The main shortcoming of the conventional approach to appraisal and development of megaprojects is the lack of mechanisms for enforcing accountability, namely the absence of, on the one hand, clear objectives and, on the other, arrangements for: (i) measuring how objectives are being met; and (ii) rewarding good and penalising poor performance. In this chapter, we will identify a number of basic instruments that we see as necessary for strengthening accountability. However, before discussing these instruments, we consider in more general terms the roles to be played by the private and public sectors in the development of megaprojects. Understanding the appropriate roles of the two sectors is fundamental to the identification of a process for appraisal and decision making that will ultimately work in the public interest.

Redrawing the borderlines of public and private

A basic issue that is both complex and likely to stir controversy is the question whether megaprojects should be publicly or privately led. Neither the complexity of the issue nor its potential for controversy should come as a surprise. After all, one of the most fundamental aspects of public policy is at play, namely that of defining the frontier between the public and private sectors.

For major infrastructure projects one could argue an either/or position on public versus private leadership:

• either such projects should be placed entirely within the public sector – for example in a government department, an agency or a state-owned enterprise – to ensure accountability through the rules of transparency and public control that apply to the public sector;

• or such projects should be placed entirely in the private sector – for example by means of build-operate-transfer or other concession arrangement – to ensure accountability through competition and market control.

Definition

Levels of centralization were – and still are – not uniform across countries. Synthesizing different strands of macrohistory, Rokkan envisioned this map of Europe: at the center are the states located on the old trade-belt, stretching from Italy, crossing Switzerland, running along the Rhine toward the Low Countries, and then on to Scandinavia and the Hansean cities. The high density of cities characteristic of this area made it impossible for centralized states to take root. Major state building, instead, took place on either side of the trade-belt – Sweden, Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the East; Britain and France in the West. Spain, a seaward state with a strong periphery, was an exception. Over time, state building proved stronger in the West, where the greater surge of commercial activity made it possible for state builders to extract resources easily convertible into currency, than in the East, where the only alternative partners for state builders were the owners of land, and the only resources that they could offer – food and manpower – were non-monetary.

Meant for the eighteenth century, Rokkan's typology needs to be updated to the nineteenth. Political power remained decentralized in Switzerland and the United States. The French occupation of Spain and the Low Countries had a lasting centralizing effect, moving Belgium and the Netherlands into the same league as France and Britain. Its effect on Spain and Italy, however, was ambiguous. In both countries, centralization became associated with autocracy, and decentralization with republics and democracy.

Demand forecasts are the basis for socio-economic and environmental appraisal of major infrastructure projects. Furthermore, estimates of the financial viability of projects are heavily dependent on the accuracy of such forecasts. According to the experiences gained with the accuracy of demand forecasting in the transport sector, covering traffic volumes, spatial traffic distribution and distribution between transport modes, there is evidence that demand forecasting – like cost forecasting, and despite all scientific progress in modelling – is a major source of uncertainty and risk in the appraisal of major projects.

Channel tunnel, Great Belt and Øresund

The Channel tunnel opened operations in 1994. Traffic forecasts made at the time of the decision to build the tunnel predicted 15.9 million passengers on the Eurostar trains in the opening year. Actual traffic in 1995, the first full year of operations, was 2.9 million passengers, or 18 per cent of passengers predicted. After more than six years of operations, in 2001, the number of passengers had grown to 6.9 million, or 43 per cent of the original estimate for the opening year (see Figure 3.1). Total passenger traffic (including passengers on shuttle trains, in addition to Eurostar trains) was predicted at 30 million for the opening year; actual total passenger traffic in 1997 was half of this. Rail freight traffic was predicted at 7.2 million gross tonnes for the opening year; actual rail freight traffic was 1.3 million gross tonnes in 1995, or 18 per cent of freight predicted.

For much of the twentieth century, all men were expected to work full time, to marry, to provide lifelong financial support for a wife and to maintain their dependent children. Indeed, the British welfare state was built on these expectations about men's lives, widely referred to as the ‘male breadwinner model’ (Land 1980, Millar 1999). When the present study began in 1997, it was already evident that these assumptions did not reflect reality for a growing segment of the male population (Haskey 1984, Cohen 1987). So far as work was concerned, lifelong full-time employment was no longer possible for many men and, in private life, there was more frequent divorce and repartnering, an increase in living alone and more widespread cohabitation outside marriage.

This chapter explores how men's family circumstances and their stage in the life course interact with their labour market experiences. From our survey data, we can sketch the parameters of how men's family and household circumstances relate to their detachment from the labour market. The follow-up interviews provide fuller information on the personal and household circumstances of a sub-sample of the men, and probe more deeply into the complexities of their situation.

