Defence firm BAE cuts 1,000 jobs

The company said there could be 212 job losses at Brough, in East Yorkshire, associated with a reduction in workload, mainly on the Hawk programme and 26 job losses at Chadderton, Manchester, because of a reduction in workload in the large aircraft business.

A further 55 job losses are expected within the Harrier team at Farnborough, Hampshire, and 149 jobs are set to go at Samlesbury in Lancashire.

In Warton, Lancashire, 298 jobs are set to be cut.

A further 206 cuts are planned at BAE's Systems Integrated System Technologies (Insyte) ...

BBC NEWS  09 Sept 2010    

BAe Systems

200,000 face housing benefit cuts

The TUC said some of the most vulnerable people in the country will be hit by proposals for a 10% reduction in the benefit of adults who have been claiming jobseeker's allowance for more than a year.

Disabled workers, lone parents and the recent homeless were among the groups most likely to be affected, said the TUC.

General Secretary Brendan Barber said: "This cut in housing benefit will make a real difference to some of the poorest and most vulnerable adults and families, who will find themselves out of pocket to the tune of nearly £500 a year.

"Long-term unemployment is not a lifestyle choice, it is a debilitating and stressful experience which puts unemployed people and their families at higher risk of poverty, poor health and relationship breakdown.

"The long-term unemployed need help and support to get them back into the labour market. They should not to be blamed for their predicament by having vital benefits cut. This is another example of the Government making struggling families bear the cost of the recession, while the rich have been let off."

uk.news.yahoo.com  06 Sept 2010    Crackdown on Welfare

RBS cuts 3,500 UK jobs

Compare and contrast: P45s for pawns, an opulent 'reward for failure' for Fred the Shred

Total positions lost at bailed-out British banks RBS and Lloyds rises to almost 45,000 ...

RBS announced that it was axing 3,500 back-office jobs as a result of the sale of 318 of its branches to Santander, a move demanded by EU regulators in return for the bank's £54bn government bailout almost two years ago.

That takes the total number of posts lost since Stephen Hester took over as chief executive two years ago to almost 27,000 ...

RBS employs 24,000 people in its back-office functions, out of a total workforce of just under 100,000.

"It will be a specially bitter pill for staff to swallow as RBS has decided to move some of the jobs abroad to the far east, India and America," said Rob MacGregor, national officer at the union Unite.

"Just three weeks ago, staff were boosted to hear of the £1.1bn half-year profit, yet today thousands of them are told that they have no future at the bank.

"The scale of the cuts announced today beggars belief and staff across the country today will be left reeling from this news. We continue to see a financial services sector which thinks the skills and expertise of its staff are a disposable asset with scant regard for the high level of service these very same staff provide to their customers." ...

Guardian  02 Sept 2010    Pawns and Players

Sir Fred Goodwin shredded

What are the links between shame and poverty?

Are shame and poverty closely linked? And, if so, why is it important? An international research project aims to find out ...

What struck [Robert Walker, professor of social policy at Oxford University], even in the mid 1970s, was the effort that mothers, in particular, made to try to protect their children from feeling shame – to the extent that they would skip meals to buy clothes and toys for them.

"Children as young as seven and eight soon learn strategies to persuade parents to buy them what they think they need," says Walker.

That process accelerated during the 1980s, he points out.

"People at the bottom are influenced by what they see in the media as much as anybody else. And expectations were rising at a time when inequalities increased substantially and child poverty tripled. We've never got on top of that, despite 13 years of New Labour," he says.

Walker is now a member of the Department for Work and Pensions' social security advisory committee, which will respond to proposals to overhaul the benefits system by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith.

Walker himself contests Duncan Smith's perception that there is a widespread culture of worklessness and dependency as a consequence of the benefits system ...

Guardian  24 Aug 2010    Corporate Media

'No such thing as society'

Councils 'could cut 500,000 jobs and not harm services'

The UK's councils could do the same amount of work with 500,000 fewer staff if they matched the productivity of private firms, a report has claimed.

Junior staff in local authorities were, on average, productive only 32% of the time during working hours, said management consultancy Knox D'Arcy.

It said this compared with an average of 44% in the private sector ...

BBC NEWS  20 Aug 2010    Consultants Parasites    Corporate Public Services

Council workers are unproductive

Council staff waste two-thirds of working day

The right type of inflation is OK, declares Bank of England

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, virtually admitted at his Inflation Report press conference this morning that the Bank now considers elevated levels of inflation to be perfectly alright provided they don’t give rise to second round effects – rising inflationary expectations and matching wage inflation.

