Richard Exell
Michael Gove has told Sir Paul Ennals, Chair of the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) that the Department for Education will cease funding the CWDC by 2012, after which its “ongoing core activities” will be transferred to the Department.
Janet Williamson
The TUC is publishing today its eighth Fund Manager Voting Survey – an annual survey that asks the largest UK fund managers how they voted at a selection of ‘controversial’ votes at company AGMs.
The survey shows that who manages your pension makes a huge difference to how your pension fund votes on a range of issues from remuneration through to chicken welfare and labour standards.
Brendan Barber addresses today’s TUC Member Trustees Network’s annual conference, with an overview presentation on the current situation and prospects for pensions in the UK, and for more active stewardship. The network brings together pension fund trustees to take a more active shareholder role for good corporate governance.
Richard Exell
Horticulture Week reports that “almost nine-tenths of park managers fear recent Government cuts will damage their green spaces.” Just under half thought that the cuts would be substantial and a third thought that the number of parks would fall, due to asset transfers. What will be especially depressing for those with memories of visiting neglected local authority parks in the Eighties is the fact that the managers feared that standards would fall, with maintenance lining up to be the main casualty. Other items likely to be at the sharp end include community involvement projects, floral displays, bowling greens and ornamental grass-cutting.
Nicola Smith
I have a post up at Left Foot Forward examining the Secretary of State’s claims regarding the distributional impacts of Universal Credit.
Richard Exell
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, the Campaign for National Parks and the Ramblers’ Association have warned that the cuts facing the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) threaten the national parks. The signatories, who include Chris Bonnington, Ben Fogle and Janet Street-Porter, point out that the national parks cannot raise rates and their funding depends on Defra – which has to make some of the deepest cuts in Whitehall. The Campaign for National Parks is also running a campaign against the cuts, encouraging supporters to write to Richard Benyon, the National Parks Minister.
Richard Exell
Local Government Chronicle reports (paywall) that David Freud has written to Newham mayor Robin Wells, admitting that “many customers will lose out as a result of these changes” but arguing that they are necessary “to stop the rapid increase in Housing Benefit expenditure.”
Lord Freud adds that DWP is carrying out an economic impact assessment to look at issues such as the added demand for schools and social services in the neighbourhoods they move to.
Con Keating
After twenty years of ever-increasing volumes and complexity of pension regulation, a brief conversation this week with a member of the Visteon scheme brought home to me the fact that very little has really changed. After 38 years of service, this individual will lose 48% of his pension entitlement under the Pension Protection Fund rules – is this really the best that we can do twenty years after the Maxwell scandal?
Kate Bell
The Department for Work and Pensions launched its White Paper on the Universal Credit last week. One of its most heavily trailed elements was the increase in sanctions for those who fail to seek or find work (on top of the already announced automatic sanction of 10% of Housing Benefit for those on Jobseeker’s Allowance for more than a year).
The White Paper wants to introduce the power for advisers to remove people’s benefits for periods ranging between one week and three years. When advisers believe that claimants would ‘benefit from experiencing the habits and routines of working life’ they will have the power to mandate them to four weeks of compulsory work activity. And advisers will also be able to
“require some jobseekers to attend their local office more frequently to demonstrate the steps they have been taking to return to work; require some people to broaden their job search earlier in their claim; and raise the number of steps they expect a customer to take in any week to have the best prospects of finding work”.
There’s little evidence that these proposals will help those out of work to find jobs, given that there are currently over five jobseekers for every vacancy. But work on Community Links’ Deep Value project, which is examining the importance of effective one to one relationships in public services, suggests that giving advisers more power to sanction claimants may in fact make employment programmes less effective.