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Alastair Hatchett reviews today’s labour market figures on the IDS blog
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Don Paskini discusses why ‘findaproperty.com’ is a less than accurate source of data on private sector rental prices, and on why the Secretary of State has (again) misled parliament by presenting these statistics as official data.
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Inside Housing reports that DWP is now using ‘findaproperty.com’ as its data source of choice for official statistics.
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Qualitative research from the Joseph Rowntree foundation finds that the people in the study faced persistent poverty despite “great and enduring commitment to work”. The individuals were more committed to work than work was to them: “the insecurity of low-paid and low-quality work was the main reason why shuttling between benefits and jobs was so common. This cycling in and out of low-paid work extended to middle-aged and not just younger workers, showing that these jobs are not necessarily stepping stones to better employment.”
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Richard Exell
Employment minister Chris Grayling has denounced the last government’s Flexible New Deal. The cost per job worked out at more than £30,000, mainly because the contractors who were to deliver it strong-armed the government into agreeing very high service fees.
This doesn’t come as a huge surprise. At the time the programme was being designed the TUC said that the flexibility of the Flexible New Deal was great, but that taking delivery away from Jobcentre Plus was a mistake. When the recession hit it was clear that the providers had been very successful indeed in renegotiating their contracts to take account of new circumstances.
Of course, the programme that most strongly resembles FND is the Work Programme and the organisations that delivered FND will also be (for the most part) the organisations that will deliver WP. The larger element of outcome-related funding in the new programme may reduce the likelihood of this sort of thing happening, but the main cause was the weak position the government was in when the labour market suddently and drastically deteriorated. If the new government continues to deny opportunities to Jobcentre Plus the risk of that happening again won’t have gone away.
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Richard Exell
I have a post up at Left Foot Forward, looking at today’s employment figures. Employment is up and unemployment is down, but the true picture is rather darker than these bare facts would suggest…
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Philip Pearson
Economic competence? Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, has effectively reversed one of the Chancellor’s more worrying announcements in the CSR - taking £1bn in taxes from the Carbon Reduction Commitment rather than recycling the revenues to energy efficient firms in the scheme. No wonder employers – and the TUC – were annoyed. We were all fully consulted on how the revenues should be used and said they should be recycled. That’s why the system was set up this way.
What a mess. A scheme that was due to begin to save up to a million tonnes of CO2 emissions from the UK’s largest service sector employers, from hotels and supermarkets to hospitals and local authorities, is deferred til 2013. Really bad news for the CO2 targets, creating confusion among those of us who have worked hard to support a greener economy.
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Matt Dykes
The Government announced today that it is set to roll out new ‘Rights to Provide’ across public services enabling front line staff to take over and run their services as mutual organisations. Francis Maude has also unveiled new support for public service ‘spin-outs’, including over £10million to help the best fledgling mutuals reach investment readiness.
The idea of using employee-ownership models such as mutuals in the delivery of public services is not a brand new idea, of course, we produced this briefing for trade unions earlier this year. The previous Labour Government advocated a similar approach. More broadly, the concept of employee ownership has had its champions on both the left and right and the TUC believes that there’s merit in exploring some of the issues further. There’s certainly been some interesting debate on some of the better blogs.
However, today’s announcement does give us some cause for concern. This is particularly so given the context of massive spending cuts, job losses and attacks on pay and pensions across the public sector.
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Nicola Smith
Today we issued a press release highlighting that the number of people who have spent more than 12 months out of work has more than doubled since the start of the recession. The Government issued this response:
The TUC should stop hoping for the worst and row in behind our efforts to get jobless people the support they need to re-enter the workplace after more than a decade in which too many were abandoned to a life on benefits.
Apart from being slightly offensive – is it fair to claim that highlighting the scale of long-term unemployment across the UK equates to hoping that levels rise far higher (as, incidentally, they have done – with today’s figures showing a 20,000 quarterly increase in the number of people out of work for over 12 months)? – it is interesting that the Government has chosen to attack the TUC in this way. Could they be on the back foot? The statistics that they have used to support their position certaintly suggest that they are.
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GMB reports that 82 jobs are at risk at the Immigration Advisory Service (a charity giving advice on immigration and asylum.
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PCS reports that the Home Office has created 20 unpaid work experience vacancies at the same time as announcing 7,000 redundancies.
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We are far too serious on Touchstone to link to amusing political videos or ever to join in campaigns to make tunes not featured on the X-factor the Christmas number one.
Indeed we are far more likely to write 800 words on why the whole concept of number one on the charts substitutes market success for what should be an aesthetic judgement.
But if we were ever to break this rule …
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Philip Pearson
Where were we? In June, the Chancellor announced a levy on banks’ balance sheets “to ensure our banks make a fair contribution to reflect the risks they pose.” The move was lazily headlined as a “£2,5bn bank levy”. In fact, it takes four years to reach that level. After a little bank lobbying about “unsustainable” levels of taxation we learn that HM Treasury may cut the tax rate on UK and international banks, to ensure the Chancellor’s £2.5bn “target” is not breached. Meanwhile, HMRC has apparently reduced Vodafone’s potential tax liability of about £7bn to a little over £1bn.
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Economics
House Prices: it’s good that inflation is coming down, but what does that say about demand?
Richard Exell
Today’s figures for the Communities and Local Government House Price Index in September show that the average house price is £211,815 and that house price inflation in the year to September was 6.1 per cent. This is down from 8.3 per cent in the previous month and substantially below the forecasts of around 9 per cent.
This slowing down is good news.