Would policy have been any different over the past three years, he was asked, had the Bank known that inflation was going to come in much higher than the Bank was forecasting? Probably not, he conceded. His justification was that elevated levels of inflation have been largely the result of a series of “price shocks” which lie outside the Bank’s control, such as higher energy and food prices.

These shocks were masking a much more benign picture. High unemployment and abundant spare capacity in the economy would keep second round inflationary effects at bay. Since wages are for the time being significantly lagging inflation, the effect is a big squeeze on disposable incomes. This type of inflation can therefore be seen, paradoxically, as deflationary. It is one of the mechanisms by which a real reduction in disposable incomes is being brought about.

Telegraph  11 Aug 2010    Rebalancing the Economy    Well-being

We want to work – but government would rather cut costs than help us

Rather than helping disability claimants into work, it is cheaper to cut benefits and set them up to fail in a tough labour market ...

Finding work is difficult enough for the fit and healthy, but if you are one of the 11 million people – from cabinet office estimates – in Britain who is disabled, injured, or suffers from ill-health, then your condition may make it harder to move beyond the interview stage. Enabling most claimants to work means that jobs would have to be tailored to their needs.

This means taking account for weeks and months off work, short days, regular shifts in working hours, work days and deadlines, the distraction of severe pain, post-medication sleepiness or sickness, susceptibility to colds, flu and bugs, and the need for home-working.

At least a couples of these issues will affect most claimants, no matter what their level of mobility.

This fact makes a poor joke of the idea that most disabled people, even if capable of some work-related task, would be able to cope with employment not adjusted to their symptoms.

Employers already complain about statutory maternity leave, so how would they cope with making adjustments to complex and long-term needs, affecting their profitability? And how can people be declared "fit" to work if employers won't give them jobs because of their illness? ...

Andrew
3 Aug 2010, 8:26AM

Another good article ...

The central issue with incapacity benefit and disability is not that that vast majority of people can work and choose not to, or indeed that they just need a bit of tough love to push them into the jobs market - even though this is the consistent bang of the drums from Whitehall.

The central problem is that employers try to avoid taking on people with disabilities - or are unwilling to provide sufficiently flexible working practises to make the job possible.

This is the elephant in the room - employers are concerned about the bottom line, productivity per worker. The tories are more than happy to embrace this - but you can't embrace this and at the same time hector those with disabilities for not fitting into the jobs market.

peterpuffin
3 Aug 2010, 8:39AM

The Tories are also planning to cut housing benefit but the significant cost for all poor people and low income people is RENT; a significant cost to the huge housing benefit bill.

The left must start a debate about how to CUT RENTS/housing costs which remain outside the area of TORY and tabloid interest; cut housing benefit and rents in tandem and you create an incentive to work.

There are millions of young and poor people paying off the gambling speculation of the propertied class and particularly tenants in BUY TO LET whose nos must equal those of the Council houses sold off by Thatcher.

Lets hear Labour running a campaign to cut rent; and return to a society based on mutuality where housing for First Time Buyers is 3x Median income ie 60,000 pounds for a starter house; this over a generation.

This requires a significant redrawing of the Green Belt; houses for working class based on the 1930's Garden Movement; allotments for flats , green spaces on the urban fringes ....

Also release land at agricultural rates 10000 pound a plot with services put in so people can buy kit homes off the internet and lets drive down housing costs for he next generation and stop the poor paying off BUY TO LET gambling debts.

In other words a housing strategy to answer the needs of a generation PRICED OUT.

Guardian  03 Aug 2010    Crackdown on Welfare    

Remploy

GMB_Remploy

Disabled to lose their factories

Welfare reforms are 'onslaught on the vulnerable'

The National Housing Federation (NHF) claimed the plan to impose a cap on housing benefit payments amounted to an "onslaught on the vulnerable", which would cost more than 900,000 low-paid people an average of £624 a year – forcing them into debt or homelessness ...

The NHF analysis revealed hundreds of thousands of the unemployed and low-paid single parents would be hit by the changes.

It found that 18,870 people would lose out in Birmingham, 15,610 in Leeds, 12,620 in Liverpool and 10,210 in Manchester ...

Independent  01 Aug 2010    Crackdown on Welfare

Jobless fall; part-time jump

In the three months to May the unemployment rate was 7.8 per cent of the workforce, slightly better than the market had been expecting.

