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Ben Baumberg has written the best brief summary of what can be learnt from the Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration Project, which tried to help lone parents and long-term unemployed people who got jobs to keep them and to move on to better pay with training, advice, guidance and cash bonuses.
For lone parents, there was little short-and no long-term impact.
For long-term unemployed people, the project was very good at getting people into work, which increased their incomes and reduced costs to the government, but it seems that ERA did very little to increase the earnings of people in-work.
This is a major cause of poverty and social exclusion. What is more, because we still haven't succeeded in designing policies that can be shown to work it remains an important area where we don't have an evidence-based policy agenda.
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Great article by ETUI’s Andrew Watt which exposes the facile and nasty suggestion that UK unemployment – or EU unemployment for that matter – is the result of lazy unemployed people. Unless, that is, people get lazier in recessions and less lazy in booms!
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A new report from Barnardo’s looking at the 16-19 Bursary Fund – the government’s replacement for Educational Maintenance Allowances. The charity finds that lower levels of money and the fact that it is harder to access the fund “are forcing many young people to consider dropping out of education and training altogether due to financial hardship” others are suffering severe hardship – going without meals, for instance – to stay in their courses.
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NIESR expects global growth of 3.5% in 2012 & 4% in 2013 (provided there is a ‘successful resolution’ of the Euro Area crisis.) Despite this, NIESR expect a mild recession in the Euro Area and the UK, with the UK economy contracting by 0.1% this year – but growing 2.3% in 2013 (provided the Euro crisis ends well).
Unemployment is expected to reach 9% this year and stay high till after the next election: “Unemployment at this elevated level for such a long period is likely to do permanent damage to the supply side of the economy, with large long-run economic costs.”
CPI inflation is expected to fall to 2.2% this year and 1.4% in 2013. The cyclically adjusted current budget is forecast to return to balance in 2016–17.
“The UK economy currently suffers from deficient demand; the current stance of fiscal policy is contributing to this deficiency. A temporary easing of fiscal policy in the near term would boost the economy.”
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At the IFS website Robert Joyce considers the benefit cap in the Welfare Reform Bill. This is now expected to affect about 67,000 households from 2013-14, reducing their benefit entitlement by an average £83 p.w.
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An excellent post from the Engineering Employers' Federation, showing that feeble household spending lies behind the UK's very weak recovery.
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A page of resources from the Children's Society on how the "benefit cap" will hit children. Did you know that if the government reverses the Lords amendments, 70 per cent of the people who lolse out because of the cap will be children?
Or that 80,000 children could be made homeless?
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A German research paper looking at Germany and the UK shows that “work-hour mismatches (i.e., differences between actual and desired hours) have negative effects on workers´ health. In particular, we show that ‘overemployment’ – working more hours than desired − has negative effects on different measures of self-perceived health.”
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“Variable pay for performance, while it may seem attractive in theory, creates more problems than it solves. There’s no proof that it helps achieve its intended purposes, and other approaches not only work better but also strengthen employee loyalty.”
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In January, domestic and export orders and deliveries were down on the previous month. Optimisim about the business situation and export prospects still very low and investment intentions for buildings and plant/machinery are negative (but positive for product and process innovation and training and retraining.)
By far the biggest factor likely to limit capital expenditure authorisation is “uncertainty about demand”, quoted by 61% of respondents.
But manufacturers do expect an improvement in output and export orders and CBI says there is some reason for being a little more optimistic, especially in the light of improving US performance.
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The CBI's monthly survey finds shoppers cutting their spending after Christmas and sales falling. 44% of retailers reported sales volumes falling from a year ago and 22% saw them increase. The net balance of -22% was the lowest since March 2009.
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The Independent Living Fund makes cash payments directly to disabled people to help them to to live in their communities rather than in residential care.
Maria Miller, Minister for Disabled People, has said that, although funding for existing users will be protected for the life of this parliament the ILF is closed to new applicants. Eventually, the government plans to replace the ILF with a new system that will be part of the eventual reforms of Adult Social Care.
Disabled users, care workers, families and the ILF staff are worried.
Calum Wiley is a disabled person who relies on ILF and he has set up this campaign to challenge the government's decision and win support for a petition to Save the ILF: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/24368
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Alastair Hatchett takes apart ten myths about regional pay on the Public Finance Blog
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NCVO reports that: 79% of Work Programme sub-contractors said their prime contractor was not adequately shielding them from financial risk; A majority were not satisfied with the level of Work Programme referrals they had received from their prime contractor; 55% said their prime contractor had not included them in the wider commissioning process (identifying need, design of services and evaluation) at all and 25% had been included only “to a small extent.”; Over a third – 36% – said they had observed examples of creaming and parking of clients (8% said they had observed “many” examples.)
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An IPPR study shows that, statistically, there is only a weak relationship between CEO pay and company performance among FTSE 100 companies. Sectors experiencing similar improvements in company value saw very different increases in CEO remuneration. "These findings undermine the argument that company directors must be paid large and increasing amounts in order to secure the strong performance of their companies."
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Study of 27 countries finds "repeated temporary contracts have a significant negative impact on health."
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