Policy Critical - ippr election 2010 blog

Class of 2010

2010-05-05T02:11:00.000-07:00

Who are the new MPs we are about to send to Westminster? What are their political beliefs? What backgrounds do they come from? Could they work together in the event of a hung parliament? Although the next parliament will see an exceptionally large number of newcomers, we still know relatively little about the ‘class of 2010’.

To help us answer some of these questions ippr has conducted an online poll of Prospective Parliamentary Candidates from across the different parties. This excluded sitting MPs and included only those who had a serious chance of winning – either in safe seats for their party or in marginal contests.

Our first finding was that if PR is the deal breaker in a hung parliament, both David Cameron and Gordon Brown will find it difficult to persuade their backbenchers to back electoral reform. All of the Conservative PPCs polled supported first past the post, while only 10 per cent of Labour PPCs backed PR or a mixed system as used in Scotland and Wales.

On the PPCs’ ideological positions the survey found that Labour and Lib Dem PPCs have much more in common with each other than either set of candidates do with the Conservatives. This confirms that a coalition between Labour and the Lib Dems would be much easier to hold together politically than an arrangement between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives.

Our survey found that:

Most Labour and Lib Dem PPCs agree that government should redistribute income from the rich to the poor. Only 30 per cent of surveyed Conservative PPCs supported income redistribution and 47 per cent opposed it. Labour PPCs are slightly to the left of Lib Dem PPCs on questions of redistribution and the welfare state: 67 per cent of Labour PPCs against 33 per cent of Lib Dem PPCs agree strongly that government should redistribute income.
Labour and Lib Dem PPCs are less in favour of tougher sentences for criminal offences than Conservative PPCs, with Lib Dem PPCs being the most liberal.
59 per cent of Conservative PPCs disagreed with the statement that too many people’s lives would be damaged by cutting benefits, compared to just 7 per cent of Labour and 17 per cent of Lib Dem PPCs.
70 per cent of Conservatives agreed that the welfare state ‘crowds out’ civic endeavour and community self-help, while most Labour and Lib Dem PPCs disagreed.
91 per cent of Lib Dem PPCs agreed that we have been too reliant on the City for growth and should curb its role, compared to 44 per cent of Labour PPCs. Most Conservative PPCs opposed action to reduce the role of the City in the economy.
Lib Dem PPCs are the least interventionist on foreign policy, with 91 per cent wanting Britain to stop trying to be a major military force in the world, compared to just 27 per cent of Labour and 6 per cent of Tory PPCs.
59 per cent of Tory PPCs think the EU is a threat to the UK’s national sovereignty, whereas Labour and Lib Dem PPCs overwhelmingly reject this.
Whereas all Labour and Lib Dem PPCs agree that climate change is real and man made and requires major social changes, only 53 per cent of Tory PPCs believe this.

Finally, in terms of how the candidates were selected, we found that in most cases the candidates were locally based or had some local roots. There was little evidence of lots of London-based candidates being parachuted into constituencies. What is more noticeable about the selection process is how few people are involved in it: 75 per cent of these PPCs were chosen by fewer than 200 party members and 28 per cent by fewer than 100. The only party to have broken out of those small numbers were the Conservatives – many of whom had been selected in primary contests.

The survey is here and the press release here.

Rick Muir

A conspiracy of silence that will come back to haunt the winner

2010-05-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

The economy has been at the heart of the general election campaign. Gordon Brown emphasises the need to support jobs and denounces Conservative plans to cut public spending by £6 billion this year as risking tipping the economy back into recession. David Cameron extols the benefit of making a start on deficit reduction in 2010/11 so that national insurance contributions do not have to rise in April 2011. And Nick Clegg calls for an increase in the personal tax threshold to £10,000 as a demonstration of the ‘fairness’ that is needed if the public are going to support tough measures on reducing the fiscal deficit.

But, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has made clear, all three main political parties have left more unsaid than said. In a detailed analysis of their plans, the IFS concludes that the Conservatives have not specified where £52.4 billion of deficit reduction would come from, Labour £44.1 billion and the Liberal Democrats £34.5 billion. It also said that ‘Labour and the Liberal Democrats would need to deliver the deepest sustained cut to spending on public services since the four years from April 1976 to March 1980’ while ‘the Conservative plans imply cuts to spending on public services that have not been delivered over any five-year period since the Second World War’.

Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have, simply, all been too afraid of the electoral consequences of spelling out where public spending will be cut and which taxes will increase after the election. All saw how the Tories’ ratings dipped in the opinion polls after their flirtation with ‘Age of Austerity’ rhetoric late last year and have concluded that, in a tight election, they cannot afford to tell the public the truth. Instead, they have, predictably, chosen to emphasise spending commitments (e.g. to the National Health Service), tax reductions (e.g. for married couples) or other positive stories (e.g. abolishing university tuition fees).

As a result, there has been far too much debate about whether it is a good idea to cut public spending by an additional £6 billion in 2010/11 and far too little about where up to £60 billion of cuts will come from in subsequent years.

In truth, the argument about the £6 billion of cuts was fought to a stalemate even before the election was called. Some economists say that it would take demand out of the economy at a time when the recovery was fragile; others suggested it would boost confidence and, thus, private spending. Whichever side is right – and I side with those who think cutting spending now is an unnecessary risk - the far more important issue is the make-up of the bigger spending cuts and tax increases that will inevitably follow.

This is not just a question of a democratic deficit – how can the electorate choose which party it wants to govern for the next five years if none of the parties will reveal its approach to the biggest issue that will face the government in the next parliament?

It is a problem for the parties too. Whether the election results in a majority Conservative Government, a minority Conservative Government or some sort of coalition or partnership (which, two days before the polls open, seem to be the three possible outcomes), the next government will have to implement unpopular measures on taxation and public spending, not just in its first few months in office but in every one of the next four or five years. And it will have to do so without having secured the support of the public for those measures. This will make it extremely unpopular. Indeed, Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, is reported to think whichever party wins this election will not subsequently win another one for a generation.

Economists will recognise this situation as a classic game theory problem. If all the parties had cooperated and agreed to be totally open and honest about their spending and tax plans before the election, then the winner would be in a better position to implement its plans in the next parliament. But there was no such cooperation and no single party was willing to break ranks and be the first to set out its plans, for fear that the other two would not follow its lead and that it would lose support. Consequently, none acted and the result is a sub-optimal outcome for all concerned.

The consequence of this failure will haunt the next government every time it announces a tax increase or a cut in spending on public services.

This piece was first published on Left Foot Forward

Tony Dolphin

Unemployed young northerners

2010-04-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

In last night’s leaders’ debate all three parties emphasised the importance of increasing the number of apprenticeships and vocational training to help build our industrial base and get young people back into work. This is to be welcomed.

ippr north is currently researching some of the most deprived communities in northern England. For many of the young people we have spoken to, one of the major barriers they face in getting into work is having to have previous experience. They agree that having more apprenticeships and in-work training opportunities would most help them get into work. It’s also their experience that education and qualifications do not help, but ‘who you know’ does – which is also difficult for them to achieve.

