The reader who is silly enough to turn to Appendix 2 will find of course that the only buildings mentioned there are those which are to be preserved. The others have disappeared even before the bulldozer has arrived on site; they have become non-buildings like people become non-people in Russia.

Turning to your own magnificent designs, you must be careful at all costs not to alarm. Use only the palest wash to sketch the buildings and draw the plane tree in front of them boldly so that the buildings are scarcely visible. As for materials, always speak of your materials, whether granite or prestressed concrete, as 'warm' and 'soft'. The general effect you want to give is of a sort of infinitely tactful shimmer, the architectural equivalent of Jeeves coming into the room.

Where the project is to be constructed at public expense, there should be no suggestion of extravagance. When a Tory MPasked for guidance on where to put the swimming pool and squash courts, Sir Hugh had to explain that this was 'a sensitive issue' and that, in deference to public relations, he and his partners had simply put in an area of floor labelled 'workshop, stores and recreation'. Faced with an architect, mere politicians seem such crude fellows. It is, therefore, with a heavy heart that one records that, for the time being at least, despite all Sir Hugh's immense distinction and delicacy, the project has gone for a burton, Mrs Thatcher having jumped on it from a great height.

Now what is extraordinary, you may think, is not that the Prime Minister should have refused to sanction more than £100 million at a time like this but that grown men should have gone on discussing the project at all. These projects develop a life of their own. You wait, the new Parliamentary Building (Bridge Street) Scheme will pop up some time (remember Stansted?) and Sir Hugh will come into his own again.

But if capital projects tend to be only scotched, not killed, current spending — which means people's wages — is devilish hard even to scotch. The Prime Minister finds herself in the position of the patent lawyer in the Charles Addams cartoon, pointing a ray-gun out of the window at the people on the sidewalk and complaining to the inventor: Death-ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn't even slow them up.'

Indeed, what the Tories have been slowly discovering is that the government, far from acting as a restraint on wage inflation, has over the years, equipped itself with inbuilt accelerators for making inflation worse.

The best known, and the most recent, is the government's legal commitment to raise retirement pensions and social security benefits in line with wages or prices, whichever is the higher. Under this 'indexlinking', not merely are pensioners protected against inflation but they will progressively improve their position relative to the working population in those years when prices have risen faster than wages; no wonder spending on social security has risen from 20 per cent to 30 per cent of total government spending in the last five years.

The legacy of these fatally free-spending years is to reinforce one side of the poverty trap. As fast as government raises the minimum levels at which you start to pay income tax, so the levels of unemployment benefit inexorably catch up, so that it becomes less and less worth working.

The Social Security Bill, now before Parliament, proposes to break the earnings link, but this 'de-indexing' would still leave social security jogging along with inflation rather than helping to rein it in. There are whispers that the government is now nerving itself to break the prices link too, at least for unemployment benefit.

• Dating back much further, to the Whitley Councils of the early 1920s, are the laws establishing wages councils in certain low paid industries. The councils now cover nearly 3 million workers. Their awards are reached by a joint panel of employers and union representatives plus a group of independent members, who often end disagreements by coming up with a solution which splits the difference.

These awards now have the force of law and over the last decade of incomes policy have often breached the pay norms. Such breaches were defended on grounds of the social need to jack up low pay, but the results naturally have had a consequential effect upon the demands of the better paid too. The Agricultural Wages Council has just awarded farm-workers 19 per cent, some say more. Certain minimum rates for hairdressers and hotel staff have risen by more than that.

The government has harmstrung itself even in settling the wages of its own employees. Civil servants are entitled, under a tradition dating back to the Fair Wages Resolution of 1891, to 'comparability'; their salaries must be roughly the same as those paid by a good private employer for the nearest equivalent job, the 'analogue'. The rot set in with Sir Raymond Priestley's Royal Commission of 1955 which rejected with shock and horror earliereontentions that the basis should be to pay civil servants enough to 'recruit and retain an efficient staff.

The 'recruit-and-retain' principle was held to be unfair primarily because Priestley did not 'believe that financial considerations are the sole, or even always the principal, incentive which attracts recruits to the civil service or indeed to many other occupations. Tradition, family backgrounf and sense of vocation may all play a part'. All of which sounds a little quaint to those who remember the single-minded vigour with which civil servants campaigned for their pensions to be inflation-proofed.

As for pay rises, the Pay Research Unit, reactivated by Mr Callaghan, potters about finding the nicest analogues which, not unnaturally, tend to keep civil service pay somewhat ahead of the common herd. For 1980-81, there is talk of 17-18 per cent, enough to wipe out any savings made by staff cuts.

All these pensioners, farmworkers, hairdressers and civil servants make up a vast secret army of those whom government has sought at one time or another, for reasons of charity and votes, to protect from the inhospitable world outside. The question now cannot be dodged whether this protection can be maintained intact indefinitely. However much you may wish to improve the living standards of those least able to improve it by themselves, can such improvements anticipate the resources to pay for them? These are unseasonable thoughts. Nobody relishes the prospect of a deindexed Christmas. The well-heeled squires at the Cabinet table would much prefer to play the Cheeryble brothers than the senior partners of Scrooge and Marley. The trouble is that Cheeryble Bros was making a profit.