Tory replacement for youth jobs only helped under 20,000
Labour’s Young Person’s Guarantee helped nearly 200,000 unemployed youths in just over one year, but the Tory work experience programme for Young People has only ‘helped’ 16,500 in the last eight months.
The Tory work experience programme (see here) was introduced to give NEETs 8 weeks work experience to boost their employability.
It was introduced to replace Labour’s Young Person Guarantee that was scrapped by the Tories in Mach 2011.
But since January the Tory’s programme has only been provided to 16,360 youths, whereas the Labour programme had been provided to nearly 200,000.
We are unable to measure the success of the Tory programme because post-completion data is not yet available.
But the low rate of assistance offered to youths is further evidence that the Tory approach to youth unemployment is woefully inadequate.
From the 25 January 2010-March 2011, Labour’s Young Person Guarantee funding managed to help more than 200,000 people.
The Future Jobs Fund accounted for just over half of those beneficiaries.
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UK Border Agency: let’s sign up to Schengen
One of the few political positions that sections of the far left and the free market right alike hold dear is opposition to immigration controls. But I am still not quite sure whether it was the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Adam Smith Institute that sneakily managed to take over the UK Border Agency while no-one was looking this summer.
Even though I also back a policy of open borders, I never once imagined that the Coalition would implement the idea quite so literally.
Cameron’s latest Big Society blunder
The Prime Minister went to give evidence to a Committee of MPs yesterday about the Big Society. In response to questions, he claimed that:
“we are not sitting back and just hoping that the Big Society springs up. We have established what was called the Big Society Bank, which is now called Big Society Capital. It will get £200 million from the banks under the Merlin agreement.
That will be making grants to small voluntary bodies, so that they can scale up; they can be bigger and they can do more things.”
Sounds good, right? It is just a shame that, back in May, the government agreed that:
“The BSB[Big Society Bank] will not be a grant-making organisation. Funds deployed will therefore seek both financial and social returns.”
No wonder the Big Society isn’t working. Cameron thinks that one of the flagship policies of his government is that they’ve got hundreds of millions of pounds from the banks to give in grants to small voluntary organisations, so that they can build up the Big Society.
Instead, these small voluntary organisations are being offered loans, which will ‘seek a financial return’.
Meanwhile, government cuts mean that voluntary organisations are losing hundreds of millions of pounds in grants.
Is it fair to freeze benefits as union members get low increases?
Many union members are getting pay increases of less than three per cent. So is it fair for people on benefits to get an increase of 5.2%, which is what the policy of uprating in line with inflation would mean?
It looks as though the government will exclude pensions from the freeze, if they go ahead with this plan.
The government is flagging up this exclusion because even they can see that this would be unfair: pensioners have paid for their benefits through National Insurance Contributions and many would be forced into ever-deeper poverty as prices rose and their pensions didn’t.
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20% of Lords staff linked to lobby groups
Guardian survey shows that, excluding obviously junior outside interests, 172 of 646 staff working for lords have lobbying links.
Nearly one in every five staff passholders in the House of Lords is involved in lobbying, a Guardian survey of newly released figures reveals.
Peers have given parliamentary passes, allowing the wearer to walk the corridors of Westminster, to 125 individuals who are paid to promote outside organisations. Companies represented in peers’ offices include BP, the National Farmers’ Union and at least eight lobbying organisations.
The disclosures raise fresh questions about the easy access that lobbyists have to ministers via the upper chamber.
Why @Peston is wrong to absolve banks of blame for stagnation
Robert Peston is regarded as a reasonable financial journalist, but he lets himself and the BBC down badly today by exonerating the banks over the continued economic flatlining:
Some will say the banks are partly to blame for the sluggishness of the economic recovery, having pumped up the leverage in the boom years and now – in this era of so-called de-risking and deleveraging – starving businesses with good growth prospects of the credit they so badly need. That said, the banks are more-or-less hitting the so-called Merlin targets, agreed with the Treasury, for lending to businesses, including small businesses.
Peston clearly hasn’t looked at the data properly.
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How we could solve the online male trolls problems
By now, I assume, we’ve all read Helen Lewis-Hasteley’s skin-crawling round-up of the abuse and threats of sexual violence that women writers face on the net.
Anyone who writes online, of course, is used to being called naive, ignorant or just plain stupid, often by commenters for whom it seems punctuation is just something that happens to other people.
The men who make these comments pose a clear and obvious danger to society. But we shouldn’t hate them.
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Labour gets campaigning against NHS bill
The recent change from John Healey to Andy Burnham as shadow health minister has brought a more campaigning element to Labour’s opposition to the NHS Bill.
The party today unveiled a new website – www.dropthebill.com – which focuses on why the NHS bill is terrible.
The site lists five reasons:
POSTCODE LOTTERY
The Bill will break up the NHS and create an unfair postcode lottery. With no national standards, there will be widespread variation in the treatments available on the NHS. In some areas, people may have to go private to get services available for free elsewhere.LONGER WAITING TIMES
The Bill risks rises in waiting times and a two-tier NHS. It scraps the cap on hospitals treating private patients at the same time as watering down guarantees on NHS waiting times. This means local hospitals will be free to treat more private patients and make NHS patients wait longer.PRIVATISATION
The Bill turns the NHS into a full-blown commercial market, putting competition before patient care. It allows private companies to cherry-pick quick profits, potentially forcing local hospitals to go bust. Hospitals could even be fined for working together.DAMAGED DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP
The Bill undermines the bond of trust between doctors and patients. It creates conflicts of interest where financial incentives could interfere with medical decisions. GPs could even get a bonus for rationing your care.WASTE
This Bill is wasting money and creating bureaucracy. It is unforgivable to spend £2 billion on a reckless re-organisation when the NHS needs every penny it can get for patient care. Nearly £1 billion is being wasted on pay-offs for managers, only for many of them to be re-employed as consultants.
We understand the site will be expanded to offer more information and campaigning information on what Labour is doing to oppose the NHS Bill (which is currently delayed).
Party activists are now also printing flyers with the above information to distribute to households.
Students to march to #occupyLSX tomorrow
Students plan to march to Occupy London, 9th November, at their first action since the protests earlier this year.
The student march will primarily focus on the tripling of tuition fees to £9000 and rising inequality.
#occupyLSX sent out a release today saying they were planning a ‘lively teach out’ to coincide with the march. They will also feature performances from Billy Bragg, Chumbawamba and others.
The students will be joined on the day by thousands of striking electricians who are marching in protest at a 35% national pay cut.
The day of action is supported by National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, NUS, UCU and a host of trade unions.
The student march will start from Malet Street at 12 noon. It will will travel through Trafalgar Square, up the Strand, before passing the Occupy London Stock Exchange site, just by St Paul’s Cathedral.
It will finish at Moorgate Junction, symbolically next to London Metropolitan University, which is one of the hardest hit institutions.
This is the really worrying news from Europe
Yesterday was another big day in the Eurocrisis – the Greek government looks set to fall, Italy’s is tottering on the edge and France announced (another) austerity package.
With Italian yields approaching the crucial 7% level at which a ‘bailout’ was required in Greece, Ireland and Portugal the situation looks pretty grim.
But for me the real news yesterday wasn’t the stuff which made most of headlines. Instead it was a much less reported debt auction by the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF).
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