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"Local Government Chronicle" has surveyed council finance officers and found that 83% were planning cuts in library services & 63% were planning cuts in Sure Start. One in five said that services for young people would lose the largest propotion of their funding.
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Richard Exell
This week there have been plenty of indications that business, and especially consumer, confidence are at very low levels. This provokes the question: just how likely is it that households are going to borrow on the scale the Office for Budget Responsibility expects?
Last week I pointed to OBR’s forecast for household borrowing and debt, which show this rising from 160% of income last year to 173% by 2015. Yesterday Paul Krugman blogged on this (referencing False Economy):
“…the only way the economy can avoid taking a hit from government cuts is if private spending rises to fill the gap — and although you rarely hear the austerians admitting this, the only way that can happen is if people take on more debt. So we have the spectacle of a government that inveighs against the evils of debt pinning all its hopes on an assumption that over-indebted households will dig their hole even deeper.”
I want to expand on this a bit, because this week there has been lots of evidence that this is unlikely to happen any time soon:
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Sarah Pearce
This week I’ve been over in San Francisco taking part in the IPPR’s US learning exchange on green jobs. There are 14 of us from a range of organisations, social enterprises, environmental and social justice organisations and trade unions finding out how forming alliances can lead to the creation of green jobs. So what have we discovered?
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Philip Pearson
The Government has cut council budgets and removed their climate change targets. Small surprise, then, that only one in four councils (89 authorities) have now committed to cut emission across their area by 2020. A Friends of the Earth survey of every English local authority found that of those that do have a 2020 target, only 22 have a target equivalent to a 40% cut in emissions by 2020. This is the minimum recommended by the Committee on Climate Change. The average council target through to 2020 was a 30% reduction.
FoE’s David Powell says that the government’s move to scrap local area agreements (LAAs) had contributed to the decline. This is also confirmed by the fact that a majority of the 150 councils that have retained their LAAs had also adopted climate change targets. The voluntary approach to tackling climate change locally was not working. As a result, FoE wants the Coalition to include addressing climate change as a core responsibility for every council in its Energy Bill, currently being debated in Parliament.
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Richard Exell
We have just published the latest edition of our Labour Market Report.
In it, we provide our usual round-up of employment and unemployment figures. There is a section on “Want Work” rates – a way of measuring labour market slack. Using this measure there are 4,888,000 people who want a job but don’t have one.
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Nigel Stanley
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary have today published their analysis of what constitutes a front-line police job.
And politicians of all parties like to say that they will defend front-line public service jobs by cutting the back-office bureaucrats.
But this division is a nonsense.
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A good post from Age UK on the lump of labour fallacy as applied to old v young
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Justine lives in North East Derbyshire and writes about her experiences trying to get a job – a useful reality check for everyone who writes about the labour market!
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Nigel Stanley
Unison commisioned some interesting poll questions from YouGov in the run up to last Saturday’s March (and kindly ‘donated’ one about support for the march to the TUC, which has popped up in the media sevaral times since.)
The questions give respondents the opportunity to choose betwen the kind of argument we would put and on the government would put. That can be a good polling technique as it means that youy are not trying to devise a neutral non-leading question, but giving people the choice between two clearly partial statements.
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Philip Pearson
Industry is hurting from the Chancellor’s carbon tax. This is the plan to set a target price of CO2 at £30 a tonne by 2020. A new carbon tax, imposed when the market price is low, doubles the cost of carbon in the UK compared with Europe. Alcan, the UK’s aluminium producer, warns the tax on carbon emissions from power generation could fatally damage its plant in Northumberland, with 600 employees. The industry body for Energy Intensive Users says the tax will “add millions to the cost of manufacturing energy intensive products in this country.” Yet you search the Treasury’s Plan for Growth in vain for words like steel, ceramics and cement (except in words like announcement).
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Tim Page
You knew that, of course. So did I. But it’s good to see it confirmed by no less a body than the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent organisation set up by the Chancellor, George Osborne, to provide impartial economic analysis.
Today’s Financial Times carries a report headlined ‘Osborne defends Budget as MPs hear of oil risks’. This report describes evidence given to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee on the effects of Budget 2011 and includes the following passage: “Mr [Steve] Nickell, of the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, said that if wages failed to keep pace with inflation, real wages would fall, consumption would decline and growth would be weak. ‘That, in some senses, is the worst of all possible worlds,’ he told the Commons Treasury committee. ‘You have higher inflation and lower growth as a consequence, which means the difficulties facing the [Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England] are of a very high order.’”