This compares with 10 per cent in the eurozone and 9.5 per cent in the US.

The number of people out of work for more than 12 months was up by 61,000 to 787,000.

The total of people working part-time jumped by 148,000 to 7.82m, or 27 per cent of those in employment, the highest since records began in 1992.

The number of temporary workers was also up by 78,000.

Those classed as economically inactive – for instance because they are students or are long-term sick or looking after a family – fell by 62,000 to 8.1m or 21.3 per cent of the working age population.

There was a fall of 5,000 in unemployed 16-24-year-olds to 923,000 or 19.5 per cent of the workforce in that age group.

Vacancies were up by 10,000 to 486,000.

Average weekly earnings, including bonuses, rose by 2.7 per cent in the three months to May compared with a year ago, down from 4.1 per cent in the three months to April, confirming that pay pressures remain subdued.

Earnings excluding bonuses rose by just 1.8 per cent, compared with 1.9 per cent.

FT  14 July 2010    Rebalancing the Economy

Part-time workforce at record levels

ONS

Number of Britons in permanent jobs drops to lowest level this year

Kevin Green, REC chief executive ... warned the problem of high youth unemployment – currently about one in five under 24-year-olds are out of work – would escalate as thousands more graduates and school-leavers would seek work in the coming months. "Youth unemployment is one of the most pressing issues we currently face in the UK and needs to be urgently addressed," he said.

Telegraph  06 July 2010

UK towns where it's hardest to find a job

Graduates warned of record 70 applicants for every job

The class of 2010 have been told to consider flipping burgers or stacking shelves when they leave university as leading firms in investment banking, law and IT are due to cut graduate jobs this year.

Guardian  06 July 2010

'The only way in is unpaid work'

Three quarters of employers 'require 2:1 degree'

The danger of a wasted generation

Britons on the breadline

Thousands of people could be forced to rely on food parcels because of benefit delays, as the Government's plan to slash the country's welfare bill is put into effect.

Charities that run foodbanks warned this weekend that the prospect of people having to rely on Third World-style food aid – despite Britain being among the richest nations in the world – is a real possibility for 1.5 million people who will be moved off incapacity benefit (IB).

The number of people who are turning to foodbanks as they can't afford to feed their families has soared, rising from 26,000 in 2008-09 to 41,000 in 2009-10 – 37 per cent of whom were referred to foodbanks because of delays with their benefits ...

Chris Mould, director of the Trussell Trust, said: "What worries us is the amount of people who come to us because their benefits status is being reassessed and they've had their benefits stopped; if hundreds of thousands of people are being reassessed, we fear there will be huge problems."

The Government recently announced that everyone on incapacity benefit will have to go through tests known as Work Capability Assessments to see if they are fit for work. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that, of the 1.5 million people currently on IB, 750,000 will move on to jobseeker's allowance, 300,000 will move on to other benefits, and 450,000 will come off benefits entirely ...

Independent  04 July 2010    Crackdown on Benefit Scroungers    Inequality

Food Stamps USA

Trussell Trust

Ministers consider scheme to hand out food vouchers to unemployed

The line of travel is probably to replace benefits with food stamps.

The government is considering plans to distribute food vouchers to people on the dole as part of a wider drive to empower charities to supplement the support provided by the welfare state.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, has given his provisional backing to JobCentre Plus staff handing out vouchers that can be exchanged for food parcels.

The parcels, which contain enough donated items to keep a family fed for six days, are administered from 65 food banks across the country run by the Trussell Trust, a Christian charity ...

The Trussell Trust, which fed 41,000 people last year, already relies upon front-line professionals such as a teachers, social worker and doctors to give the vouchers to people they encounter who do not have enough money to feed themselves.

Until two years ago, a few Jobcentre Plus offices also let their staff distribute vouchers on an ad hoc basis.

That practice, negotiated locally, was stopped by the Labour government in 2008, after a ruling that Jobcentre Plus advisers "must not act as an agent for handing out any form of support, such as food vouchers" on behalf of charities.

Labour ministers were thought to have been concerned that the Trussell Trust parcels would give the impression welfare payments were insufficient ...

Chris Mould, director of the Trussell Trust, said a growing proportion of the charity's clients were "on the edge" because they had been refused a crisis loan or had their benefits halted as officials reassessed their entitlements ...

