Richard Exell

How does anyone manage to live on social security benefits? On Tuesday, I noted that the average weekly payment to someone receiving Incapacity Benefit or Severe Disablement Allowance was £96.64 – that is being replaced by Employment and Support Allowance, where the average weekly payment is £81.71.

Yesterday, the Department for Work and Pensions published their annual Abstract of Statistics for Benefits, National Insurance Contributions, and Indices of Prices and Earnings. The most useful information in this book is in the pages detailing benefit uprating since the war – each increase, together with what percentage of average earnings that represented. There’s tables for different benefits, and most of them have lost value over time – the exceptions are Pension Credit, Income Support for couples with young children and Child Benefit, which rose under the last government.

But benefits for unemployed people did as badly under the last government as under those that preceded it.

Continue Reading →

Richard Exell

I have a post at Left Foot Forward, looking at today’s employment figures. I note that once again the headline results for employment and unemployment are good (with encouraging movement in the number of unemployed young people and long-term unemployed people.) But the rise in the Claimant Count measure of unemployment, the increase in the number of redundancies and the falling level of vacancies all point to hard times ahead.

Continue Reading →

This Public and government attitudes to housing in the UK are shot through with assumptions and prejudices. Most prevalent is the strongly held view that certain forms of tenure are better than others. This pamphlet argues that this ‘false hierarchy’ has led to bad policy-making that fails to acknowledge that many owneroccupiers are trapped in areas with weak labour markets and face excessive liabilities.

It looks at how the dream of home ownership may turn sour, entrenching poverty and unemployment, and calls for a new approach. This includes extending advisory and financial support to owner-occupiers and accepting that private renting and social housing have a vital
role to play in creating greater mobility for those seeking work and financial security.

Continue Reading →

Anjum Klair

Our previous analysis in May examined unemployment data from March 2005 to March 2011 and found strong evidence of persistent poor local job prospects, with London being one of the worst hit areas of the country. Four London Boroughs including Hackney, Haringey, and Lewisham have been in the top ten employment blackspots in Britain for five of the last seven years.

Continue Reading →

Nigel Stanley

Two weeks ago on consecutive mornings on the BBC’s Today programme government ministers were unable to argue that public service pensions were unaffordable and unsustainable.

This is because they had no answer to the projections accepted by the National Audit Office, the Office for Budget Responsibility and John Hutton’s report that the share of GDP taken by gross public service pension payments is due to fall from 1.9% to 1.4%.

Today they have tried to fight back by spinning new projections of the costs of pension liabilities in today’s Whole of Government Accounts (WGA). But the Office for Budget Responsibility’s new report shows that this spin is highly misleading.

Continue Reading →

Here are the opening arguments from the speakers at yesterday’s TUC/BCC Modern Workplaces debate. David Frost of the British Chambers of Commerce won the toss and opened with this contribution:

Continue Reading →

Anjum Klair

While there have been improvements in the labour market post recession, unemployment in some areas has got dramatically worse and are still in the midst of a jobs crisis.

Our analysis, ahead of the latest unemployment figures, looks at the proportion of Jobseeker’s Allowances (JSA) claimants to Job Centre Plus Vacancies in every local authority. This analysis ranks the 202 local authority areas by the increase in its claimant to vacancies ratio from May 2010 to May 2011.

Continue Reading →

Paul Noon

I doubt whether anyone has yet digested all 142 pages of the electricity White Paper published this afternoon, but some of the measures have been trailed previously and there has already been debate about the proposed carbon floor price – which TUC Congress supported last year.

In general I think the White Paper is right to propose bold action to accelerate the development of low carbon energy. The twin challenges of combating climate change and ensuring security of supply cannot be ignored and deserve equal priority.

The comprehensive package of measures set out finally give the lie – albeit reluctantly – to any idea that either of these objectives will be achieved by relying on the market alone.

Continue Reading →

Richard Exell

Overall, today’s inflation figures are quite good – the headline rates are down for both CPI (0.3 points to 4.2 per cent) and RPI (0.2 points to 5.0 per cent). What is more, core inflation – excluding “energy, food, alcoholic beverages and tobacco” – has come down even more (0.5 points to 2.8 per cent).

But there’s some worrying points.

Continue Reading →

Andy Atkins

Climate change is biggest and most urgent challenge facing humanity.   Scientists say we need global emissions to peak within the decade and decline rapidly thereafter to have an earthly chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

The world we want will require much more enlightened green governance.

When you think about it, without some measure of governance in any field, we get the law of the jungle – the powerful dominate, the weak get squeezed, bad things happen, and there is no redress.

So what should good green governance mean?

Continue Reading →