These young people are critical of training courses that do not lead to work. Too often the major objective is simply for young people to be ‘seen’ to be meaningfully occupied; if the process has no job prospect at the end, there is a danger of vulnerable young people becoming even more disillusioned about the benefits of education and the opportunities available to them. This risks lowering aspiration, and reinforcing a belief that education does not lead to employment.

But perhaps most fundamentally for the North, the majority of the election debate has been focused on the issues of ‘labour supply’ – particularly training and skills – perhaps because this is the area where the leaders feel they have most levers.

For a sustainable recovery to happen in the North, the parties must do more to tackle the thorny issue of creating new, high-quality, low-skilled jobs. Only when jobs offer the opportunity for progression and decent pay, can they truly offer a way for people to improve their lives. The risk otherwise is that we further entrench inequality.

Evelyn Tehrani

As safe as houses?

2010-04-29T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Nationwide Building Society has just reported that house prices in the UK rose by 10.5% over the last year – the first double-digit increase since June 2007.

Although at a personal level this will be a great relief for those households that found themselves in negative equity as a result of the fall in prices between October 2007 and February 2009, it is not a cause for national celebration. House prices in the UK are still at high levels, relative to incomes, and it is again becoming harder for young people to take their first step on the property ladder.

The manifestos of the three main parties have little to say on the housing market – though Labour and the Liberal Democrats want an increase in the number of affordable homes and Labour repeat the Budget pledge to exempt house purchases below £250,000 from stamp duty for the next two years – and nothing to say on the need to prevent a resumption of rapid house price inflation.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee has done an excellent job since 1997 in keeping consumer price inflation close to its target rate, but ensuring greater stability in the UK economy in future requires control of consumer and house price inflation. It is a fact that house prices boomed in the period leading up to each of the last four recessions in the UK (in the early and late 1970s, the late 1980s and most of the 2000s). If nothing is done now, there will eventually be another house price boom, to be followed inevitably by recession.

Building more affordable homes will help at the margin but would only prevent future house price inflation if it was done on a major scale, something that no one is proposing. Interest rates cannot help, because they are set to control consumer price inflation. What is needed is an overhaul of the regulation of the UK mortgage market, to include limits on loan-to-value and loan-to-income ratios, restrictions on buy-to-let and self-certified mortgages and changes to remuneration practices at mortgage lenders to ensure bonus payments reflect performance over several years.

None of the main political parties was brave enough to challenge our love affair with our homes by making such proposals ahead of the election. It is to be hoped that the next government will be brave enough to implement measures along these lines after it.

Tony Dolphin

The Sunday Times Rich List could pay off the deficit without noticing

2010-04-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

The Sunday Times this week published the latest list of the collective wealth of the 1,000 multimillionaires in Britain which has climbed to £335.5 billion, up £77.265 billion on 2009. Despite the global economic downturn this represents 29.9% growth on last year – the biggest rise in the 22-year history of the Rich List.

Quite apart from the fact that this is yet another indication that those ‘architects’ of the economic crisis have also been its beneficiaries, this level of growth is completely unsustainable by almost any standards. It does, though, suggest a rather tempting solution to the political parties’ collective headache over the public deficit.

By our calculations, just 20% of the combined wealth of the Rich List would be sufficient to fund the entire public deficit for 2010-2011. In political party terms, just half of last year’s growth could plug the hole in Liberal Democrat plans; a 25% share of the richest hundred’s combined wealth of £182bn would fund Labour’s shortfall; and if this year’s 53 billionaires (rising from 43 last year) could stump up £53bn between them, that would plug the Conservatives' plans.

Of course, if it was done through taxation there would be cries of foul and flight – although interestingly the Sunday Times this year plays down such cries as threats rather than realities – but it would be worth the anoraks running some sums.

But in these unprecedented times, what if the Rich List 2010 somehow clubbed together and in an act of monumental generosity simply gave a small part of their wealth away? For the many millions facing as yet unknown austerity in our schools, hospitals and communities, it might make a difference that would go down in the annals of history far more than any investment in a trophy football team or quantity of private jets. And for the richest thousand? They probably wouldn’t even notice.

Ed Cox

Higher spending in the devolved nations

2010-04-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

Whatever the outcome of this election, everyone knows that public spending is going to be cut dramatically in future years. But how might cuts affect the distribution of funding across the UK as a whole?

A new ippr paper by David Bell, Professor of economics at Stirling University, argues that thanks to the perverse properties of the funding formula used to dish out money to the devolved nations, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be better protected than England. He warns that the current funding disparities that exist between England and the devolved nations will actually widen as overall spending across the UK falls.

Why? First, because the main parties have promised to protect health spending, while Labour is also promising to protect a substantial proportion of the education budget, and it these two items of spending which make up well over half the grant that goes from Westminster, via the controversial Barnett formula, to the devolved administrations. Protecting health and education therefore safeguards a bigger share of the budget than in England. The effect won’t be huge but it will be felt. Certainly we won’t see the current spending gap across the nations fall.

Of course the realities of budget-deficit reduction after the election might mean that health and education don’t survive unscathed. But even if these areas face some pruning the oddities of the Barnett formula will still ensure that devolved budgets don’t fall as much as those in England.

The so-called Barnett squeeze, a reference to the fact that overtime the formula is supposed to bring about equal spending per head, actually goes into reverse when spending in England is cut. For example a 5% reduction in English spending will actually increase the gap between English per head spending and that received by Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Does this matter?

Arguably it will exacerbate English resentment over the higher spending enjoyed by the devolved nations. Earlier this year we published research that shows that the number of those in England who believe that Scotland gets ‘more than its fair share’ of money has nearly doubled in the last 7 years. Awareness of spending disparities is on the rise. So if the English were increasingly annoyed about how much money went to Scotland in an era when spending was growing how will they react when they learn that the funding gap is likely to widen as cuts are unleashed?

Guy Lodge

Is the public sector really ‘too big’?

2010-04-27T03:09:00.000-07:00

How public spending is spread around the UK is generating great interest, after David Cameron identified areas like Northern Ireland and the North East as having a public sector that is ‘too big’. Is he right? Well, sort of.

Much of the coverage has been based on figures that show the public sector constitutes up to 70 per cent of the economy in some parts of the country. These are quite shocking figures, but they deserve closer inspection.

Treasury figures published last week reveal that spending per head is spread unevenly around the country. Areas like Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the North East and the North West of England receive above average levels of public spending per head, while regions like the South East and East of England receive less than the UK average. Surprisingly for some, these figures also reveal that is it actually London that receives the most public spending per head – 15% above the UK average.

Mostly what this shows us is which parts of the UK have the highest levels of social and economic need, as a large proportion of this spend is made up of ‘social protection’– i.e. benefits and the state pension. This spending is entitlements-based, and responsive to need, so if the number of claimants of Jobseeker’s Allowance in an area increases, so too does social protection spending.

So why didn’t David Cameron flag London’s public sector as too large? The figures he used looked at the sector as a proportion of GDP, rather than public spending per head. The City of London’s economic success (much of it the result of people commuting in from surrounding regions) disguises the size of public sector spending when the figures are viewed in this way.

Cameron did also make the argument that the private sector needs to be larger in the Northern regions, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is the right way to think about the issue. It is not so much that the public sector is 'too big' but that the private sector is 'too small'. You could argue that without public sector employment the situation could be even worse in some parts of the UK.