Figures released by the DWP revealed that 37,000 people waited 17 days or more for their jobseeker's allowance last year, while 20,000 had to wait more than 22 days ...

Guardian  02 July 2010    Crackdown on Benefit Scroungers    Inequality

Food Stamps USA

Trussell Trust

Where will the private sector jobs come from?

Answer came there none

Quite rightly, Osborne thinks the economy should be less dependent on consumer spending ...

The private sector can manage. Freed from the constraints of an unaffordably large public sector, the economy has the wherewithal to create more than 2m jobs in the next five years.

That was the gist of the report from the Office for Budget Responsibility brought forward yesterday in response to the Guardian's story about the employment losses from George Osborne's spending cuts.

The OBR's figures differed slightly from those in yesterday's Guardian, but not materially so.

It estimates that public-sector employment will drop by 490,000 by 2014-15 and by 601,000 by 2015-16.

That is broadly in line with the range of 100,000-120,000 jobs lost each year in the leaked Treasury impact assessment.

It gave no specific numbers for the private-sector jobs that would be lost as a result of the knock-on effects of the chancellor's budget, but the figures in the Guardian story of 120,000-140,000 a year have not been challenged.

Despite that hit to jobs, the OBR said that overall employment would pick up in every year from now, rising from 28.89m to 29.97m by 2015. That's a net increase of 1.08m even after the impact of the budget is accounted for, and well over 2m jobs in all ...

So where would the 2m jobs come from? ...

Guardian  30 June 2010    Branch Office Britain

Battle breaks out over Treasury's jobless figures

George Osborne needs 2m private jobs

Office for budget irresponsibility

Budget will cost 1.3m jobs - Treasury

In pursuit of an export led recovery ...

Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015 ...

A slide from the final version of a presentation for last week's budget, seen by the Guardian, says: "100-120,000 public sector jobs and 120-140,000 private sector jobs assumed to be lost per annum for five years through cuts."

The job losses in the public sector will result from the 25% inflation-adjusted reduction in Whitehall spending over the next five years, while the private sector will be affected both through the loss of government contracts and from the knock-on impact of lower public spending ...

texaspete82
29 Jun 2010, 9:14PM

Step 1 - Make the dole queues 2 million longer, justified by a highly uncertain and pessimistic assumption about the structual deficit driven by unrealistically pessimistic assumptions about the size of the output gap

Step 2 - Wage war on "welfare scroungers" with aim of denying benefits to newly unemployed and disabled

Step 3 - Use mass unemployment as excuse to abolish minimum wage and push wages downwards

Step 4 - Use poor quality public services resulting from cash-strapped public services and loss of best staff due to severe pay cuts and 35% staff cuts as justification for privatisation to trim state down to 20% GDP

Step 5 - Use smaller state to cut taxes for the 10% of the population earning more than £40k

This is brilliant strategy from the Tories to achieve what they have always wanted to.

WellWell
30 Jun 2010, 6:53AM

In yesterday's FT (Companies and Markets p31) a quote from Steve Barrow of Standard Bank: "...it is the financial markets that have the power to restrain governments and so bring about change, NOT the unions and the electorate."

So there you have it, a clear statement from the financiers that there is no democracy. The people don't matter, it is the financial markets that dictate policy (see also the Walter lippman quote in a post above).

Barrow subsequently qualifies his remark, "However, when the economic climate gets this bad it may well be the social aspects of policymakers' actions that count, not the reactions of financial markets." Barrow is referring to the tens of thousands demonstrating across Europe in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon and Athens (Not forgetting the strikes in China). The only time ordinary people enter the thoughts of the financial controllers is when they rise up on the streets and challenge the hegemony of the markets.

The question arises - are the people of Britain (and i would add Ireland) going to rise up in solidarity? Or are we going to do nothing more than grumble as what remains of the social fabric is slashed and shredded to tatters?

After thirty years of Thatcherism/monetarism/neoliberalism - whatever you want to call it - we get a cabinet of 22 pampered millionaires cotton-wooled from the concerns and worries of ordinary people who are smugly implementing policies that stamp on the poorest and toss them into penury like rubbish on a skip; moreover policies that will throw hundred of thousands more onto the dole queues. And all to retain the spending power of the very wealthy, which allows them to escape the world they've destroyed for the rest of us taking flight to their luxury yachts like the Haywards of the world, or to their private jets, or their lavish holiday homes or overpriced select restaurants...

