Brendan Barber

Policy Exchange have a new report out today, Health and Safety: Reducing the Burden. It’s about as close to being relevant to the needs of the modern workplace as Alice in Wonderland.

Anyone who seriously believes that there is a culture of over-compliance needs some basic lessons in the reality of working life in the UK. Last year 30 million days were lost due to injuries and ill-health caused by work. And a quarter of a million people were injured at work. These were caused by employers failing to comply with health and safety regulations.

There is not one shred of evidence that there is any over-compliance. Research has shown that over half of all small businesses have not even done a basic risk assessment as required by law.

We now have less than half the number of regulations than 35 years ago, and they are generally simpler and clearer. Businesses spend, on average, less than four minutes a day on health and safety – hardly a major burden.

There is no place for any lowering of standards or reducing regulation. Instead we need more support for those businesses that want to do the right thing, and more enforcement action against those that do not.

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Join us, the blogging teams of Left Foot Forward, LabourList and Liberal Conspiracy, and special guest commentators this Wednesday from noon for live blog coverage of, and reaction to, Alistair Darling’s budget speech in the Commons. We’ll be scanning Twitter for opinion as it happens, so make sure to use the hashtag #budget2010 to get involved.

And stay with us on ToUChstone blog throughout the afternoon on Wednesday for specialist reaction on how the budget will impact on some of the big political and economic issues of the day.

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Nicola Smith

Download the 1st TUC Labour Market Report

Last week’s labour market figures received ambivalent media coverage. The BBC reported that despite large falls in the claimant count plenty of causes for concern remained and The Guardian warned against exaggerating the scale of the recovery. All of this analysis is correct – as our first Labour Market Report shows, we are very far from a fully recovered labour market.

However, it’s also worth reflecting on how much worse things could have been. Until late 2009 the economic conseusus was that unemployment would be heading upwards for a considerable time – Howard Archer was not alone in his prediction that unemployment was likely to top 3 million in 2010, and in our own Recession Report in June 2009 we suggested that the recent recession was following the pattern of the 1980s.

In fact, the labour market has performed far better than anyone predicted. While the situation remains extremely fragile, it is pretty remarkable that only one month after the deepest fall in output since the 1920s unemployment appears to have started to stabilise.

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Tim Page

As political attention turns towards next week’s Budget, I was happy to be asked to comment on the needs of industry for Left Foot Forward. Regular readers will know of the TUC’s recent call for a French style strategic investment fund, with a £5bn budget, taking long term stakes in strategic companies. However, access to finance for companies, especially green tech companies or those that will improve the nation’s infrastructure, must be a priority as we move out of recession. I hope the Chancellor takes the opportunity to address this vital issue.

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Owen Tudor

Over the last week, there have been several further articles supporting the Robin Hood Tax – some from past supporters like Jeffrey Sachs and Lord (Adair) Turner – following new support from the Archbishop of Canterbury and Polly Toynbee.

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Philip Pearson

We can reliably expect tens of thousands of new jobs in the Yorkshire and the Humber region, now designated a Low Carbon Economic Area (LCEA) for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as part of Government plans to transform the UK into a low-carbon economy.

Part of today’s announcement by Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband is £6.3 million  awarded to Scottish and Southern Energy’s 100 tonne per day capture pilot project at Ferrybridge. This  will stimulate CCS development within the region.

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Owen Tudor

Since the G8 Gleneagles summit in 2005 – the year of Make Poverty History – there has been a consensus among UK politicians about the quantity of overseas aid. Certainly, both Labour and Conservatives have agreed to ring fence their commitment to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of Gross National Income on overseas aid. Labour is proposing putting that commitment in law, and has certainly led the Conservatives in making commitments on the issue (Labour put a timetable of 2013 on achieving the UN target in their 2005 manifesto) but the Conservatives’ commitment would be difficult to break – and it is a commitment that only applies in one other area – health – so it would stand out if they did: basically that and the health commitment are key elements of the ‘nice not nasty’ imagery that David Cameron’s leadership has tried so hard to promote. However, Labour will be keen in the coming election to stress that the last Conservative government actually cut overseas development assistance. And the behaviour of right of centre governments in Canada and Ireland suggests that spending on overseas aid in the new global climate is once again becoming a left-right issue.

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• Labour List| Sovereign equity can revolutionise financing of the UK’s assets
  Chris Cook makes a very interesting suggestion for funding public works
• Unemployment should be at the heart of the election debate
  Richard has a guest post at Left Foot Forward, arguing that unemployment is the test of political ethics. How high a priority do politicians give it?
• George Irvin | Comment is free | The wisdom of recycling trade surpluses
  What would Keynes do?

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Nigel Stanley

NEST is the new low-cost default pension scheme for employers who do not have alternative arrangements when the new duty on employers to auto-enrol their staff and make pensions contributions starts to roll out in 2012.

We already knew a lot about how it will work, but there has been one big gap. But today we have learnt what its charging structure will be.

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Richard Exell

The Costs of Unemployment is a new TUC report, published today that looks at the costs to individuals and society. We believe that the facts and figures we report lead to a political imperative: all politicians have a duty to make unemployment their first priority. The facts are shocking. To quote just a handful:

• Unemployed people are twice as likely as others to suffer frequent mental distress and twice as likely to suffer short-term depression.
• Unemployment increases the risk of marital dissolution by 70%.
• Unemployed people are twice as likely to be unhappy.
• A 1% increase in unemployment is associated with a 0.79% increase in homicides.
• Unemployed people much more likely to be the victims of crime – and more than twice as likely to be the victims of violent crime.
• The death rate for the children of long-term unemployed parents is thirteen times as high as for the children of whose parents worked in higher managerial or professional occupations.

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