We all know cuts are coming and they have to be made, but it is vital that economic geography is factored into the thinking as the size of the public sector is reduced. Otherwise, there is a risk that swinging cuts could have a particularly negative effect where social and economic need is already high.

Katie Schmuecker

The parties and voluntary sector engagement

2010-04-27T02:03:00.000-07:00

Last week Gordon Brown suggested that life after politics will not see him slide into a high-profile job at the World Bank or the IMF, but a turn to 'charity or voluntary work'. My fear is that the current policy outlook jeopardises the existence of this charitable future, or at best transforms it beyond recognition.

On the face of it, the political consensus forming around the need to ‘strengthen the voluntary sector’ bodes well for charities and community groups. All of the main parties have put forward measures which affirm their commitment to the sector, from Labour’s Social Impact Bonds, through the Lib Dems’ increase on gift-aid payouts to the Conservatives’ Big Society Bank. The charity sector already receives one third of its income from the state, and this looks set to rise under any future government.

So why the concern? The cynic within me sees this newfound enthusiasm for voluntary sector engagement as a neat way of divorcing a future government from the looming problem of public service spending cuts, while reaping the anticipated rewards of a ‘change’ agenda which 'returns power' to the hands of communities.

The idea is that money can be saved through outsourcing to charities and communities, under the guise of ‘inclusive’ government. This is already underway: public service contracts currently make up around 65% of the voluntary sector’s statutory income.

Yet by asking charities to compete for public sector contracts which they lack the infrastructure to deliver, policy falls short of the substantive support that the voluntary sector will need if it is to play the starring role that the three major parties have assigned to it. In the context of a battle for the future of affordable public services, the current measures seem analogous to handing David a slingshot and sending him forth to meet Goliath.

As highlighted by recent ippr work on 'Capable Communities', charities add value where other service delivery mechanisms cannot, owing to their niche, local expertise and their independence from top-down targets and constraints. To couple simple, finance-based policy to an expectation that charities will transform into slick, area-wide providers of target-hitting public services is to inhabit the grey area between naїvety and negligence.

The new government will need to sit up and do some serious thinking about the scale, process and viability of this proposed transformation or risk selling an expectant and dependent public woefully short.

Leo Ringer

So what IS behind BNP support?

2010-04-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

The BNP launched their manifesto today, and it’s worth taking a look at what they offer the British voter. Alongside getting out of Afghanistan - “there is not a single grain of Afghan sand that is worth the blood of a British soldier” apparently (though the idea that we are there for the sand may be news to some) - and “ending the global warming conspiracy”, they also vow a “halt to the immigration invasion”.

As Nick Griffin has tried to detoxify his brand, talking less about race, he has ratcheted up discussions of immigration. He now argues that much of the BNP’s support reflects the fact that they are the only party to take into account communities’ ‘real’ (and according to them, very negative) experiences of immigration.

ippr published a paper this week which examined whether he is right. We used regression analysis to examine the roots of BNP support across 150 local authorities, looking at whether high levels of immigration do raise communities’ support for the BNP, or whether other variables – such as political disengagement – are more important.

The findings suggest that areas which have higher levels of recent immigration are not more likely to vote for the BNP. In fact the more immigration an area has experienced, the lower its support for the far right. This reflects the findings of previous research which suggests that, on the whole, the more interaction people have with migrant groups the less concerned about migration they are.

We aren’t claiming that the scale of immigration in recent years isn’t of concern to many people; or that immigration doesn’t have some negative effects; or that there is no link between voting far right and being anti-immigration. What we show is that where people have significant lived experiences of immigration, those experiences are not of the kind which drive them to vote for the British National Party.

So what is behind BNP support? The evidence points to political and socio-economic exclusion as key drivers (see our recent ippr report). In particular, areas with low average levels of qualifications (which can mean people struggle in today’s flexible, knowledge-based economy); low levels of social cohesion; and low levels of voter turn out (indicating political disenchantment) are the ones which show more BNP support. It is these issues mainstream politicians should focus on to improve the lives of marginalised people, and draw support away from the party, making its future manifestos even more irrelevant than today’s.

Laura Chappell

What election?

2010-04-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

Stranded in a hotel room half way around the world in east Beijing, you would probably forgive me for being a little out of the loop when it comes to the latest General Election developments. Sure, I can log on to the Guardian and track Andrew Sparrow’s live blog or get the latest election headlines on CNN in between rolling footage of ash cloud and stranded tourists, but in the English language press here in China there’s very little coverage of the closest electoral contest in 20 years in Britain.

That said, one article in yesterday’s Global Times, China’s leading daily for international affairs did catch my eye. Indeed, it is the one and only piece I have seen on the UK election since arriving in Beijing last Tuesday. The paper ran the story about Nick Clegg calling for the end to the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US:

‘The leader of one of Britain’s most important political parties said on Tuesday that the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States was a relic of a bygone age and needed reassessing.’

The article then goes on to say that this latest interjection by Clegg comes at the end of a ‘remarkable week’ in which he has become, referring to round one of the televised TV debates, ‘an overnight sensation’ with support for the Liberal Democrats moving up ‘in some polls to parity with the ruling Labor (sic) party’.

According to the reporter, ‘Clegg’s party could win the election, and in the event of a hung parliament... he could play a key role in forming a governing coalition.’

Couched alongside successive articles (here, here and here) dismissing the call from some US senators for China to revalue the Yuan, and another in the state-run China Daily reporting a recent US poll that suggests that 80 per cent of Americans have no faith in the federal Government, this latest article about a relatively minor incident in the British election debate appears to conform to a particular trend.

While I don’t doubt that there is genuine interest in European politics in China, this article has as its raison d’être one thing and one thing only. This coverage of Nick Clegg, the ‘star so far of the campaign’ according to the newspaper, has nothing to do with the Liberal Democrats’ prediction of the financial crisis or the party’s policies for public service reform in Northern England.

Instead, it has everything to do with the message that this particular story conveys to the Chinese people: China is not alone in its critique of the US, China is right to stand up to the US and China should continue to do just that.

This minor piece of coverage of the British electoral debate in China serves merely to reinforce Chinese perceptions of the US during the latest cooling of relations between the two global superpowers. One thing is for sure, while a future Prime Minister Clegg might expect a somewhat guarded welcome on his first state visit to DC, he would likely be greeted much more warmly in Beijing.

David Nash

What is the real appetite for change?

2010-04-22T07:11:00.001-07:00

‘Change’ is everywhere in this election. Nick Clegg is offering change by the bucketload, David Cameron is doing his best to out-change Clegg, and Gordon Brown’s silence on the matter is noticeable – because he knows the change many voters would like to see would involve him not being Prime Minister.

But do people really want change or do they just like hearing about it? I often feel that our resistance to real, concrete change that actually affects us is apparent in our reaction to plans to reduce the number of post offices or restructure healthcare services.

The latter is particularly pertinent for me right now because where I live in Islington there is long-running and very popular campaign to save the A&E at the Whittington hospital, whose closure is part of NHS London’s restructuring plans. Local politicians of all parties are queuing up to rubbish the plans and support the local campaign, and similar campaigns are being run across London.

