Whether it was a coincidence or not the cross party Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Welsh Assembly published an important report today calling among other things on the Welsh Assembly Government to produce a ‘White Paper’ ahead of publishing a measure to improve the legislative process in Cardiff Bay by giving more details of their policy plans.
So far from promoting a lack of scrutiny and WAG rushing through legislation as many no campaigners claim, the Assembly and its Members are actively looking at its performance to date in terms of making laws here in Wales and considering what’s good and what needs improving.
They made 16 recommendations in total that will need a response from the First Minister and his Cabinet and the report will no doubt be debated in the Chamber, all good stuff that should strengthen the YES Campaigns arguments in the days and weeks ahead.
No legislature is perfect, but this is a positive step forward that the Committee and its members should be commended for.
The press release with video of Committee Chair Janet Ryder explaining the findings is here and the full report is here.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
'Government must look beyond worklessness to expand opportunities for around ten million workers already struggling on less than £15,000 a year.'
I was going to write a bit on this new report from the Work Foundation which should be read by everyone, not just those in the welfare to work field, but the press release says what I would have in a more powerful and concise way.
'Coalition policies must not ignore bottom ten million failed by successive governments'
'A focus on job entry alone is not enough for the Coalition to meet its targets for benefits savings and poverty reduction, according to a new report from The Work Foundation published today. The report argues the government must look beyond worklessness to expand opportunities for around ten million workers already struggling on less than £15,000 a year.
Welfare to What? Prospects and challenges for employment recovery is the first report from The Work Foundation’s Bottom Ten Million two-year programme, which examines in-work poverty as both a serious social injustice and a major hindrance to the UK’s economic performance. With the greatest falls in employment during the recession concentrated in the largest low-wage sectors and jobs, the Bottom Ten Million remains the group most vulnerable to wage reductions and job insecurity.
The report sets out the labour market challenges cities and towns currently face and includes maps showing job density, claimant rates and hotspots of the UK’s lowest wages. The report concludes by outlining what policy makers need to do to tackle these issues.
Naomi Clayton, lead author of the report said, “There is an urgent need for quality, lasting jobs that provide opportunities for development and progression. The regional and local divisions in jobs cannot be addressed without tackling the Bottom Ten Million. In places such as Blackpool, Grimsby and Hull, a third earn less than £7 an hour. Without more, better-paid jobs, long-term sustainable regeneration in these places will not be possible. In such depressed local labour markets, lack of labour demand creates and reinforces social problems, further reducing individuals’ chances of securing sustainable, quality employment.
“Both the geography of the recovery and the public spending cuts are likely to widen regional disparities and exacerbate the problems of low employer demand at local level. Based on the pace of regeneration in local areas, a balance must be struck between increasing individual mobility in order to widen access to job opportunities, while seeking to rebuild the economic base to increase the number, quality and sustainability of local jobs.”
The latest labour market figures show the growing impact of public sector cuts and, as predicted, little recovery in manual and semi-skilled jobs. With signs of increased polarisation in the jobs market set to worsen social mobility, the authors claim a sustained effort is needed to address the deep rooted structural problems in the labour market. Without this effort, the mismatch between new jobs and existing skills will leave people trapped in insecure, low wage employment or pushed out of the labour market altogether.
Naomi Clayton added, “Policy makers need to consider a wider range of measures, used in parallel with the National Minimum Wage and working tax credits, to combat in-work poverty. The UK has built up a strong network of labour market intermediaries helping people find better jobs and develop skills. Sustaining and strengthening these networks for the Bottom Ten Million will be a key part of any future strategy and will have to be backed by sustained public investment.”
The report also calls on the government to ensure local authorities and their partners have the flexibility, including greater budgetary control, to shape labour market policy and customise interventions in a way that responds to local circumstances. In addition, it states that policy makers need to understand how to manage public sector cuts while rising to other strategic challenges, prioritising and taking decisions about where costs will be reduced with a clear vision of the desired outcomes for service delivery across public service providers.'
The full report is here
'Coalition policies must not ignore bottom ten million failed by successive governments'
'A focus on job entry alone is not enough for the Coalition to meet its targets for benefits savings and poverty reduction, according to a new report from The Work Foundation published today. The report argues the government must look beyond worklessness to expand opportunities for around ten million workers already struggling on less than £15,000 a year.