The family and household circumstances of men who are detached from the labour market: evidence from the survey

Two-thirds of our sample of ‘detached’ men were married, almost a fifth were single and a tenth were divorced or separated.

Earlier chapters have already described some of the ways in which men's labour market behaviour has altered in recent decades in response to a variety of changes in the occupational and industrial structure, family roles, access to welfare, pensions and education and new forms of work organisation. We have seen that for many men, especially, but not exclusively, those in the older age groups described in detail in ch. 6, detachment from the labour force has arisen through redundancy, early retirement or ill-health. Throughout the book, we have been exploring what ‘detachment from the labour market’ means. Chapter 1 outlined issues about measuring unemployment, noting that in the past standardised patterns of male employment partly disguised the measurement problems which are now so evident. Chapter 5 considered the extent to which men who would prefer to be working have disappeared from unemployment statistics because they have been recorded as economically inactive. Most commonly they have instead been defined as incapacitated (because they are claimants of IB) or as early retired (in some cases claiming no state benefits at all).

This chapter focuses specifically on the relationship between health and labour force detachment. It opens with discussion of some possible reasons for the increased claiming of sickness and disability benefits in recent decades. By 1999, when we conducted our last interviews, around 1.

The preceding chapters mainly explored how men have become detached from employment. However, as chs. 2 and 3 explained, re-attaching the unemployed and inactive to the labour market has become a key preoccupation of governments in the UK and elsewhere. Indeed, it is often now the guiding principle in restructuring social security systems away from an essentially ‘passive’ model, geared to individual need, towards an ‘active’ model aimed ultimately at moving claimants off welfare altogether.

This chapter examines how non-employed men assess their labour market position and the possibility of returning to work. It does so primarily by drawing again on the in-depth interviews that were the basis of chs. 7, 8 and 9. The chapter concentrates on two groups of men: the long-term unemployed and the long-term sick. In the UK context these groups mainly comprise the men in receipt of JSA and IB, though the overlap between how men describe themselves and the benefits they are actually claiming is not perfect, as ch. 4 showed. These two groups make up about two-thirds of the ‘detached male workforce’, as we have defined it in this book, and the long-term sick are particularly numerous. As ch. 4 also showed, nearly 90 per cent of the long-term unemployed and around half the long-term sick say they would like a full-time job. Far fewer of the early retired – the other large group among the detached male workforce – express an interest in returning to work.

Introduction

This book is about processes of labour market detachment among adult men. As later chapters show, in recent years detachment from the labour market has become an increasingly important phenomenon, with significant economic and social consequences. Yet it cannot be explained in terms of any single factor – men's attitudes or personal characteristics, for example, or employers' decisions to close or restructure workplaces. As a research team, our interest in the processes of labour market detachment arose partly from the observation that, in the early and mid-1990s, inadequate opportunities in the British labour market were being reflected not only in continuing high levels of unemployment, but also in rising levels of economic inactivity. This was particularly the case in certain local labour markets where major industrial restructuring had occurred. We were also stimulated by a developing literature on how employment behaviour and labour market participation were influenced by welfare systems and social security regimes (Esping-Andersen 1990). Finally, we were interested in how far changes in men's social and family roles, affected both by women's rising rates of labour force participation and by the proliferation of different types of household structure, were shaping changes to traditional expectations about men's working lives.

What do we mean by detachment from the labour force? Labour market analysis uses a range of measures to assess levels of participation in the labour force: employment, unemployment and a variety of types of ‘economic inactivity’.

Introduction

For most working-age people, earnings constitute the ‘norm’ in terms of making ends meet. This is sometimes supplemented by other sources of income, but individuals and households largely ‘get by’ through earnings from work. Whole societies and economies are arguably predicated on this norm, which has had immense symbolic significance (Bauman 1998) even if it tends to downplay or overlook the role of unpaid work such as domestic labour, unpaid care and voluntary work (Levitas 1998).

For the Labour government in the UK, for example, employment has become a central plank of both economic and social policy. Commentators increasingly refer to an ‘employment-centred’ social policy based on the promotion of work and the work ethic (Jordan 1998, Annesley 2001: 202–18), encapsulated in the now familiar refrain regarding the focus on ‘work for those who can, security for those who cannot’ (Department of Social Security 1998a: iii). Not only does the focus on employment and employability have important economic consequences, it is also suggested to be the most effective ‘escape route’ from low incomes and social exclusion.