It took a CIA backed military coup to implement austerity measures in Chile similar to this, and operation Condor in the Southern Cone. We mustn't accept this. The Tories (with the aid of the Tory trojan Clegg) are going to complete the Thatcherite project and undo 100 years of struggle for ordinary people. If we do nothing, we will all be at the mercy of charity and private interests. And what then when the next crash comes as it surely will. Will we let them erode our living standards even further?

Enough. Enough discarding entire communities and shoving them away in ghettos, enough exploitation of the poorest, enough destruction of the planet. And why such madness? For the profit of a few. Enough of their geopolitical wars and their indoctrination. Rogue capitalism needs to be brought to an end - NOW

AnOwl
30 Jun 2010, 8:08AM

@Gilday - I'm far from confident about your reading comprehension skills.

The entire article clearly casts enormous doubt on the ability of the private sector to create 500,000 jobs per annum (which it has never done in this country, even in the longest boom periods).

Where do you imagine the majority of private sector growth has been over the last 20-odd years? It is in public service procurement of private sector services. This is likely to be redcued to the point of non-existence during the coming Parliament. In nascent industries where there may be some prospect of major growth (renewable energy; the digital sector; life sciences) the current government is already scrapping several crucial financial stream necessary for their successful incubation into fully-fledged national industries. Still, corporation tax is going down by 4%. That'll sort matters out...

Outside the rarefied and increasingly closed-off world of global finance, the economy shows every sign of stagnating for years to come. A second soverign debt crisis, anywhere in the world, would pull the global economy back to the precipice. Chinese growth is faltering, its property sector vastly overheated and due for "market correction".

I think we are heading squarely into the heart of a second Great Depression.

Guardian  29 June 2010

Budget office's forecasts of 2m jobs questioned

Vince Cable's 'department for growth' is first to face job cuts

In Ireland, a Picture of the High Cost of Austerity

Whisper it softly: Was Brown right after all?

Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations ...

Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized.

Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession.

Joblessness in this country of 4.5 million is above 13 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed — those out of work for a year or more — have more than doubled, to 5.3 percent ...

Despite its strenuous efforts, Ireland has been thrust into the same ignominious category as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. It now pays a hefty three percentage points more than Germany on its benchmark bonds, in part because investors fear that the austerity program, by retarding growth and so far failing to reduce borrowing, will make it harder for Dublin to pay its bills rather than easier ...

Politicians here have raised taxes and cut salaries for nurses, professors and other public workers by up to 20 percent.

About 30 billion euros ($37 billion) is being poured into zombie banks like Anglo Irish, which was nationalized after lavishing loans on developers.

The budget went from surpluses in 2006 and 2007 to a staggering deficit of 14.3 percent of gross domestic product last year — worse than Greece.

It continues to deteriorate. Drained of cash after an American-style housing boom went bust, Ireland has had to borrow billions; its once ultralow debt could rise to 77 percent of G.D.P. this year.

“Everybody’s feeling quite sick at what happened because things were going so well for Ireland,” said Patrick Honohan, the Irish central bank governor. “But we don’t have the flexibility to do a spending stimulus now. There’s no one who is even arguing for it.” ...

NYT  28 June 2010    IMF    The Euro    

The Third Depression

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression ...

... the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy.

Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history.

Unlike their predecessors ... today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer ...

... unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

... the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence ...

... there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors.

On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain ...

It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs.

It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy?

The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

NYT  27 June 2010    Crackdown on Welfare    G20

[US] Recovery Slows With Weak Job Creation in June

It's 'negflation' that Britain really needs to worry about

'Negflation'

A sadistic attack on the jobless

People who have lost their jobs are shocked ... to discover they are expected to eat, pay their bills, clothe themselves and get around – including for job interviews – on just £64.45 a week if they are over 25.

For those under 25, weekly subsistence must be attained on just £51.85.

Osborne's announcement that the rate at which benefits rise will decrease, by linking them to the consumer price index (CPI) rather than, as currently, the retail prices index (RPI), was actually set out by the Treasury under the heading "Fairness".

On current figures, with the RPI at 5.1%, and the CPI at 3.4%, jobseeker's allowance was due to rise next year, to £67.87 a week for the over 25s, and a princely £53.77 for those under 25.

Instead, the figures will be, respectively, £67.22 and £53.25. The loss is 65p a week for the over-25s, and 52p per week for the under 25s.

