Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg claims in today’s Financial Times that the Coalition’s policies are ‘fair’ and we shouldn’t get hung up on ‘the numbers’. Nice try Nick, but no prize, I’m afraid. Read more...
Opinion about Unemployment
The no-win generation, by Conor Ryan
This week’s GCSE celebrations – as with the A-level ones last week – will be muted somewhat by the lack of opportunities facing young people after they digest their results. Undergraduate places for UK students may have been up by 10,000 this year, but they still left many youngsters with no prospect of a university place. The youth employment market is unpromising, with many graduates struggling to find places with their degrees, and many apprenticeships and college places are hard-fought. Read more...
24 August 2010 | Conor Ryan
From Toy Story to Tory story, by Heather Wakefield
An afternoon South of the Border in Latin America with Oliver Stone on Wednesday and a 3-D trip to Toy Story 3 last night have stuck in my fuzzy ‘downtime’ brain, despite my best efforts to crank up a gear and blog for Public Finance. Read more...
6 August 2010 | Heather Wakefield
Welfare reform: not so simple, by Stuart Adam & James Browne
The Department of Work and Pensions today published a consultation paper called 21st Century Welfare which sets out ideas for fundamental reforms to the benefits system. Read more...
30 July 2010 | Stuart Adam
Crash course in HE finance, by Stephen Court
Next month will bring the moment of truth for this year’s record numbers of university applicants. On 19 August hundreds of thousands of A-level students find out their exam results. Those who achieved the grades they needed should be accepted by the universities they have applied to. Those who haven’t will have to join the clearing scrum to try and get onto a course elsewhere. Read more...
8 July 2010 | Stephen Court
Regions after RDAs, by Kieran Larkin
So the government has announced its plans for economic development on the cheap. Regional development agencies will be replaced by Local Enterprise Partnerships by March 2012. The state of the government’s finances means that this is going to be a no-frills version of the economic policy of the past decade. But does this necessarily mean cities will be short-changed? Read more...
1 July 2010 | Kieran Larkin
Public Enemy No 1, by Judy Hirst
The private sector, we were told last week, has so far borne the brunt of this recession. Many millions of its employees have had their pay frozen and pensions restricted, said the chancellor in his Budget speech. It’s time, he argued, for the ‘insulated’ public sector to ‘share the burden’. Read more...
1 July 2010 | Judy Hirst
Getting welfare to work, by Patrick Nolan
No one should be in any doubt that eliminating the deficit will be a challenge. As statistics released yesterday illustrated, spending cuts on the scale necessary will put many jobs at risk. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility estimated that fiscal consolidation will mean 610,000 public sector jobs will be lost. Softening this blow is the forecast growth in jobs in the private sector, which is expected to mean that, overall, the level of employment will rise by around 1.3 million over the next five years. Read more...
1 July 2010 | Patrick Nolan
Frank Field’s feckless fathers, by Melissa Benn
For as long as I can remember, Frank Field has been thinking the unthinkable. Now part of David Cameron’s cost-cutting team, some old ideas are being re-cycled in a new supposedly culturally and politically sensitive form. His proposals, however, will face some very familiar problems. Read more...
30 June 2010 | Melissa Benn
New York welfare lessons, by Dalia Ben-Galim
The question of how to create employment and support services that respond to citizens’ needs has never been easy. In the current context of spending cuts and increasing levels of unemployment, it becomes even more critical. Read more...
18 June 2010 | Dalia Ben-Galim
Cameron’s cuts: cities take the pain, by Paul Swinney
David Cameron today further emphasised the impending cuts that are coming to public sector budgets. Last year we estimated in our Public Sector Cities report that 290,000 public service jobs are likely to be lost as a result of these cuts. Some other commentators have put this figure closer to 500,000. Read more...
7 June 2010 | Paul Swinney
Not such a new welfare deal, by Dan Finn
The Queen’s Speech placed welfare reform at the heart of the new Government’s strategy for getting ‘five million plus people languishing on benefits into work and out of poverty’. Subsequently, in his first major speech Iain Duncan Smith, the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, argued that the failures of the existing system were ‘trapping’ people in dependency. The New Deal employment programmes were deemed to have failed and the existing welfare system has become too complex and expensive, with large numbers of people ‘parked’ on disability benefits. Read more...
31 May 2010 | Dan Finn
Welfare reform: the weakest link, by Kayte Lawton
Today’s speech on welfare reform from the new Welfare and Pensions Secretary, Ian Duncan Smith, was noteworthy for three reasons. First, it was an impassioned speech full of outrage about the extent of poverty and inequality in the UK. It lacked the usual clichés of ministerial speeches on welfare (from both Labour and the Conservatives) about getting tough on benefit cheats and cracking down on the ‘can work / won’t work’ cohort. Instead, this felt like a genuine attempt to get to grips with the scale of poverty and think seriously about how to address it. Read more...
27 May 2010 | Kayte Lawton
Bitter medicine to come, by Sonia Sodha
So the axe has started to fall – or in the more delicate terms of David Laws, the scalpel has started to slice. Cutting £6.2bn now is more of a symbol of the coalition’s commitment to cuts than something that will have a profound impact on the macroeconomy for the worse or better. Read more...
26 May 2010 | sonia sodha
The penny drops, by Alan Downey
It seems that public sector employers have finally woken up to the scale of the financial challenge that is coming their way. Read more...
29 April 2010 | Alan Downey
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