Scarlet Harris
This week’s unemployment figures came as a welcome surprise to many people as Richard Exell points out in his Left Foot Forward blog.
As Richard explains, the rise in employment and the drop in unemployment seem to be genuinely good news and not masking a boom in “atypical” work such as temporary or self-employed jobs.
So, good news all round then? Alas, not for women.
Matt Dykes
“I want to talk today about our plans to set public sector workers free, to let them take control of their organisations, turn them into mutuals and have more control and autonomy over how things are run”.
So said Francis Maude in November last year as he launched the Government’s drive to enable more public sector workers to create mutuals that will take over the running of services they provide.
But are public sector workers embracing the brave new world of the mutual? Events at MyCSP this week would suggest not.
Richard Exell
I have a post at Left Foot Forward, looking at today’s labour market statistics. Employment is up and unemployment is down, which is all in line with recent indicators on recruitment; so why do the economic commentators still expect unemployment to go up this year?
Philip Pearson
Almost half the 27,000 jobs supported by the Coalition’s growth fund, announced today, are in the north of England, described as Government attempts to “counter job losses in areas most dependent on public sector employment.” But unemployment has risen by 43,000 in the two Northern regions since the recession (January ’08). It’s 10.2% in the North East. Around 107,000 are jobless in the 2 regions, four times the direct jobs announced today. The Business Secretary said the £450m in grants for 50 companies would leverage £2.5bn of private investment. It’s welcome, but nothing like enough. The investments will doubtless be spread over time. And no Minister is claiming that this is a green stimulus programme.
Nicola Smith
As today’s Telegraph reports, TUC analysis demonstrates that despite CPI now being the Government’s preferred measure of inflation RPI remains its measure of choice for calculating the interest on student loans. This hypocrisy allows the Goverment to ask households to accept lower tax credit payments, faster moves into higher tax rates, reduced pensions and lower benefits while continuing to uprate payments that are due to the state by the higher RPI inflation measure. Over the long-run the Government calculate the difference is 0.87 percentage points annually: the costs for working, workless and retired households will soon start mounting up.
The Government’s justification for maintaining two inflation rates for payments and reciepts is incoherent – and is illustrated by BIS’s response to our analysis.
Ben Moxham
I’ve just been reading “The Globalization Paradox”, by Harvard’s Dani Rodrik who makes an interesting and powerful point: “If you want markets to expand, you need governments to do the same.” (page 18).
Rodrik stumbles across this slightly counterintuitive conclusion in an old article by David Cameron – not our public budget butchering Prime Minister, but a political scientist from Yale.
Philip Pearson
Despite evidence that businesses gain reputational and other benefits from an open approach to reporting their carbon footprint, the Coalition is set for a U-turn on plans for mandatory reporting, due this year. Ministers are apparently considering whether to limit the system to larger companies only. Yet Defra Minister Lord Henley said last autumn: “Disclosing good quality information helps investors to make informed decisions about where and how to invest, taking account of how well the company is managing its environmental impacts.” It seems the Coalition’s new drive against red tape trumps all. But does this make sense, when a regulation is good for business?
Darinka Aleksic
In the pro-choice movement, it is fairly common to be told that we are promoting murder, eugenics, racism and social ills of all kinds. In some ways it’s easy to dismiss this kind of accusation: most reasonable people, in the UK at least, broadly support a woman’s right to choose abortion and are able to distinguish between extremist viewpoints and rational debate on the subject.
That’s why the abortion-related amendments to the Health and Social Care bill recently tabled by Nadine Dorries and Frank Field are more problematic – because superficially they sound reasonable.
Paul Sellers
New monthly figures published by the Council of Mortgage Lenders today show loans recovering slightly after a disastrous January. However, the number of loans granted for house purchases and remortgages were both down by 12% compared to February 2010.
The Government simply has to bear down on the banks to start making more mortgage finance available, otherwise the housing market will remain at a standstill, and ordinary working people will continue to be squeezed out.