Richard Exell's Archive 
I am the TUC’s Senior Policy Officer covering social security, tax credits and labour market issues, including the debates about the European social model and labour market flexibility. I also represent the TUC on the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council.
Richard Exell
The government has abolished Disability Living Allowance, the benefit that helps disabled people with mobility or care-related costs. The replacement, Personal Independence Payment, will lead to hundreds of thousands of people being worse off. I’ve recorded a short video to explain why unions are opposing this change.
Richard Exell
In the latest of our occasional series of Stagnation Charts we use today’s release for the Index of Services. The problem isn’t that output in the service industries isn’t growing – it is – but that the rate is much slower than it was before the recession:
Richard Exell
I have a post at Our Welfare Works, looking at the demonisation of benefit claimants, arguing that it leads to stigma and worse lives for people on benefits. The TUC’s research showed that the better informed someone is, the less likely they are to believe all the negative stories about the social security system and claimants – which is why mythbusting must be an important part of the campaign to defend benefits.
Richard Exell
I’ve recorded this video taking a look at May’s employment figures. The headlines were very worrying, with employment down and unemployment up. But the news on average earnings was even more depressing. Record low increases in average earnings give a hint that Britain may be moving towards a low productivity, low quality, low paid economy with stagnant living standards. This country desperately needs a plan for growth.
Richard Exell
Figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics help us compare inflation rates across the major developed economies. Looking at the inflation figures for the twelve months to March (the most recent figures), the UK has the highest of any G7 economy. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s most recent data also has the UK’s inflation as the highest in the G7.
Richard Exell
Have workers been getting their fair share of increases in productivity? On average, UK manufacturing increases at a rate of 3 to 3.5 per cent a year (a bit more recently). Has that been feeding through to wage increases?
There’s some interesting international figures just released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for the gap between productivity and compensation (wages). Unfortunately, the figures only cover manufacturing, but they’re still very informative. The figures cover the USA and 12 other advanced countries, including the UK, and they show labour productivity and compensation figures back to 1970, so we can look at how the two have grown over a period of more than forty years.
The gap between the two is a politically significant issue in the United States – not surprising, given the fact that, by 2011 (the most recent figures) the US productivity-compensation gap is easily the largest among the countries the BLS compares. But the figures also show that Norway is the only country where wages have grown faster than productivity.
Charting what has happened in the UK is fascinating:
Richard Exell
A new report published today shows that Universal Credit is not the answer to rising poverty the government hoped. The evidence that poverty and inequality are set to rise substantially by the next election has been accumulating for some time: in 2011, the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that, by 2015-16, the coalition’s policies would have increased the number of children in relative poverty by 200,000 and the number of working age adults by 200,000.
Since then we have had the Welfare Benefits Uprating Act and the government itself estimates that the 1 per cent uprating cap in 2013/14 – 2015/16 “will result in around an extra 200,000 children being deemed by this measure to be in relative income poverty compared to uprating benefits by CPI (consumer price index)”.
In response, coalition politicians have two defences: Universal Credit and the increased income tax personal allowance. Will Universal Credit Work?, written for the TUC by Lindsay Judge of the Child Poverty Action Group, is an honest and open look at Universal Credit.
Richard Exell
The government’s starting to get a reputation for slyly using an argument for one policy as cover for something much bigger. They are doing this on a grand scale, of course, using the near universal agreement that the deficit has to be addressed (the disagreement is about timing and who should bear what burdens) to justify a permanent shift to a smaller welfare state.
And they’re using the same trick to justify individual policies. In his speech to Morrisons’ staff three weeks ago the Chancellor said
“When I took this job, I discovered there were some people who got £100,000 a year in Housing Benefit. £100,000 a year in benefit.”
That was why, he added
“We’ve made sure that you can’t get more than £400 of Housing Benefit a week in this country.”
There, in one passage you have two examples of the trick I’m talking about.
Richard Exell
Another sign of the times is the debate about how much people on benefits need to spend on food. The BBC says you can have “a healthy diet on £15 a week”, Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke thinks the problem is they spend their money on fags and booze and the Daily Mail says you can ‘survive’ on a pound a day.
Of course, most of us could take a holiday to poverty and get by for a day or two or even a week or two. Polly Toynbee is spot on about this, it’s the grinding effect that makes poverty different – the longer it lasts, the fewer resources you have and the more difficult it is to cope with an emergency or unexpected bill. Just as important, the longer it lasts, the greyer life becomes, the more depressing. That’s bad enough to live through, but to watch its impact on those you love must be unbearable.
Richard Exell
Getting onto the Path to Work is a new TUC report by Christopher Schwartz. In it he looks at the international experience of job creation programmes, focusing on job guarantees. He concentrates on programmes in Denmark, Flanders and Wales, with briefer reviews of schemes in France and Finland.
One of his lessons is that countries that are accepted as having successfully used ‘activation’ strategies to tackle unemployment haven’t relied on punitive measures, but instead have used a “cocktail of measures to facilitate access to employment.” The analysis and the recommendations are worth reading in full and you can find the report here.
