The Street That Cut Everything, BBC One

The Street That Cut Everything, BBC One | reviews, news & interviews

The Street That Cut Everything, BBC One

Big Society? Residents on one Preston street were happy not to make the big decisions

by Fisun GunerTuesday, 17 May 2011

There’s nothing like a reality TV programme to bring a community together. Or maybe not. The Street That Cut Everything took one suburban cul-de-sac in Preston and shook up its residents thus: if they wanted their bins emptied, their street cleaned, their benefits paid and their elderly and needy looked after, they had to do it themselves. The council were going to withdraw all services - bar the emergency services and schools - for six whole weeks. And if that doesn’t sound terribly long, it was certainly long enough to pit neighbour against neighbour when it came to voting over who got what.

Firstly, the residents were given some hard cash: each household received the return of their share of pro rata council tax. That was £52.50 for each household, which must have numbered slightly fewer than 50 paying households. And it was whether to pool the cash into a kitty, or not, which caused the first signs of tension. As chairwoman (unlike gleeful reports of some local authorities there were no memoed diktats on the use of gender-neutral terms), Janette didn‘t see a problem with a dual approach, but this left Maria, clearly a centralist, though she didn’t know it, fuming: she muttered, nonsensically, about dictatorships. Tensions simmered, and there was soon an exchange of forthright emails.

But to the business at hand. The first job was to get rid of the rubbish. One solution saw a mountainous pile of festering bin bags stacked up in a living room; another, less retchingly, saw the garage double up as refuse depot. The whole street was penalised for not organising the removal of two fridges with a registered removals firm - a piece of inadvertent law-breaking that received a £300 fine. And as one resident noted, it all felt a bit Generation Game, but without the excitement of a conveyor belt of goodies at the end, just a round of very dull committee meetings.

But, all things considered, for most of the first half, residents did, on the whole, remain fairly chipper; all pulled together reasonably well, if a little haphazardly. Public toilets got scrubbed; overnight graffiti was diligently removed from walls - hoodies with spray cans had been helpfully bussed in by the programme makers; hired lamps illuminated the newly darkened street, since the council were not providing street lighting either; and dog mess was swiftly dealt with (again, the programme makers intervened to have a pack of canines with full bowels walked up and down the street).

But just getting on with things makes fairly dull viewing, and so it proved here.

Then things got really personal. When Tracie requested a "handout" for her daughter’s free school meals, as well as transport to and from her school by taxi, one resident asked whether they had the power to evict her. When she upped the stakes by putting in for her housing benefit, which had also been severed, pensioner Graham spoke out in no uncertain terms: what was she doing having so many children (she had two) if she was unable to provide for them? Resources being low and belts tightened to snapping point, the residents had to vote on whether it would be Tracie getting her benefits, or Janette getting care provision for her elderly, disabled father.

If this was an example of the Big Society in action, then some senior members of the Tory party were far from happy about it

There may, no doubt, be plenty of armchair politicians who think they could do a better job, but for the amateurs on one Preston street the end of the experiment clearly bought relief. What’s more, it did a good job of making some local councillors feel rather less undervalued.

However, if this was an example of the Big Society in action, then some senior members of the Tory party were far from happy about it. Stephen Hammond, Tory MP and parliamentary private secretary to Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, fumed about scaremongering - because, of course, there’ll be deep cuts but, look, no bleeding - and duly complained to Ofsted about BBC standards of impartiality.

And what did we actually learn? Well, what we didn’t learn was anything of the useful nitty-gritty detail that informs any council decision. When it came to comparing numbers, and finding evidence for value for money, we were more or less left floundering in the dark.

That said, in its place, we were exposed to a fairly good general lesson: that self-interest plays a big part in our day-to-day decisions, and that for a civilised society to function key decisions must be taken where self-interest doesn‘t pollute the waters: in other words, whether Janette’s elderly disabled dad gets his laundry done shouldn’t be decided among Janette’s neighbours on a popularity vote, but should be decided according to need.

But if you didn’t know that already, then you’re a bit of a numpty.

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