In attempting to make employment-centred social policy a reality, policies regarding income maintenance for those of working age have focused upon the introduction and development of a range of in-work benefits. New tax credits for working families, for child care costs, and for employment have been introduced or are in development.

The detachment of large numbers of men from paid employment is one of the most significant social changes of the last twenty years or so. The once near universal expectation that men's working lives would extend from the time of their leaving school through to their state pension age has been shattered, probably for good. In Britain – the focus of the new research reported here – more than one in five of all 16–64-year-old men, or nearly 4 million men in total, are no longer in employment.

There has always been unemployment, of course, and during the 1980s and 1990s redundancies hit men very hard. But only a minority of the men who are now detached from employment are conventionally unemployed. Early retirement, ill-health and domestic responsibilities – and sometimes a combination of these with an important element of unemployment thrown in – are all key factors, too.

There is scant evidence that this increase in labour market detachment among men was ever anticipated by policy-makers or academic analysts. It has grown quietly, year on year, and even now the true scale of this phenomenon is not widely recognised. What is more, the trend among men stands in marked contrast to what is happening among women, who are becoming engaged in paid employment in ever larger numbers. Women's rising ‘labour force participation’ is well known and has been the subject of much research and vast discussion in the media.

THE SURVEY

The survey covered men aged 25–64 who were economically inactive or at the time of the survey had been unemployed for most or all of the preceding six months. It also covered part-time workers on the basis that this type of work is non-traditional for men. Taken as a whole, this is the group which we refer to as the ‘detached male workforce’.

The survey was carried out in seven localities:

1. Barnsley, in the heart of the former Yorkshire coalfield, an area badly affected by industrial job losses in the 1980s and 1990s. This metropolitan borough has a population of 230,000, comprising Barnsley town and surrounding mining villages;

2. Chesterfeild, in Derbyshire, which shares some of the industrial job losses found in Barnsley but has a more diverse and resilient economic base. Chesterfield borough has a population of 100,000, mostly in the town itself;

3. Northampton, a county town in the Midlands just seventy miles from London, which enjoyed expansion as a result of new town status and which has a relatively buoyant local economy. Northampton has a population of 190,000;

4. west Cumbria, as an example of a rural area with a declining industrial base;

5. north Yorkshire, as an example of an upland rural area (the survey area was within the north Yorks moors);

6. north Norfolk, as an example of a rural economy with an important seaside/tourist component;

7. south Shropshire, as an example of a lowland rural area.

The locations of the survey areas are shown in fig. A.1.

So just who are the men who have fallen out of the world of work? What are their skills, qualifications and work experience? How did they become detached from employment? Do they still want to work? And how do they get by, in terms of income and social security benefits? This chapter tries to provide answers to these basic questions, drawing mainly on a large-scale survey carried out in seven locations around Britain.

Chapter 1 outlined in broad terms the changing nature of men's experience of work, including the decline of traditional sources of male employment and the resulting issues of unemployment and economic inactivity. Before presenting the survey findings it is useful to look a little more closely specifically at the main statistical trends in non-employment among men across the country as a whole.

Trends in detachment

Figure 4.1 shows the trends in unemployment and economic inactivity among men of working age (i.e. 16–64) across Britain. The figures cover the years from 1977 to 2000. Unemployment – in this case the ILO measure from the Labour Force Survey – has fluctuated with the trade cycle. It rose steeply during the early 1980s, fell during the Lawson boom of the late 1980s, and rose again during the early 1990s. It subsequently fell once more to levels not much above those in the 1970s. In spring 2000 the Labour Force Survey recorded 950,000 men as unemployed in Great Britain, or 5.1 per cent of the male WAP.

Social security and unemployment

Most commentators on social security provision agree that the protection provided by state benefits serves a number of different purposes. These include the relief or prevention of poverty, the maintenance of income in periods of labour market absence, life course investment to support retirement and the provision of extra resources to support child care or disability costs (see McKay and Rowlingson 1999, Ditch 1999). Within the UK these different purposes have also resulted in the development of different forms of protection, subject to different rules and administrative procedures. Taken as a whole, social security is complex, confusing and contradictory, as the experience of many of the respondents in this research testifies, and we cannot hope to explore all of this complexity here. However, the study was concerned primarily with men's experiences of unemployment or labour market detachment; and the way in which the social security system responds to these issues has a particular history and incorporates a number of key elements of current policy, which are explored in more detail in this chapter.

Current benefit policies on unemployment can be traced back to the nineteenth century and to the Poor Law, the legacy of which remains to some extent still with us over a century and a half later. The concern of the nineteenth-century Poor Law was with pauperism rather than poverty, with the individuals and families who could not provide for themselves.