Welfare to What? Prospects and challenges for employment recovery is the first report from The Work Foundation’s Bottom Ten Million two-year programme, which examines in-work poverty as both a serious social injustice and a major hindrance to the UK’s economic performance. With the greatest falls in employment during the recession concentrated in the largest low-wage sectors and jobs, the Bottom Ten Million remains the group most vulnerable to wage reductions and job insecurity.
The report sets out the labour market challenges cities and towns currently face and includes maps showing job density, claimant rates and hotspots of the UK’s lowest wages. The report concludes by outlining what policy makers need to do to tackle these issues.
Naomi Clayton, lead author of the report said, “There is an urgent need for quality, lasting jobs that provide opportunities for development and progression. The regional and local divisions in jobs cannot be addressed without tackling the Bottom Ten Million. In places such as Blackpool, Grimsby and Hull, a third earn less than £7 an hour. Without more, better-paid jobs, long-term sustainable regeneration in these places will not be possible. In such depressed local labour markets, lack of labour demand creates and reinforces social problems, further reducing individuals’ chances of securing sustainable, quality employment.
“Both the geography of the recovery and the public spending cuts are likely to widen regional disparities and exacerbate the problems of low employer demand at local level. Based on the pace of regeneration in local areas, a balance must be struck between increasing individual mobility in order to widen access to job opportunities, while seeking to rebuild the economic base to increase the number, quality and sustainability of local jobs.”
The latest labour market figures show the growing impact of public sector cuts and, as predicted, little recovery in manual and semi-skilled jobs. With signs of increased polarisation in the jobs market set to worsen social mobility, the authors claim a sustained effort is needed to address the deep rooted structural problems in the labour market. Without this effort, the mismatch between new jobs and existing skills will leave people trapped in insecure, low wage employment or pushed out of the labour market altogether.
Naomi Clayton added, “Policy makers need to consider a wider range of measures, used in parallel with the National Minimum Wage and working tax credits, to combat in-work poverty. The UK has built up a strong network of labour market intermediaries helping people find better jobs and develop skills. Sustaining and strengthening these networks for the Bottom Ten Million will be a key part of any future strategy and will have to be backed by sustained public investment.”
The report also calls on the government to ensure local authorities and their partners have the flexibility, including greater budgetary control, to shape labour market policy and customise interventions in a way that responds to local circumstances. In addition, it states that policy makers need to understand how to manage public sector cuts while rising to other strategic challenges, prioritising and taking decisions about where costs will be reduced with a clear vision of the desired outcomes for service delivery across public service providers.'
The full report is here
Sunday, January 30, 2011
'There really is no Plan B for the economy'
Andrew Rawnsley writing in the Observer today confirms that the Government really doesn’t have a plan b for the economy despite the 0.5% reduction in GDP reported this week for the final quarter of 2010 along with rising inflation which many experts expect to reach 5% before it starts to fall and a rise in unemployment announced earlier this month.
He writes ‘When they insist that they have no intention of turning back, you need to know that the prime minister and chancellor are perpetrating the most dastardly trick in politics: they are telling the truth. They really do not have a Plan B. When they speak of their determination to lash themselves to the wheel, they absolutely mean it.
I expect the chancellor is preparing a few "concessions" for his budget to try to ease some of the anxieties among the coalition's backbenchers and take the edge off public discontent. He is already hinting he may cancel the 1p fuel duty rise scheduled from April. But such sops will represent tactical manoeuvres, not a fundamental reappraisal of strategy. Even if it might seem eminently sensible for the coalition to have a fall-back plan to temper spending cuts, such a plan does not exist.
The first reason they do not have a Plan B is that they can't see how they could get to it from Plan A without looking weak and floundering both politically and economically. Any whiff from within government that it is no longer so committed to its deficit-reduction programme would provoke the bond traders who have battered so many European governments. The coalition would then be faced with a potential crisis in the financial markets on top of everything else.
The next reason why they do not have a Plan B is that they still believe in Plan A. When it comes to public finances, tax and spending, there are broadly three types of Conservatives in the world. There are the followers of Reaganomics, the school of the late American president, who essentially think that the answer to any economic question is a tax cut. So long as you cut taxes by a lot, everything else, including deficits, will eventually take care of itself. Boris Johnson seems to be positioning himself as the leading advocate of Reaganomics. When you hear these sort of Tories calling for "a plan for growth", what they really mean is that they want a plan for tax cuts.
