Nigel Stanley
It’s been disappointing to see the IFS claims that you can’t make the rich pay more by raising income tax rates taken quite so uncritically. Of course it’s true that the super-rich will continue to do all they can to avoid paying a fair level of tax, but that does not mean you should give up trying - simply that you need to get the tools right. As Richard Murphy says it means integrating anti-avoidance measures – as we do with the TUC’s minimum tax rates proposal.
Alice Hood
The verdict on what the budget has to offer on housing? £1bn of new money, around half for new building and half to support homeowners, is definitely a step in the right direction, although it falls short of the boldness needed to tackle the full extent of the housing crisis. Still, if the money is all to come within one year, it represents one-third of the package the TUC and others have been calling for (albeit differently distributed ) – a welcome starting point.
Iain Murray
In addition to the new jobs and training package for unemployed under-25s, the Budget included two other welcome initiatives that will help to counter unemployment by increasing education and training opportunities for young people.
Philip Pearson
This practical, green budget clearly acknowledges that the government has a central role to play in turning the UK into a competitive low carbon economy. The Government has shown that it wants an energy revolution, cutting our carbon by 34% by 2020, on a scale that the market on its own cannot deliver.
The Budget adds up to £1.365 billion for new green energy supply and energy efficiency, about £6.5 billion in capital support through the European Investment Bank and other means, plus an unspecified ‘funding mechanism’ for up to four carbon capture demonstration projects. Each CCS plant won’t give much change out of £1billion.
Richard Exell
The Budget’s new programme for unemployed young people is very welcome, and bears a certain resemblance to the TUC’s proposals for an intermediate labour market programme, but I can’t help being disappointed by the non-action on child poverty.
Like other organisations in the End Child Poverty coalition, the TUC called for a £3 billion investment in support for the 3.9 million children still living in poverty.
The scale of the Budget response was inadequate; as far as I can make out there are three items that are designed to raise children’s incomes:
Nicola Smith
Today’s unemployment figures (providing data from December 08 – February 09) are bleak. They show that by the end of February there were 2,100,000 unemployed people by the ILO measure, and the unemployment rate was 6.7 per cent. Young people’s unemployment rates are far higher than those for other age groups - among 18-24 year olds the rate is 15.1 per cent. Between December 2008 – February 2009 631,000 young people were unemployed and 111,000 young people (17.6 per cent of all unemployed young people) had been unemployed for over 12 months.
In his Budget speech the Chancellor announced the Government’s plans to introduce an employment programme for 200,000 long-term unemployed young people from 2010. We welcome this support, which is urgently needed and closely resembles our own calls for a new scheme to create jobs for the long-term unemployed. But it needs to happen now – waiting until the beginning of next year will mean that 100,000 young people may already have been out of work for 24 months before they can access this help.
Tim Page
Today’s Budget announced a £750m Strategic Investment Fund, to support advanced industrial projects. This follows Monday’s launch of ‘New Industry, New Jobs: Building Britain’s Future’, by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson.
The TUC has campaigned for years for an intelligent industrial strategy, centered on the kind of strategic industries where the UK is or could become competitive in world markets. For most of those years, both the Government and employers were lukewarm, equating our approach with a failed policy of ‘picking winners’.
Brendan Barber
There is much to welcome in this budget, particularly action on youth unemployment, some first steps in creating a fair tax system and better support for the unemployed. There is some help for construction, and a Strategic Investment Fund provides real resources for Monday’s welcome industrial strategy. Pensioners will welcome the increase in capital disregards. This budget clearly acknowledges that the government has a central role to play in turning the UK into a competitive low carbon economy.
Nigel Stanley
It’s hard to think that Hugh Dalton had to resign as Chancellor because he had mentioned a budget “secret” to a journalist on his way into the House of Commons to actually deliver the speech. Today the debate is about whether the Chancellor has saved up anything surprising for his speech, and there have been clearly well-sourced predictions in the papers since the weekend.
Join us from 12 noon onwards on this post, where we’ll be giving live commentary on Alastair Darling’s budget, using CoverItLive and Twitter. Also check the rest of the blog over the course of the afternoon for specialist analysis from ToUChstone team members on different policy implications of the announcement.