Those pennies all add up, as the government itself understands, calculating that this flick of the scythe across the benefit system will save it £1.17bn in 2011-12, and almost £6bn by 2014-15.

Over a year, somebody unemployed over 25 will lose £33.80, while the under-25s will each be £27.04 worse off.

Before the election, I wrote that this poverty level of unemployment benefit, and the cruelty of a system that allows people to earn just £5 in part-time work before additional earnings reduce the benefit pound for pound, was a scandal no party was prepared to address.

Donald Hirsch, author of a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on the minimum needed for an acceptable standard of living – £13,900 last year, he found, way above jobseeker's allowance penury – said: "Everybody knows you cannot survive on that level of benefit." ...

Guardian  27 June 2010    Coalition War on Benefit Scroungers    'Reserve Army'

A minimum income standard for Britain in 2009

Coalition to tell unemployed to 'get on your bike'

Mr Duncan Smith, the MP for Lord Tebbit’s former parliamentary seat of Chingford, disclosed that ministers were drawing up plans to encourage jobless people living in council houses to move out of unemployment black spots to homes in other areas, perhaps hundreds of miles away.

The former Conservative Party leader said millions of people were “trapped in estates where there is no work” and could not move because they would lose their accommodation.

The proposed scheme would allow them to go to the top of the housing list in another area rather than lose their right to a home if they moved ...

Telegraph  26 June 2010    Coalition Crackdown on Benefit Scroungers

Pensions shake-up

Mr Iain Duncan Smith has discovered a way of 'reinvigorating retirement': work longer.

With current unemployment somewhere between 2.46 million and 8.19 million (inactive), and over 5 people per vacancy, you might wonder about the impact of this move on unemployment below 65, and especially on the 927,000 so-called 'Neets'.

Whichever way you cut it, there's not enough work to go round.

It's called having a 'reserve army' to keep wages down and profits up, and unless the coalition is going to allow people to starve, it costs.

Millions of employees who are not saving for their retirement will be enrolled in company schemes under a radical shake-up of pensions which eventually could see most people working into their seventies ...

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, told The Daily Telegraph that the radical pension reform he will oversee was designed to “reinvigorate retirement”.

“People are living longer and healthier lives than ever, and the last thing we want is to lose their skills and experience from the workplace due to an arbitrary age limit,” he said. “Now is absolutely the right time to live up to our responsibility to reform our outdated pension system and to take action where the previous government failed to do so. If Britain is to have a stable, affordable pension system, people need to work longer, but we will reward their hard work with a decent state pension that will enable them to enjoy quality of life in their retirement.

“That is why we are issuing a call for evidence on moving the state pension age to 66, and thereafter plan to take a frank look at the relationship between state pension age and life expectancy.” ...

In keeping with the Coalition’s drive to encourage people to take more responsibility for themselves, up to 10 million employees who currently fail to save for their retirement will be automatically enrolled into a company scheme ...

Telegraph  23 June 2010    Youth Unemployment

Employment Rate falls to 72.1 per cent

Or, as The Grauniad prefers to put it: Headline UK unemployment rate drops

Correction: the number claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance dropped.

'Inactivity' went up.

The employment rate for the three months to April 2010 was 72.1 per cent, down 0.1 on the quarter.

There was a small increase of 5,000 in the number of people in employment compared with the previous quarter to reach 28.86 million.

The number of full-time workers fell by 56,000 over the quarter but the number of part-time workers increased by 61,000.

The number of employees and self-employed people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job increased by 45,000 on the quarter to reach 1.08 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992.

The unemployment rate for the three months to April 2010 was 7.9 per cent, up 0.1 on the quarter.

The number of unemployed people increased by 23,000 over the quarter to reach 2.47 million.

The number of people unemployed for up to six months fell by 42,000, to reach 1.17 million.

However, the number of people unemployed for more than twelve months increased by 85,000 over the quarter to reach 772,000, the highest figure since the three months to April 1997.

There were 5.2 unemployed people per vacancy, up 0.1 on the quarter.

The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (the claimant count) decreased by 30,900 between April and May 2010 to reach 1.48 million.

This is the first time the claimant count has been below 1.5 million since March 2009.

The number of claimants of up to six months duration fell by 20,400 on the month to reach 901,200 while the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance for over twelve months increased by 6,500 between April and May to reach 258,700.

The inactivity rate for the three months to April 2010 was 21.5 per cent, up 0.1 on the quarter.