Then there are Big Government Conservatives, a recent example of which was George Bush II. These are Conservatives who like state spending as much as politicians of the left except that they spend a lot on rightwing causes such as the military and Conservative-inclined voter groups like the elderly. As the public spending cuts bite, I expect we will find there are quite a lot of closet Bushites on the Tory backbenches.
Messrs Cameron and Osborne are neither Reaganauts nor Bushites. They belong to the third category of the right when it comes to the economy. They are fiscal conservatives. Shortly before the election, a friend asked David Cameron what he expected his first term in government to be most remembered for. Mr Cameron did not respond by naming schools reform or changes to welfare or the "big society". He told his friend: "I'm afraid it will be tackling the deficit." He and his chancellor really do think that the primary responsibility of Conservative government is the pursuit of sound public finances.
It is important to understand what motivates them. They are taking such a swift and deep axe to public spending not because they are evil Tory bastards who get their jollies from taking away people's services and jobs. They genuinely think their priority is right, their method is correct and the economy will be better for it in the end. Their Lib Dem partners are more confused and divided. At some point between the election campaign and the conclusion of their May coalition negotiations with the Tories, the leading Lib Dems concluded that the Conservatives had been correct to argue for deeper cuts and that they had been wrong to previously decry the Tory approach as reckless.'
The rest of the column is here
He writes ‘When they insist that they have no intention of turning back, you need to know that the prime minister and chancellor are perpetrating the most dastardly trick in politics: they are telling the truth. They really do not have a Plan B. When they speak of their determination to lash themselves to the wheel, they absolutely mean it.
I expect the chancellor is preparing a few "concessions" for his budget to try to ease some of the anxieties among the coalition's backbenchers and take the edge off public discontent. He is already hinting he may cancel the 1p fuel duty rise scheduled from April. But such sops will represent tactical manoeuvres, not a fundamental reappraisal of strategy. Even if it might seem eminently sensible for the coalition to have a fall-back plan to temper spending cuts, such a plan does not exist.
The first reason they do not have a Plan B is that they can't see how they could get to it from Plan A without looking weak and floundering both politically and economically. Any whiff from within government that it is no longer so committed to its deficit-reduction programme would provoke the bond traders who have battered so many European governments. The coalition would then be faced with a potential crisis in the financial markets on top of everything else.
The next reason why they do not have a Plan B is that they still believe in Plan A. When it comes to public finances, tax and spending, there are broadly three types of Conservatives in the world. There are the followers of Reaganomics, the school of the late American president, who essentially think that the answer to any economic question is a tax cut. So long as you cut taxes by a lot, everything else, including deficits, will eventually take care of itself. Boris Johnson seems to be positioning himself as the leading advocate of Reaganomics. When you hear these sort of Tories calling for "a plan for growth", what they really mean is that they want a plan for tax cuts.
Then there are Big Government Conservatives, a recent example of which was George Bush II. These are Conservatives who like state spending as much as politicians of the left except that they spend a lot on rightwing causes such as the military and Conservative-inclined voter groups like the elderly. As the public spending cuts bite, I expect we will find there are quite a lot of closet Bushites on the Tory backbenches.
Messrs Cameron and Osborne are neither Reaganauts nor Bushites. They belong to the third category of the right when it comes to the economy. They are fiscal conservatives. Shortly before the election, a friend asked David Cameron what he expected his first term in government to be most remembered for. Mr Cameron did not respond by naming schools reform or changes to welfare or the "big society". He told his friend: "I'm afraid it will be tackling the deficit." He and his chancellor really do think that the primary responsibility of Conservative government is the pursuit of sound public finances.
It is important to understand what motivates them. They are taking such a swift and deep axe to public spending not because they are evil Tory bastards who get their jollies from taking away people's services and jobs. They genuinely think their priority is right, their method is correct and the economy will be better for it in the end. Their Lib Dem partners are more confused and divided. At some point between the election campaign and the conclusion of their May coalition negotiations with the Tories, the leading Lib Dems concluded that the Conservatives had been correct to argue for deeper cuts and that they had been wrong to previously decry the Tory approach as reckless.'
The rest of the column is here
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