Restructuring health services in the capital so that more care is provided in local or specialist centres, and less in hospitals, is apparently more cost-effective and likely to deliver better care to local people. But local people don’t like it because they’ve got used to having their local hospital. Tuesday night’s BBC London evening news featured a local leader whose main argument against closing the nearby A&E seemed to be simply that people had got used to it. If we took this approach to every public policy question, nothing would ever change.

On the one hand, you could simply argue that local NHS managers have done a bad job in communicating the benefits of the changes to local people, or that on this occasion the changes in question are just wrong. But I also think it shows that people’s first reaction to real, visible, concrete change that affects them directly is negative: we like things just the way they are, thank you very much.

I think this creates a real challenge for all those politicians promising change in this election. We will need many more radical changes to our economy and society if we want to drive forward a fair and sustainable recovery. Politicians need to show us how they will deliver real change which doesn’t flounder on our inbuilt preference for inertia. Otherwise ‘change’ will continue to be just another campaign slogan that means very little once our votes have been cast.

Kayte Lawton

Back to work?

2010-04-22T04:11:00.000-07:00

With the latest figures showing a rise in unemployment – but a fall in the number claiming unemployment benefit – it seems like there is an opportunity to momentarily shift discussion away from the Clegg bounce and leadership debates and towards welfare policy. So far the parties have largely focused on making sure voters know that they will be tough on welfare, but with unemployment at 2.5 million, this is insufficient.

Lots of similarities between Labour and Conservative welfare policies are evident from the manifestos, but also some important differences, in approach as well as policy.

There are similarities in the sound-bites: Labour aims for a ‘swift return to employment’ and the Conservatives want to ‘get Britain working again’. And in the headlines: both main parties are keen to offer more targeted and personalised support, focus attention on job creation and prevent a scarred generation of young people. There are similarities in flagship programmes, namely Labour’s Flexible New Deal and the Conservatives’ single Work Programme. And both parties talk of toughening up the system with proposals on sanctions and benefit cheats.

But there are also significant differences. Labour’s manifesto commitments include an extension to the Young Person’s Guarantee, a better off in work guarantee, a living wage in Whitehall, and rises in the National Minimum Wage. And the narrative of a ‘big society’ that underpins Tory proposals to tackle welfare dependency highlights different roles for the state, welfare to work organisations and individuals.

What of the Liberal Democrats? Well, their manifesto commitments on welfare are noticeably thin. There is a focus on supply-side measures such as job creation and especially green jobs, but proposals to tackle unemployment are mostly absent.

It is clear that many challenges remain around welfare reform. Amongst the most significant is personalising welfare. Emerging findings from ippr’s innovative Now it’s Personal research are highlighting the need for interventions that don’t just isolate employment support and that recognise a wider set of needs such as childcare and transport. Also needed are advisers who have good knowledge of the local environment and in particular good relationships with local employers and training providers. In addition a focus on supporting sustainable job outcomes with more support for people once they are in work to manage the transition as well as a volatile and flexible labour market.

A tougher welfare policy may seem like the right tactic to appeal to voters, but with 2.5 million people currently unemployed and with public sector cuts still to come, this will not be enough. More radical change is needed for the welfare system to be genuinely responsive, personalised and effective.

Dalia Ben-Galim

When the economic conditions are right

2010-04-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

The Liberal Democrats’ surge in the opinion polls has led to increased interest in their policies. One area of focus in this week’s leaders’ debate on international affairs is likely to be Europe, including the issue of UK membership of the euro.

The Liberal Democrats are rather more enthusiastic abut this prospect than the other two main parties. The Conservatives are opposed in principle and Labour has put forward a set of conditions that effectively allow them to shelve the issue indefinitely. But the Liberal Democrat manifesto says: ‘We believe that it is in Britain’s long-term interest to be part of the euro. But Britain should only join when the economic conditions are right, and in the present economic situation, they are not. Britain should join the euro only if that decision were supported by the people of Britain in a referendum.’

Putting aside the remote likelihood of a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum and concentrating on the economic issues, when might the conditions be right?

One argument put forward by the antis is that the depreciation of sterling since the beginning of the financial collapse has helped limit the impact on the UK economy (in contrast to, say, Greece). There is an element of truth in this argument but, although sterling fell by 24 per cent against the euro in 2008, the effect on the economy, in terms of stronger exports and weaker imports, appears to have been modest. Furthermore, although sterling is now 10 per cent higher against the euro compared to the end of 2008, it could be argued that the best time to join the euro is immediately after a sharp fall in sterling, so that any gains in competitiveness are ‘locked in’.

But joining the European Monetary Union does not just mean adopting the euro: we’d also share a common monetary policy, and in particular a common short-term interest rate, with other members. That would not be a problem at the current time. Interest rates are rock bottom in the UK and Europe. Indeed, there could be benefits from the UK joining the euro now, in the form of lower long-term interest rates.

But it might be a problem in the long term. When economic conditions return to something approaching normality, the UK authorities will be desperate to avoid, among other things, a renewed spurt in house prices and surge in mortgage lending. Setting interest rates at an appropriate level will be one means of achieving this aim. But that option would not be available if interest rates in the UK were being set by the European Central Bank based on economic conditions across the whole of the euro-area.

Ironically, joining the euro in the present economic situation would probably have little effect on the UK economy; the risk of such a move would only become apparent in the long term.

Tony Dolphin

Green economic vision?

2010-04-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Nick Clegg launched the Liberal Democrat vision for a green economy. A year of intensive investment to the tune of £3.1bn would create 100,000 new green jobs, 30,000 to be taken up within the first year. Labour and the Conservatives are comparatively ambiguous: Labour has promised to create 400,000 new green jobs by 2015, while the Tories have made only a vague commitment to ‘generate thousands of green jobs’.

On wind power Clegg proposes renovating seven ports in the North of England and Scotland for turbine production – essential if the UK is to secure ‘in house’ manufacturing jobs from its potentially massive wind industry and if we are to attract overseas manufacturers (as ippr argued last year). Labour commits only to making a decision on the feasibility of such a project ‘early in the next Parliament’.

Another key proposal is £140m of investment into a bus scrappage programme, to replace old buses while creating new jobs. This distances the Lib Dems from Labour and the Conservatives who are more interested in protecting the UK’s car manufacturing industry, which Labour intends to make green by promoting ‘rapid take up of electric and low carbon cars’.

The Lib Dems’ eco-cashback scheme would provide a financial incentive to make energy efficiency improvements to your home in the form of a £400 reward. This goes further than the Government’s current boiler scrappage scheme as it includes areas such as double glazing and microgeneration too.

What about green jobs for the young? The Lib Dems plan for 18–25s to receive training, education or an internship after only 90 days on Jobseeker’s Allowance. This is dramatically less than the 1 year that young people currently have to wait under the Future Jobs Fund. But Labour has announced that 10,000 (out of 170,000) of the jobs/placements/training schemes to be created through the FJF will be of the green variety; the Lib Dems have so far made no such pledge.

Overall, the Liberal Democrats’ plans on green jobs are ambitious and challenging, but the electorate may not find them credible.

Kandida Purnell

Every ash cloud has a silver lining

2010-04-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

Most of those stranded on foreign shores – including my colleague David Nash, whose keynote presentation at a symposium in Beijing seemed like a good idea at the time – will fail to appreciate the ash cloud’s silver lining.