The number of inactive people of working age increased by 29,000 over the quarter to reach a record high of 8.19 million.

This is the smallest quarterly increase in inactivity since the three months to October 2009.

Most categories of inactivity, including the number of students not in the labour market, fell over the quarter, but the number of people in the “long-term sick “category increased by 58,000 to reach 2.07 million.

The number of vacancies for the three months to May 2010 was 492,000, up 7,000 over the quarter.

All industrial sectors showed small movements in vacancies over the quarter.

The earnings annual growth rate for total pay (including bonuses) was 4.2 per cent for the three months to April 2010, down from 4.3 per cent for the three months to March.

The earnings annual growth rate for regular pay (excluding bonuses) was 1.9 per cent for the three months to April 2010, down from 2.0 per cent for the three months to March 2010.

ONS  16 June 2010    Inequality

Headline UK unemployment rate drops

Sales of beer and TVs push down inflation

Fiscal conservatism may be good for one nation, but threatens collective disaster

"Appeasing the markets is like trying to reason with a crazy man ... "

What is unambiguously clear about the European economies, including that of the UK, is that if they all decide to cut their borrowing, slash spending and raise taxes, and do so at the same time, growth will be lower than it otherwise would have been ...

It a classic Keynesian paradox; what is good for one nation can be disastrous for all ...

What I detect as being especially dangerous in Europe right now are the cuts in the wages of public sector workers.

This so-called "internal devaluation" is based on the idea that prices and wages can both move down together.

Whether that happens or not, what will not move down is the value of the debts incurred by households ...

So, with a lower salary and the same mortgage and consumer debts, many families will, I fear, default ...

In these already highly indebted states, that could place much more stress on the banking system, and make the banks even more cautious and unwilling to extend credit, which would add another twist to the downward spiral ... the case for more cuts is weak.

Appeasing the markets is like trying to reason with a crazy man ...

Better to follow the right policy: supporting growth through higher spending on public investment and infrastructure, which will help the economy grow faster in the long term.

Independent  15 June 2010

OBR report: Difficult decisions ahead

The Chancellor is overplaying the scale of the black hole ...

Are the books really ... as bad ... as the coalition says?

Osborne will have to look elsewhere for austerity affirmation

The lunatics are back in charge of the economy and they want cuts, cuts, cuts

As things stand, a second Great Depression has been averted, but growth has ranged from the weak in Europe to the unspectacular in the United States.

Banks are not lending. Unemployment is running at near double-digit levels in the US and the eurozone.

The determination to cut budget deficits in these circumstances does not show that policymakers of probity and integrity have replaced the irresponsible spendthrifts of 2008 and 2009. It shows that the lunatics are back in charge of the asylum ...

The budget hawks like to cite Geoffrey Howe's draconian 1981 budget as evidence that fiscal tightening is perfectly consistent with economic growth. So it is, providing there is scope for an over-valued pound to depreciate and for excessively high interest rates to be cut.

So it is, provided that tumbling oil prices raise the real incomes of consumers and cut costs for businesses.

All these things happened in the early 1980s; none of them are likely to occur now.

The pound has already fallen by 25%, interest rates are at 0.5% and oil prices show no sign of falling much below $70 (£48) a barrel ...

... we now have the bizarre spectacle of China, Japan, the eurozone and Britain all set on reducing budget deficits while simultaneously pursuing export-led growth.

This is a logical absurdity because somebody, somewhere has to be importing all the exports.

If the rest of the world assumes that the US is once again going to become the world's spender of last resort it is seriously mistaken ...

Guardian  14 June 2010

OBR UK growth forecast downgraded

Antidepressant use rises as recession feeds wave of worry

Prescriptions have doubled in decade, NHS figures show, with doctors warning drugs are covering for counselling shortage ...

The health service issued 39.1m prescriptions for drugs to tackle depression in England in 2009, compared with 20.1m in 1999 – a 95% jump.

Doctors handed out 3.18m more prescriptions last year than in 2008, almost twice the annual rise seen in preceding years, according to previously unpublished statistics released by the NHS's Business Services Authority.

The increase is thought to be due in part to improved diagnosis, reduced stigma around mental ill-health and rising worries about jobs and finances triggered by the economic downturn.

But tonight doctors warned that some people are being put on the drugs unnecessarily, especially those with milder symptoms of depression, partly because there is too little access to "talking therapies", which use discussion rather than drugs to tackle problems ...

Guardian  11 June 2010    Prozac Nation