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Sarah Pearce
UK businesses are wasting billions of pounds every year. These are the findings from a Carbon Trust report published this week. The report, The Business of Energy Efficiency, by the Carbon Trust’s Advisory Service says that finance directors in large businesses are undervaluing the financial returns from energy saving by over a half.
Energy saving measures, such as upgrades to heating and lighting, energy policies and staff training could be saving businesses at least £1.6bn every year. I’ll just repeat that last bit, it’s important … Every Year.
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Richard Exell
I have a post up at Left Foot Forward, looking at today’s figures. Unemployment passed the psychologically important 2.5 million mark and employment is down as well. Public sector job losses are starting to mount and the private sector is holding off from hiring new workers. It looks as though one of the reasons is that they’re scared that 2011 is going to be perfectly bloody.
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Richard Exell
The press release for Eric Pickles’ announcement on funding for local authorities claimed that this settlement is about “protecting the vulnerable.” His own Department’s figures undermine that claim.
This is a truly awful settlement - the (Tory-controlled) Local Government Association called it “the toughest LG finance settlement in living memory.” The Financial Times’ Westminster Blog examined DCLG’s claim that the cuts in central government funding for councils are “only” 4.4 per cent on average and capped at a maximum of 8.9 per cent. They revealed that these figures are only achieved by taking the cut as a proportion of all local authorities’ income; as a proportion of the grant its much higher – an average of 10 per cent this year, up to 17 per cent in some authorities.
But even if you accept the DCLG way of looking at the figures, the claim that they have been designed to protect the vulnerable is simply unsustainable.
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The plan for a National Police Air Service would involve cutting the number of aircraft from 31 to 20 and an equivalent reduction in the number of bases – 61% of the population could be reached in 25 minutes, compared with 100% at present.
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Paul Nowak
Good post here from UNISON Active regarding the government’s decision to abolish the so-called ‘Two-Tier Code’.
The Code was designed to ensure that new starters working on outsourced government contracts had broadly comparable pay, terms and conditions to formerly directly employed staff TUPE’d across to private sector employers.
All this seems pretty arcane, but the upshot is that – combined with the government’s efforts to increase the role of the private, voluntary and social enterprise sectors in the delivery of public services, and the government’s swingeing cuts in public spending - the abolition of the Code and its replacement by a set of voluntary principles, could well lead to race to the bottom in pay, terms and conditions for public service workers.
Women in particular are likely to be the big losers in all of this - something that unfortunately seems to be a consistent theme of the government’s approach to public services.
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Richard Exell
The Bank of England’s annual survey of household finances confirms what most of us know from our own experience: families’ resources are still stretched paper-thin despite the recovery. High unemployment, stagnant earnings and the fact that credit is harder to get all play their part and families’ “awareness of the fiscal consolidation measures was quite high.” People are more worried about debt – quite rightly, as unsecured debt is at a high level.
And yet, if we look at the economy as a whole, there’s still reasonable progress.
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Philip Pearson
Cheering in the Cancun conference hall, not least from the union delegation, as the UN reached an agreement on climate change in the small hours of Saturday 11 December. Building blocks of this elusive agreement include committing major economies to CO2 cuts consistent with the latest science; holding global average temperature rises to below 2 degrees; a Green Climate Fund for developing countries with up to $30bn of Fast Start funding for the period 2010 to 2012, and £100bn annually by 2020; and action on deforestation.
But Governments could not reach an agreement to a specific CO2 target for 2020. The phrase “reducing their aggregate emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases” to a level consistent with the science, must imply cuts of between 25% and 40% by 2020. Current CO2 pledges from governments total up to 16%, well short of that aggregate figure. This still points to temperatures rises of double the UN’s ceiling.
A diplomatic road crash was avoided. To say that the climate will be much safer is a different matter. This agreement is not binding: it says so: “nothing in this decision shall prejudge prospects for, or the content of, a legally-binding outcome in the future”. So, welcoming the agreement, ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow called on Governments to “raise their sights by the time of next meeting in Durban in a year’s time.” It’s going to be a tough year leading to the UN’s supposed final conference in Durban in December 2012. That’s when the binding commitments of the Kyoto Protocol expire, and when new CO2 commitments must kick in.
For trade unions, the UN’s Shared Vision for long-term co-operative action recognises the importance of “promoting a just transition of the workforce, the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities and strategies and contributing to building new capacity for both production and service-related jobs in all sectors, promoting economic growth and sustainable development.” Strong text, too, on stakeholder engagement. Music to our ears. After two weeks of intense, round-the-clock lobbying of governments in Cancun, our emails whizzing round the globe this weekend spoke of joy and solidarity.
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Richard Exell
It looks as though petrol prices (already at a record high, according to analysts Experian Catalist) will rise even further next year. Petrol currently averages 121.76p for a litre of unleaded and diesel is not far off record levels, at 125.73p. This price has been influenced by the severe weather, but any fall will be temporary, as the VAT increase in January and a further increase in fuel duty could add a further 3.5p a litre.
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Richard Exell
There was further evidence of the weakening of demand in the private household sector yesterday, when the Council of Mortgage Lenders’ mortgage statistics showed that loans for house purchase in October were down from September (4% fewer, 6% down by value) and from October 2009 (16% fewer, down 12% by value). Remortgaging was also down from the previous month (9% fewer, down 11% by value) and from 12 months earlier (21% fewer, down 24% by value).
This downturn, with lending at its lowest level for five months, is remarkable because interest rates have not been so low for so long in the memory of any current home buyers (though some other conditions for borrowers have been tightened a little.)