Richard Exell

I wonder if the DWP is starting to regret publishing their benefit fraud figures on a monthly basis? Certainly there’s precious little publicity for the latest release. Visit the newsroom on the DWP website and you’ll find there’there’s been no press release – though there was one on Friday to fanfare their “benefit fraud blitz” (I wonder how The Sweet would have coped with that title).

I suppose one reason is that the numbers are so similar to last month’s. Another is that the level of fraud hardly justifies the blitzkreig: the Department’s best estimate is that, in 2010/11, 0.8% of total benefit expenditure across all benefits was lost to fraud.

As it happens, though, there are genuinely shocking data that went on to the DWP website today.

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Matt Dykes

So we finally have it.  After months of delays, the Government today launched its ‘Open Public Services’ white paper. There’s little new here.  Most of its recommendations are gleaned from initiatives already announced in regard to health, education, mutuals and localism.

What the white paper does do, however, is re-affirm the Coalition Government’s commitment to the marketisation of all public services outside of national security and the judiciary.  We are back in the territory the Prime Minister occupied in the heady days before the Health and Social Care Bill unravelled.

David Cameron was adamant:

This white paper says loud and clear that it shouldn’t matter if providers are from the state, private, or voluntary sector

A clearer message to the market could not be given.  Public services are open for business.

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Philip Pearson

Hopefully, the government’s Energy White Paper due 12 July will leave plenty of room for further discussion. There’s a lot of anxiety, or worse, about energy costs among industry and consumers. The Energy Secretary said last weekend:

“We want to get out from under the volatility of these world markets. The best way we can do this is to save energy, make our bills much less sensitive to world market prices and get on in the long term … to clean, secure, green energy sources.”

Carbon pricing is essential to force the shift to low carbon energy supply. But the transition looks unjust. Major energy companies are making huge windfalls from energy price increases. We should look to the Australian government, offsetting its new carbon tax with tax cuts and compensation.

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David Frost

Director General, British Chambers of Commerce

Last year, Brendan and I debated the effect of regulation on the labour market and on the economy in general. I argued that costly, constantly changing employment regulation was a barrier to growth and job creation that UK PLC could no longer afford. This Government introduced the one-in-one-out rule. Business was told that no new regulations would be brought in unless another one was removed to offset the burden. Yet the laws and the changes keep on coming.

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Philip Pearson

Delays to the Energy Bill are an opportunity for the Government to come back to Parliament with a serious homes insulation programme, new measures to give councils real local leadership on climate change, and make the Bill deal now with the coldest private rented homes. As it stands, the Green Deal will cause the UK to fail to meet its emissions targets under the Climate Change Act. It will fall 3 million tonnes of CO2 short of its legally binding CO2 targets, because over 5 million homes won’t be treated.  WWF and 50 organisations, including major retailers set to deliver the Green Deal, wrote to Chris Huhne (17 June) urging him to correct the inadequacies in the Energy Bill.

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Tim Page

Blink and you’d have missed it. The London edition of the FT didn’t see fit to report it. But a group of European Ministers met in London yesterday, hosted by the Deputy Prime Minister no less, to talk about economic growth. But where was Germany? And France. And Italy. And Belgium, Luxembourg and Austria for that matter.

Reading the press release of this meeting on the BIS website, which I confess I stumbled across while looking for something else, it’s hard to be clear exactly what the meeting was for. BIS says its aim was “to build on recent European Council agreements regarding the creation of a fully-functioning digital single market, reducing the regulatory burden and maximising the potential of EU services.” So it was a digital summit? Does that mean that the countries listed above have no interest in a digital single market?

Or was there another agenda at work?

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Richard Exell

An e-mail conversation yesterday with a colleague prompted me to think about how unions should respond to the report of the Dilnot Commission. It’s a type of problem we often face – the Dilnot report recommendations would definitely be an improvement on current arrangements, but they don’t go anywhere near as far as we’d like and there’s a couple of points most trades unionists will really dislike.

Do we welcome the real improvements? Even if this means giving up on the hope of a genuine National Care Service?

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Darinka Aleksic

‘Considering Abortion? Free Pregnancy Testing Information & Advisory Service, Quick & Confidential.’

If you read this statement in an advert, for a service listed under ‘Abortion Clinics’, what would you think? If you were pregnant and needed advice, you might give them a ring.

Unfortunately, what the Albany Women’s Centre, who posted this advert at Yell.com, failed to mention is that they don’t offer any medical services and they are, in fact, opposed to abortion in principle. Today, following a complaint made by the charity Education for Choice, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the Albany ad was misleading and must not appear again in its current form.

This could be dismissed as a single rogue example, were it not for the fact that anti-choice groups operate networks of pregnancy advice centres around the country. Under proposals currently under consideration by the Department of Health, organisations like this one could be given NHS contracts to provide their own special brand of ‘independent advice and counselling’ to women seeking abortion.

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Nigel Stanley

The government has been unable to win the argument that the cost of public sector pensions is unsustainable. Right wing critics of public sector pensions have therefore changed their tune and now stress their argument that poorly paid and ill-pensioned private sector workers should not have to pay for public sector pensions.

This, of course, is just another call for levelling down. With two out of three private sector workers now getting no employer help building up a pension, the only way to make the two sectors fair would be to remove two-thirds of public sector workers from any pensions coverage. And if you take this argument to its logical conclusion you end up in the absurd position that low paid private sector workers should make no contribution to paying the wages of public sector workers with a higher income. Given that the public sector has higher median pay as it tends to employ workers with high skills and professional qualifications – all those teachers and doctors – this ends up being most of the public sector.

But there is a glaring unfairness that many critics of public sector pensions (though to be fair not all) fail to acknowledge. This is the £39 billion cost of pensions tax relief – most of which goes to the better off.

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James Gregory

This week Grant Shapps has hosted a ‘first-time buyer summit’ to think of imaginative ways of getting more households onto the first rung of the property ladder. The name of the game is the same as it was under the last Labour administration. Political success apparently relies on serving the aspiration to own.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, very few politicians would consider home ownership to be a ‘problem-tenure’ in itself; the only ‘problem’ is how to provide more of it. Except in times of recession and acute financial crisis, it is typically assumed that homeowners have taken a positive and one-way step on the path to independence and self-sufficiency. This apparent independence, of course, is typically contrasted with the alleged ‘dependence’ of social housing tenants and a range of social problems associated with the tenure.

This is a mistake, both politically and in terms of public policy. As we argue in a new TUC Touchstone paper to be published next Wednesday – ‘Can Housing Work for the Workers?’ – the sharp distinctions that we draw between owners and renters makes for bad policy.

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