It’s equally hard to see how British businesses will benefit or how those whose products rely on fast delivery to market, such as the flower growers in Kenya, will appreciate the bright side of the continuing ban on flights to and from the UK.

According to Independent newspaper – using Reuters copy – though, there are ten silver linings to the cloud of volcanic ash currently hovering over northern Europe. These include lower risk of stroke, which apparently is heightened by aircraft noise, and saving 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions; equivalent to the annual emissions of 50 of the world’s poorest countries.

Slightly different estimates of the carbon emissions saved are available here, but you get the picture.

So why is a climate change researcher such as me not rejoicing? Because aside from clearing the skies of west London (and allowing the people of Hounslow to return to their back gardens for what, by coincidence, was a scorcher of a weekend), the ash cloud’s temporary excoriation of all aircraft and their vapour trails from our skies brings mostly economic pain and major inconvenience. And from an environmental perspective, there has been no structural change. Once the ash cloud has gone, it will be business as usual; the emissions saved utterly trivial.

What, on the other hand, the continued eruption of the world’s most unpronounceable volcano shows with great clarity is that whether we like it or not, our economy and the way we live our lives is heavily reliant on aviation. Ground planes – for whatever reason – and at least some of the machinery of globalisation grinds to a halt.

Is there an electoral silver lining? Certainly the conjuring of Dunkirk spirit is never a bad thing (it worked for Thatcher in 1983), although there is a danger that politicians merely look impotent at the hand of nature and, as such, it’s equally hard to see how the non-incumbents can make political capital out of the ashes.

If anything, the volcanic ash has exposed – once again – how vulnerable the current model of globalisation is and how trying to deal with emissions from aviation, whose growth will be a major problem for future governments, simply by curbing flying is a political non-starter.

When the ash cloud lifts and planes take to the air again, we need politicians to think about how we can accelerate technological innovation to reduce emissions from aircraft permanently, how the noise, misery and health impacts that jet aircraft bring to those grounded under their flight paths is reduced, how to replace flying where possible with hi-tech alternatives and how gradually we can shift to a more sustainable model of global trade.

Andrew Pendleton

The first step to tackling ‘the neet problem’… ditch the term ‘neet’

2010-04-20T04:16:00.000-07:00

A new word has entered common usage as a result of this recession. With young people being the worst affected by the downturn (nearly double the percentage of 16-24 year olds are unemployed compared to the rest of the adult population), we’re hearing a lot about those who are not in employment, education or training. Or ‘neets’ as they’ve become known.

This is undoubtedly one of the most important problems thrown up by the recession. There is a mounting body of evidence that being unemployed early in life can ‘scar’ people later on. If you are out of work when young you are more likely to have spells of unemployment later in life. You’re likely to earn less in the future, too. And we know that being in work is massively important for general well-being, sense of identity and social mobility. So the Conservative candidate for Hammersmith, Shaun Bailey, was right to be hitting the streets this weekend to highlight the problem of youth unemployment. Despite a slew of programmes introduced by the Labour government – from guaranteeing jobs to increasing education places – it looks likely that they’ll miss their target of 7.6% of 16-18 year olds being ‘neet’ this year.

The trouble with ‘the neet problem’ is that it isn’t one problem. It’s lots of very different problems that have been unhelpfully bundled together in a single term. How can politicians come up with policies to help ‘neets’ when it includes everything from top graduates unable to find jobs and those leaving school with no qualifications? And what about those who are ‘neet’ in cities dependent on manufacturing compared to those in rural communities? And don’t forget the difference between men and women – women are four times more likely to have an identified barrier to entering the labour market than men.

The things that are stopping these groups entering the labour market, and the policies that would therefore help them find work, are quite different. So perhaps the first step to tackling the ‘neet problem’ would be to ditch the term ‘neet’. Then we can have a proper discussion about the range of policies that are needed to support these very different groups.

Jonathan Clifton

How green are our parties?

2010-04-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

The Green Party published its manifesto yesterday and is clearly taken great pains to emphasise its thinking in policy areas other than environmental issues, such as the economy, pensions, health and employment.

Nevertheless, the name ‘Green’ does tend to focus one’s attention on the environmental policies - so how do the parties compare here?

Clearly, the big issue is climate change and all set out ideas for how they would tackle this problem. The Conservatives want Britain to become the ‘world’s first low carbon economy’, while Labour seeks a ‘low carbon revolution’ and the Liberal Democrats to ‘lead the fight against climate change’. The Greens, however, suggest that ‘only the Green Party understands that this [climate change] is just one sign of the stress our economies and lifestyles put on the environment… it is a warning of the catastrophic social and environmental consequences of business as usual’.

As far as the three main parties are concerned, many of the ideas for reducing carbon emissions are very similar, although they have been given different names. The Liberal Democrats pledge a ‘ten-year programme of home insulation…paid for by the savings from lower energy bills’; the Conservatives a ‘Green Deal’, essentially a programme of home insulation paid for by the savings from lower energy bills; and Labour have an eye-catching ‘Pay As You Save’ scheme, which is … well, you can probably figure it out.

But there are some important differences, perhaps the most obvious being the parties' positions on nuclear power. Both Labour and the Conservatives are for a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK. The Liberal Democrats oppose new nuclear on the basis that it is too expensive. And the Greens, unsurprisingly, resolutely oppose it both on economic and environmental grounds.

The most striking difference is really in the differing ideologies on how to achieve carbon reductions. While Labour believe active government intervention will be necessary to achieve a low-carbon transition and to generate new green jobs, the Conservatives' approach is much more laissez faire, eschewing ‘rules and regulations’ while embracing ‘incentives and market signals’. The Lib Dems have plans for tougher targets and green investment programmes and the Greens want even higher carbon targets along with direct government investment and even the re-nationalisation of gas and electricity providers.

Of course, these differences may be of little interest to an electorate focused on avoiding recession and dealing with the deficit, which suggests that the Greens’ decision not to lead on their environmental credentials but to focus on economic policies is a smart political manoeuvre.

Jenny Bird

Foreign policy: missing in action?

2010-04-15T01:46:00.000-07:00

As observed in a recent Policy Critical post, this election campaign is giving short shrift to foreign affairs. This is understandable in the context of campaign speeches and promises, since voters want to hear most about the issues that have the greatest impact on their day-to-day lives: taxes, healthcare, education and so on.

But how the government conducts its relations with its international partners – and the trade-offs that it must make in deciding what issues to prioritise – also has profound implications for the country’s economy and national security, broadly defined, so these issues deserve to be addressed in much more detail.

It is encouraging that the manifesto statements of all three parties appear to have recognised that Britain’s place in the world has changed in recent decades. Without making too much of the argument that we are a power in decline, it is clear that we cannot afford to maintain the kind of full-spectrum combat capabilities that we enjoyed in the past. In the short term, this is because the financial crisis has limited the resources available to spend on security and defence.

More significantly, the changing nature of the security challenges we face – which include extreme weather, pandemic diseases, nuclear proliferation and transnational crime, as well as more conventional threats such as inter-state conflict and terrorism – mean that the tools and strategies we use to tackle them must also change. Greater specialisation is required, and a commitment to working in partnership with allies old and new should be seen as a strategic imperative, rather than an optional add-on to a unilateral foreign policy.

