Richard Exell

Today’s labour market figures are pretty depressing – employment down, unemployment up. But at first sight, one statistic looks encouraging: there were 480,000 vacancies in the three months to December. This is an increase of 18,000 from the three months to September and is fourteen thousand higher than a year earlier.

Unfortunately, this increase is entirely due to the census, which began recruiting temporary collectors and enumerators in October. As the ONS notes point out,

Excluding the Census vacancies, there were 456,000 job vacancies in the three months to December 2010, down 6,000 from the three months to September 2010.

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Congratulations to our very own Nicola Smith, who scooped the Work Foundation’s Workworld Media Awards “Blogger of the Year” title at last night’s ceremony. The award, which was presented by Will Hutton and Lord Puttnam is a new category for the 24 year old work, business and economic media awards, but was hotly contested, with a shortlist comprising Owen Walker of the FT’s SchemeXpert.com and the always excellent Stefan Stern for his work at Edelman and FT Blogs (and who has a post up today on the new category’s implications for journalism).

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Richard Exell

The debate on Educational Maintenance Allowances called for by the Parliamentary Labour Party seems to have focused politicians’ attention on the government’s harsh plans to get rid of EMAs. I’m particularly proud of the way unions, working with students, have led the way in campaigning against this policy and today we saw two pieces of union research that showed just how damaging this move will be. UNISON revealed that cancelling the contract with Capita to run the scheme will cost up to £40 million in penalty charges. At the same time, a poll commissioned by the University and College Union has shown that 70 per cent of students who get EMAs would drop out without this backing. The government claims to believe in social mobility, fairness and equal opportunities – all of these causes will be harmed by cancelling the EMAs.

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Alastair Hatchett

Higher petrol, diesel, gas and food prices drove inflation higher in December 2010, even before the rate of VAT was raised to 20% at the beginning of January 2011. The Retail Prices Index (RPI) rose to 4.8% in December, up from 4.7% in November. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose to 3.7%, up from 3.3% in November.

This is widespread concern that these levels of inflation are much higher than forecast earlier in 2010 and are likely to be with us for much of 2011. The large rise in the CPI measure will be a blow to the Government and the Bank of England, both of whom seek to target policy on a rate of 2%.

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Anjum Klair

We have previously reported on how cuts are impacting on children and young people, as local councils respond to significant cuts in their funding. Further information from councils is now coming forward as they settle their financial budgets for 2011/12, which show us that these cuts are impacting on front line services and on the most vulnerable. 

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Anjum Klair

About 2,000 jobs are to go at Manchester City Council in the next 12 months as a result of government spending cuts (17% of the workforce).

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Alice Hood

Ahead of the publication of the Health and Social Care Bill this Wednesday, unions representing workers across the NHS have used a strongly-worded letter to the Times (paywall) to warn that the planned reforms are “extremely risky and potentially disastrous”. The unions (BMA, RCN, Unison, Unite, RCM and CSP) between them represent the majority of the 1.4 million people working in the NHS in England, including doctors, nurses, midwives, health visitors, psychologists, physiotherapists and many more. They argue that the current proposals could damage the quality of care and hamper effective collaborative working. The nature of the changes, the speed and scale of implementation, and the requirement to make £20 billion in savings at the same time all add up to a potent cocktail of risks.

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• Written evidence on Universal Credit
  The Work and Pensions Select Committee has published all of the written evidence that it has received on Universal Credit.

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Nicola Smith

Yesterday’s GDP estimates from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) may be causing the Treasury some concern, given NIESR’s conclusion that growth during the last quarter of 2010 was only 0.5 per cent, lower than ONS’s current estimate for Q3 2010 and therefore suggesting a further decline in the rate of recovery.  Slowing growth towards the end of 2010 has also led NIESR to conclude that over the year the economy only expanded by 1.6 per cent, 0.2 percentage points below the OBR forecast.

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Nicola Smith

Announcing the phasing out of the default retirement age, Ed Davey told this morning’s Today programme that:

I’m afraid those people who seem to think there is a displacement between young and older people here firstly are not reading the evidence and secondly they have a very old fashioned approach to labour supply as though there is a fixed amount of jobs in the economy. That clearly isn’t the case … this will actually boost the number of jobs in the economy.

Great. We agree (as do nearly all economists). The more people there are in work, the more demand in the economy grows and the more jobs are created.  But Ed Davey’s view may not be shared across the Government as the DWP appear to be proceeding with the development of Universal Credit on the basis that there needs to be (in the words of the Secretary of State) “better work distribution“. This phrase seems to mean that couple households with lots of work should be enabled to choose for one adult (not both – sharing care doesn’t seem to be the focus) to work fewer hours, thereby freeing up jobs for those who don’t have any.

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