Richard Exell

I was struck by two items in the news that happened to appear on the same day. In the UK, Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for local government, has announced plans to give the public the power to veto Council Tax increases. From 2012, MPs will decide each year on a maximum increase local authorities will be allowed to introduce, and increases over that limit will be subject to a referendum and a ‘shadow budget’ the Council would also have to produce. If the electorate voted against the Council’s budget, there would be a refund or a credit against next year’s Council Tax. (There will be no right to a referendum on cuts in services.)

On the same day I saw a report on California’s budget crisis, with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declaring a “fiscal state of emergency.”

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Richard Exell

Major cuts in children’s services are planned in Hampshire and Norfolk. Hampshire County Council plans a £25 million cut, threatening 185 jobs in the music education service, careers information and counselling, social work posts in special educational needs and senior management; there will also be a £1.4 million cut in funding for the voluntary sector. Norfolk County Council plans particularly severe cuts in the Connexions service, threatening 65 jobs.

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Richard Exell

Papers leaked to The Times (paywall) reveal that one option for cuts at the Ministry of Defence will be to scrap the RAF’s 120 Tornado GR4s

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Richard Exell

The Department for Work and Pensions has finally published a consultation document on Twenty-First Century Welfare. For a couple of weeks there have been constant will they-won’t they rumours that the Department was about to publish a White Paper on reforms to the benefits and Tax Credits system. In the end, the document that has emerged looks far more like a Green Paper, with very little detail, and a series of questions about the strategic direction for policy.

If you’ve already read the Centre for Social Justice’s Dynamic Benefits and the Coalition’s State of the Nation, then very little in today’s publication will be new to you. It seems very likely that there was a plan for a White Paper, but that it fell victim to the strains between Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne that I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

The reasons for this tension are easily set out:

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Philip Pearson

In 2005, the Government’s Sustainable Development Strategy, Securing the Future, strengthened the Sustainable Development Commission’s role as an independent watchdog. It scrutinised Government progress, monitored its targets and primed public debate on anything from health inequality to the Severn Barrage. No longer. Gone for £4.5m. Instead of the SDC telling uncomfortable truths to Government, Government will monitor itself. 

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Richard Exell

Birmingham City Council plans to make 430 workers redundant in the Connexions service and the Children and Young People’s Department.

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Nicola Smith

Scotland’s Independent Budget Review has recommended significant cuts in services across Scotland.

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Nicola Smith

The findings of Scotland’s Independent Budget Review have been published. The full report states that the June Budget’s implications for  Scotland will have “significant knock-on effects for output and employment across the Scottish economy, in both the public and private sectors”, an assertion that is based on economic forecasts that have been carried out by the Department of Economics in Strathclyde University.

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Nicola Smith

Recent days have seen multiple announcements of local authority job losses.

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Philip Pearson

Is the CBI right to attack Chris Huhne’s support for a tougher EU limit on carbon emissions, in today’s FT? He and his French and German counterparts argued through those pages recently that the EU should up its game from 20% to 30% by 2020, so not to lose competitive edge to low carbon industries in China and Japan. Industry seems divided on this issue – some sectors are certainly at risk, as our study shows. It must be time for Government to meet all sides of industry.

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