However, Labour and Conservative acceptance of this principle has not led either party to offer particularly specific suggestions for what Britain should be doing more of and what it should be doing less of. Both manifestos offer long laundry lists of desirable foreign policies – which include maintaining current spending on aid, improving conditions for the Armed Forces and delivering a sustainable peace settlement in Afghanistan – while kicking difficult questions about the cuts that must be made in order to achieve these goals to the strategic defence and security review due to be carried out in post-election period. Only the Liberal Democrats have given a firmer indication of their position on this, through their pledge to rule out the like-for-like replacement of Trident on the grounds that a price tag of £100 billion over the course of its lifetime is unaffordable.

A more realistic debate about the future contours of British foreign policy among the electorate is urgently required: it is a shame that none of the manifestos published this week have seized the opportunity to bring this about.

Alex Glennie

Repairing Broken Britain?

2010-04-14T06:08:00.000-07:00

The ubiquitous Broken Britain theme has played strongly in this election so far and with good reason. As we know from Ipsos Mori, increasing numbers of the population think the country has become a worse place to live in. We can argue, using statistics, to the contrary, but the perception still remains.

Arguments on tackling poverty in the election so far have pitted Labour’s wealth distribution strategy against Tory plans to tackle the ‘underlying causes of crime’. Few would argue the balance between these approaches is right at present. But if David Cameron is arguing that mending Broken Britain is a serious alternative to poverty reduction measures, what does the manifesto tell us about how they will achieve this? And what might it cost?

Let’s take just one of these underlying causes of poverty – drug addiction. After over 10 years of government investment in drug treatment we have lower waiting lists and dramatically more people in treatment, but the problem has not improved.

The sharp rise in heroin and crack use over the last few decades has been contained but use of other drugs such as cocaine is increasing. Cocaine is more popular in the UK than in almost any other European country. In one area of London an astonishing two thirds of child care proceedings are now related to parental drug misuse, placing family courts and social services under huge strain.

Getting people into treatment was just the first challenge. Moving people into recovery and keeping them there should now be the primary goal. So what do the parties propose?

Labour plans to ‘switch investment towards programmes which are shown to sustain drug-free lives and reduce crime’. This cost-neutral pledge fails to acknowledge the changes needed at a local level to ensure housing is available for recovering drug users, along with more intensive treatment, peer support and access to employment.

The Liberal Democrats make pledges on respecting scientific advice and moving drug users out of prison into secure accommodation where appropriate, but similarly don’t take up the urgent challenges outlined above.

The Conservative pledge is more limited still. Drugs featured heavily in the Tories’ account of a Broken Britain – IDS’s now famous epiphany took place on an estate outside Glasgow decimated by heroin use. The manifesto pledge consists simply of adapting an existing provision – Drug Rehabilitation Orders – by linking them to abstinence-based treatment. There is no evidence that this form of treatment is any more or less effective than other forms of treatment – it depends on what is most suitable for the individual. And because it is more expensive we have to assume it will result in funding being switched from existing community programmes.

It turns out the Conservative pledge to tackle ‘underlying causes’ is, in this case at least, just a small variation on the system we already have and there is little to suggest it will have any impact on reducing poverty. In which case the Tories have a problem. With so much staked on the Broken Britain argument people will expect to see results if they win power.

Tackling poverty is not all about money, but cash helps. The Big Society idea of civic renewal could at its most ambitious help create a stronger sense of purpose which is lacking in many lives. But for those the Tories have classed as part of Broken Britain, who aren’t willing or able to engage in society, it is no substitute for providing the housing or jobs they need to get back on track.

Clare McNeil

Big questions for the Big Society

2010-04-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

The centrepiece of the Conservative manifesto, out today, is the pledge to promote a Big Society, which the Tories counter-pose to what they characterise as Labour’s Big State. The Big Society theme serves two electoral functions: first, it contrasts the Conservative approach with what they see as Labour’s inherent statism and, second, it is intended to contrast David Cameron’s Conservatives with Mrs Thatcher’s, who famously remarked that there was ‘no such thing as society’. All of this owes much to the self-proclaimed Red Tory Philip Blond.

These zero-sum arguments about ‘society versus the state’ actually obscure more than they reveal: Labour palpably does not believe in a ‘small society’, but rather thinks that a strong civil society requires active government. David Miliband made this point in a recent lecture, arguing rightly that withdrawing the state only empowers those who already have power.

Where Labour has erred is that it relied for far too long on centralised targets and initiatives to deliver public outcomes, and gave far too little latitude to local government and local services to develop their own solutions. It is not that the state is too big – but rather that it needs be reconfigured.

Moreover, if we study the policy detail of what the Conservatives propose there is an implicit recognition that voluntary and community action often needs public stimulus. So, they propose to recruit an army of neighbourhood community organisers and want a Big Society Bank to help voluntary and community organisations take on a larger role. These initiatives are good ones – but they are also about the state doing more or working differently rather than withdrawing or cutting back.

So both parties (and the Lib Dems) favour a more active civil society – but both need to answer the following big questions:

• How can grassroots community organisations take on more responsibility without losing the informal civic ethos that is their key attraction?

• Is it really feasible that important public goods can be delivered without bureaucratic rules and processes? These rules are generally a response to things that go terribly wrong, leading to the cry ‘this must never happen again’. This is why most ‘bonfires of red tape’ tend to fail – the public demands accountability, as well as less bureaucracy.

• Does the public want to be involved in the design and delivery of public services? Even if people have the motivation, do they have the time?

• What would have to be done to funding streams and commissioning models if this agenda were to be made a reality?

• Will this all cost more in the short run and if so how do we pay for it?

I am not suggesting that these problems cannot be overcome – I believe they can and our Capable Communities project is intended to help find the answers. But this is where the debate needs to be, rather than in a phoney war about the size of the state. The real issue is how the state can be reformed to do what it is supposed to do better and support the healthy civic society we all want to see.

Rick Muir

Crime and punishment in the Labour manifesto

2010-04-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

The Labour manifesto contains some important commitments in the area of criminal justice. Recognising that there is no more money to spend on the police, the focus is on protecting neighbourhood policing while creating new pressures for service improvement. So (as with health and education) there are to be entitlements to a basic standard of service and mechanisms of redress if those are not met.

In policing, redress is to come via Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which will have powers to intervene and replace the management team of either a police force or a Basic Command Unit if performance is poor over a prolonged period. This is to be welcomed: at the moment the Home Secretary has the power to sack a Chief Constable on grounds of poor performance, but these powers are never used. This is because ministers fear they will be accused of political interference in policing if they get too involved in firing police chiefs. This new proposal has the advantage of setting out clear criteria to assess performance, with an automatic ladder of intervention if matters do not improve.

There is now clear blue (or clear red) water between the Conservatives and Labour on policing: Labour favours takeovers by other forces or the dismissal of the management team adjudicated by the independent inspectorate, while the Conservatives favour elected police commissioners with powers to hire and fire. The reason the Conservative plan is so unpopular in the police service is because of the risk of politicising policing decisions through direct election. ippr has produced its own alternative elsewhere, involving a new role for local councils in holding the police to account.

