Alice Hood

A quick plug for some interesting Ipsos MORI polling conducted for the Economist ahead of next Wednesday’s Budget. Covered in the Times (paywall), the polling found that 70 per cent of respondents think the Government is cutting too fast, only three in ten think the Government has got the balance between cuts and tax rises right, and 70 per cent think the poor will be hardest hit.

Nigel has been tracking the YouGov polling on the cuts for a few months now, most recently on False Economy and will continue to do so. The Ipsos MORI poll is very much in line with the trends shown by the YouGov data, showing widespread concern about the speed, depth and unfairness of the cuts.

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Richard Exell

The government’s plans to introduce a maximum limit to the amount of benefit a family can receive will hit the poorest families hardest and will overwhelmingly hit families with children.

From 2013, the most a family can get in benefits will be £500 for families with children and £350 for single people and couples without children. Last month the Department for Work and Pensions published their Impact Assessment for this policy. They still haven’t got round to assessing the impact on poverty, on different regions and nations, on women and men or different ethnic groups, but what is available is fascinating.

First of all, we now have a good idea of the scale of the impact: 50,000 families will lose an average of £93 a week, over half will lose more than £66 a week and 15 per cent (seven and a half thousand families) will lose more than £150 a week.

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Tim Page

No, that isn’t a typo, your eyes are not deceiving you and it isn’t April Fools Day. Jeremy Warner, Assistant Editor of the Daily Telegraph, was spot-on in his comments about economic growth, in response to the latest OECD economic survey, yesterday evening.

Mr Warner wrote: “Mr (George) Osborne, (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) should enjoy his moment in the sun while it lasts, for the threats to growth, both domestic and global, are once more looking frighteningly real… the OECD has cut its forecasts for UK growth quite sharply – to just 1.5pc this year and 2pc next. This is lower by a considerable margin than the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility is predicting, and serves as a sharp reminder that the Government’s fiscal consolidation could yet be blown off course by a weaker-than-anticipated recovery. Don’t forget, these new forecasts ignore any damange to growth that turmoil in the Middle East might inflict, and take no account at all of the economic fallout from the catastrophe in Japan.”

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Tim Page

Vince Cable launches the Government’s Technology and Innovation Centres (TICs) today. These centres, based loosely on the German Fraunhofer model, help companies access the best research from leading universities, thereby improving their productivity and, ultimately, making them more successful. Fraunhofer Institutes are part of Germany’s well-established support system for industry. TICs are a good idea. The TUC has consistenly supported their introduction and we welcome them again today. The first TIC will focus on advanced manufacturing, a crucial sector for any rebalanced UK economy. What is more, we welcome the comment from Vince Cable, a man who chooses his words carefully, that UK manufacturing “has considerably greater potential”.

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Nicola Smith

I have a post on Left Foot Forward discussing today’s labour market data: Eight per cent of working age adults in the UK now report that they are unemployed, with practically the same number again reporting that while they are economically inactive they would like a job – 2,359,000 people.

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Nicola Smith

Today’s public sector employment bulletin is concerning reading. The key topline is that since this time last year the number of public sector jobs has fallen by 132,000, of which 66,000 (50 per cent) have been lost from local government. The release also provides analysis by sector: on the year 24,000 jobs (all full-time equivalents) have been lost in education (with 22,000 lost on the quarter alone), 5,000 in the police, 3,000 in the forces, 29,000 in public administration, 2,000 in health and social work and 4,000 specifically in the NHS. And that is only up to December 2010, before the full scale of the spending cuts have hit. With the OBR forecasting 330,000 public sector jobs will be lost over the next four years it’s interesting that over a third of the reduction already appears to have taken place. With more than £80 billion to be lost from public sector budgets over the spending review period – which hasn’t even started yet -  it’s hard to see how these employment forecasts can stand up.

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Tim Page

The OECD published its latest UK economic survey today and the TUC thinks the Paris-based think-tank has got it wrong. The top line from the OECD report – one that the Government will no doubt latch on to – is that the Coalition is right to go ahead with its spending cuts programme. The TUC’s General Secretary, Brendan Barber, has described the OECD report as far too complacent about the very real risks that deep, early spending cuts pose for the UK economy.

I couldn’t resist chuckle when I read the Guardian website’s first report of the OECD survey. This report has the headline, ‘Interest rates must stay low to protect recovery, OECD says’. To the right of the Guardian website report, in a column entitled ‘Related’, there is a link to a Guardian website report from last May, just a couple of weeks into the Coalition’s term of office. This report has the headline, ‘UK must raise interest rates, says OECD’!

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Owen Tudor

The TUC wants a budget for growth because the main way to deal with the budget deficit is to get the economy growing again. But budgets are also about taxes, and who pays them, so the TUC is also calling for tax reform. One key demand is to implement a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions, not least because the finance sector is undertaxed compared with other sectors and, for that matter, you and me! It could raise an extra £20bn a year for good causes including preventing public service cuts, but it’s unlikely that George Osborne will announce an appropriately pauline conversion on Budget Day (oh go on then, surprise me, George!)  There is still some way to go before the world leaders who already support such taxes (eg Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy – not strange bedfellows for Osborne at all, so you never know) manage to convince enough unbelievers, although a majority of Eurozone countries now seem convinced.

But there are a couple of practical steps towards a Robin Hood Tax that the Chancellor certainly could announce which would raise about £6bn a year: a 0.005% levy on sterling currency transactions, and extending the 0.5% Stamp Duty on share transactions to cover the trading that banks do on their own account, rather than for clients (who already pay that tax).

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Anjum Klair

There are almost ten dole claimants for every job vacancy in Labour held constituencies, more than double the rate in Conservative seats, according to our analysis published ahead of the latest unemployment statistics.

The analysis finds that there are 9.8 Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) claimants per vacancy in Labour held constituencies, compared to a ratio of 6.1 in Lib Dem seats and 4.5 in Conservative seats. Across the UK, there are over six dole claimants per job vacancy.

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Owen Tudor

I spoke tonight to over a hundred people crammed into a Commons Committee Room at the NUJ Parliamentary Rally against cuts to the BBC World Service. Former World Service Director John Tusa, former Gaza hostage Alan Johnson and NUJ Deputy General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet were among the other speakers and veteran broadcaster Austin Mitchell MP chaired. Here’s what I said…

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