A second interesting innovation in Labour’s criminal justice plans is in the area of punishment. Over the last decade Labour has talked a good talk on community sentencing, but community justice has remained under-funded and hence under-used by the courts as an alternative to custody. Hence there are many people in prison for relatively short periods who would be more effectively punished and rehabilitated by the use of community-based penalties. The manifesto contains welcome new pledges to strengthen forms of community payback and to ‘reduce the number of women, young and mentally ill people in prison’.

Rick Muir

Why limit top pay only in the public sector?

2010-04-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

In an article in today's Guardian David Cameron proposes establishing a fair pay review into pay inequality in the public sector and asking it ‘to consider how to introduce a pay multiple so that no public sector worker can earn over 20 times more than the lowest paid person in their organisation’.

Putting aside the vagueness of the language – Prime Ministers have to make decisions, not pass them over to a review to consider and I’m left wondering what would happen if the review refused to contemplate the idea? – this is a proposal with some merit.

But why limit it to the public sector? David Cameron argues that a pay multiple would ‘help tackle unfair pay policies’ and ‘improve cohesion and morale’. Shouldn’t unfair pay policies be tackled in the private sector too? Wouldn’t improved cohesion and morale in the private sector help the economy recover more strongly from recession?

Whatever the result of the general election, the next government will expect senior public sector workers to behave more like their counterparts in the private sector. They will be expected to deliver the ‘efficiency savings’ that both the main parties hope will prove to be a painless way of reducing the budget deficit (they won’t, but that’s a different story). They will be charged with lifting productivity growth in the public sector into line with productivity growth in the private sector.

So why not treat senior workers in the public and private sectors the same. Forget the review. Just stop anyone in any organisation earning more than 20 times the pay of the lowest paid person in their organisation. According to David Cameron, ‘Some of our most successful private sector companies operate a pay multiple’. Let’s try it out on all of them.

Tony Dolphin

Target financial advice where it’s most urgent: the City

2010-04-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Commons public accounts committee delivered a devastating indictment of the Government’s ‘complete failure’ to tackle high levels of consumer debt. The Committee found no one holding the reigns on the Government’s money guidance service, which aims to educate people to avoid debt problems. While advice is available at crisis point in the UK (the CAB soldiers on!), there is virtually no independent financial advice.

Given the public purse is cash-strapped it makes sense to target financial education to those who need it most.

Statistics show that debt problems are most common in low income households. But dig deeper and you find few examples of risk-taking behaviour. The number one cause of over-indebtedness is not ‘bad’ behaviour but job loss. The explosion of personal debt was driven in the main by the over-mortgaged middle classes who gambled on the buy-to-let bubble.

Looking further afield it becomes clear where money mismanagement is most problematic. A friend once met a City trader at a party. Politely making conversation, he said it must be a difficult job, derivatives sound so very complicated. ‘It’s easy really’, the trader replied, ‘you don’t have to understand them to sell them.’ Feckless bankers and overpaid traders repackaged, relabelled, and sold on shed loads of debt – and the entire country now faces a decade of high unemployment and savage cuts to public services as a result.

To be really effective money guidance initiatives could target the City regulators, MPs, and the bright young things in the Treasury. It’s a shame they weren’t implemented earlier. A cross-party class to advise Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown may have covered the perils of a cavalier attitude to regulation. The late Eddie George would have benefitted from homework on the importance of capital ratios in the banking system. Surely report cards for the Woolworth’s management – who wiped out 25,000 jobs in one swoop – would have read ‘could do better’.

The City offers one clear lesson: advisers on commission tend to give bad advice. Former RBS chief Fred Goodwin and his contemporary Victor Blank at Lloyds TSB were both ‘advised’ and ‘guided’ by advisers who made vast profits on the toxic takeovers of ABN-AMRO and HBOS. Better money management won’t help ordinary households to avoid spiralling debt. Sir Fred and his pals, however, should surely be first on the list for independent money guidance.

See our blog post on basic bank accounts Read our report Strength Against Shocks

Tess Lanning

Daddy Dearest

2010-04-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

A new poll published by Aviva this Wednesday suggests that there has been a ten-fold rise in stay-at-home dads over the past decade. With the election campaign in full swing and each party keen to win over the ‘mums net’ and ‘motorway man’ vote, all the main parties are advocating more flexible working despite the very challenging economic and jobs market. Of course there are differences in the approaches of the main parties – particularly around sharing maternity leave and who should have the right to request flexible working. But one thing that remains the same is that when politicians use ‘parents’, they are really thinking about ‘mums’.

The introduction of paid paternity leave in the UK is a fantastic achievement, but it’s only two weeks, whilst paid maternity leave is nine months. We know who policy makers think should be at home. And most ‘family friendly’ proposals still imply that whilst roles are changing men are the primary breadwinners and women the primary carers. We will only see major changes in the way jobs and home life work together when men are routinely able to, and then actually make, the same kinds of changes to their working lives as women do when they become parents. Unless men are able and prepared to step up, we will always have a gender pay gap and women will always play second fiddle in the work place.

Kate Stanley

Labour and income inequality

2010-04-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

The gap between rich and poor in the UK has widened since 1997, according to the results of a recent study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It found that income inequality in 2007-08 was higher than when Labour came to power and ‘higher than in any year since at least the 1950s’.

On the face of it, this is unwelcome reading for Labour supporters. What is the point of 13 years of Labour Government if it cannot prevent widening income inequalities?

Dig deeper into the IFS’s analysis, however, and it becomes clear that the gap between rich and poor has widened despite the Government’s efforts, not because of them. In the 1980s, when government policies seemed designed to benefit the rich, income inequality increased by an enormous amount. The increase in income inequality under Labour has been far smaller because changes to the tax and benefit system since 1997 have favoured poorer households at the expense of richer ones.

But what is missing from this analysis is an understanding of the causes of the increases in inequality that have occurred before the effects of government policy are taken into account. Throughout the last three decades, it seems, underlying inequality has been increasing. In the 1980s, this was exacerbated by government policy; over the last 13 years it has been mitigated by it. But under Conservative and Labour governments alike, it has remained a powerful trend.

There are a host of explanations for this trend, including globalisation, technological change and the dominance of the financial sector in the UK economy and we need to develop a full understanding of them because – as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have demonstrated so conclusively in their book The Spirit Level – greater inequality leaves everyone worse off.

So, while it is right to challenge the main political parties during the election campaign on how their tax and benefit policies might affect income inequality, it is perhaps more important to ask them what they intend to do about the growing disparity in pre-tax incomes. If they are, to quote Lord Mandelson, ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, they shouldn’t be.

Tony Dolphin

There are better things to tax than jobs

2010-04-08T07:14:00.000-07:00

So the first big argument is over tax. Labour argues there will have to be a small increase in National Insurance contributions, as well as spending cuts, to help reduce the deficit. The Conservatives disagree, arguing that increasing NI contributions (which they describe as a tax on jobs) will be damaging and that they can close the deficit simply through spending cuts.

On the immediate row over National Insurance contributions, I guess Labour are right. Any incoming government will have to raise money quickly in order to get the deficit under control and it seems sensible to do this through a mixture of tax rises and spending cuts - to do it all through spending cuts alone would have a severe impact on public services and the wider economy. National Insurance also has the advantage of being a fair tax which varies according to the amount you earn. It’s not perfect - we already tax jobs quite heavily - but it’s the fairest way for a quick fix.

But while raising NI is necessary for achieving a short term goal, it falls woefully far of the bar as a long term policy on tax. Such a narrow debate misses the broader problem – that for the last few years Britain’s tax system has not raised enough to fund quality public services, that it disproportionately hits the poor, and that it lets important areas such as wealth and carbon emissions off the hook.

A more radical approach would be for politicians to try to tackle these bigger problems. It would shift away from taxing low and middle incomes (effectively a tax on people’s hard work and effort), towards taxing wealth (much of the wealth that is generated in Britain is based on little more than the luck of rising land and property prices and inheritance from family members).

In my opinion, an ambitious long-term pledge on tax might include:

A tax that captured a portion of rising land values and property prices
A 50% income tax for pay slips over £100,000 a year
A financial transactions tax or ‘Tobin Tax’
A tax that penalised carbon emissions

These would all take a while to put in place, and until that time NI will have to be raised to plug the deficit. But they are a more sustainable solution to funding the investment this country needs, and a far fairer way of doing it.

Jonathan Clifton

Extreme domestic bias?

2010-04-08T02:40:00.000-07:00

The announcement yesterday that Gordon Brown will miss Obama’s nuclear summit is yet another indication of how domestic is trumping foreign policy in this election.

A domestic bias isn’t really surprising of course. In the scrabble for votes politicians focus – naturally – on obvious vote winners; and the electorate focus – naturally – on what happens in their own backyards.

But this concentration on the domestic feels extreme compared even to past electoral battles. Whereas in the past Iraq, the Gleneagles commitments or the need for an ‘ethical foreign policy’ figured large, in 2010 only two ‘foreign’ policy issues are attracting even a marginal degree of attention – Trident and Afghanistan. And crucially, though each encompasses a set of complex considerations, they have been reduced in electoral sloganeering to a simple domestic core, ‘can we afford it?’ (Trident), and ‘how many Brits will die?’ (Afghanistan). (Indeed, the extent to which Afghanistan is now being seen solely through the lens of soldiers’ deaths – ignoring issues of British security, Afghan security, cost, the future of international cooperation, the ‘war on drugs’ and numerous other issues – has become so extreme that even the Army is complaining).

There are two worrying aspects to this trend. First, it seems likely that we are focusing so much on the domestic because things here in the UK seem so bad. When the economy has looked rosy, when we have felt confident about our place in the world – indeed, at times of ‘Cool Britainnia’ – it has been easy to consider events beyond our borders. But when things look rough, when we have to cut a deficit, find jobs for our young people and try to find a way to make our banks work for us, there is a tendency to hunker down. In other words, this isn’t just an electoral trend. Dealing with the deficit and reorganising our economy is a major task which seems likely to preoccupy the next government, whoever is in power.

Even if we have our fingers in our ears, the tree falling in Afghanistan, or the US, or Europe, or China, still makes a sound. In fact, as ippr’s National Security Commission made clear it’s a sound we can less and less afford to ignore. President Obama is calling a summit to try to limit the growing spread of nuclear weapons – a terrifying prospect for the UK. Why do we not see it as a priority? And this is just one of many challenges (including climate change, poverty, terrorism and banking regulation) in our interdependent world that require us all to act together. Let’s start by listening.

Laura Chappell

Don't meddle with the BBC!

2010-04-08T01:45:00.000-07:00

Once again MPs are united against the BBC. A cross-party committee of MPs has demanded the BBC be accountable to Parliament. Surely public eyebrows will rise in unison at MPs criticising 'spending public money without fully analysing costs and benefits'. But behind the pot-kettle-black, do they have a point?

The BBC has undeniably made a few foolhardy decisions of late. In trying to maintain public interest the corporation has felt pressured to bid for popular names (infamously Jonathan Ross). But there have also been some fantastic decisions. The corporation persevered with their decision to base BBC Scotland in Glasgow despite severe recruitment difficulties early on. They have invested heavily in new talent, there as elsewhere (the majority of people that work in UK private media were trained at the BBC), and in the process fulfilled their mandate of being a truly UK-wide broadcaster.

The BBC is not beyond criticism, and it is right to question excessive spending, especially on pay at the top. But we are in murky water when MPs start demanding that the BBC is accountable to them, and must justify every pound spent, every decision made. The BBC plays a vital role democratic politics (a point we have made here before), and must maintain independence from Parliament.

So is there a way to balance accountability with independence? There is. And – who knew?! – it already exists. Every 10 years the Charter review scrutinises the BBC’s role, activities and budget. When next up for review – in 2016 – this process should be rigorous and ensure value for money from the Beeb. But once the financial settlement is complete, like it or not, the BBC must be left to do its job. That is what independence means.

If criticisms that the BBC has too many, overpaid managers ring true, it may well be that the unrelenting attacks are a driving force. Organisations that lack the freedom to take risks and make mistakes see middle management multiply in a bid to disperse accountability for ill-fated decisions. Meddling MPs may well end up with a cowed corporation of risk-averse managers, with fewer funds to support the talent and creativity it thrives on. That, surely, would be a waste of tax-payers money.

Tess Lanning and Laura Chappell

Immigration in the Election 3: Labour

2010-04-06T02:07:00.000-07:00

Gordon Brown's speech on immigration last week was a call for mainstream political unity on an issue which can too often turn nasty (particularly in election years), a defence of the policy framework put in place by Labour, and a strong critique of the Conservative commitment to cap immigration.

Labour are working hard to position themselves as tough on immigration, in the face of a public and media debate that has often portrayed them as a ‘soft touch’. In fact, Labour have a good story to tell on immigration policy to those who are concerned about control.

No system is perfect, least of all in immigration, but the Points-Based System is a pretty effective way of deciding which migrants should be able to come to the UK to work, based on the needs of the economy; the Government have more-or-less got on top of the asylum issue; and the new UK Border Agency is presiding over an immigration system that is more functional and controlled than it has been for many years. Even the decision to open up the UK’s labour market to workers from the new EU countries, which led to a massive and largely unpredicted flow of migrants from eastern Europe (and considerable political backlash), has had few negative impacts and many positive ones.

Labour’s failings on immigration have been of politics, not of policy, in recent years. It’s worth noting three main political problems:

Labour ministers have been reluctant to talk openly about the very real challenges and opportunities presented by immigration, which has added to a sense that the issue is somehow ‘off limits’ and ceded the space to those who hold extreme views. So, it is welcome that Gordon Brown is tackling the issue head on in this election campaign.
Labour have allowed the political debate on this issue to become highly polarised, because they have not been able to develop a balanced and moderate narrative that occupies the middle ground and can convince the majority of voters. So, it was good to see Gordon Brown emphasising the (considerable) degree of policy consensus on the issue which now exists.
Labour have too often tried to solve a political problem with a slew of policy announcements and changes. All too often, this only reinforces the perception that the immigration system is broken. So, although Gordon Brown was right to defend the policy framework that Labour have put in place, he may have made his political message less effective by also using his speech to announce or re-announce a range of relatively minor tweaks to the system.

Sarah Mulley

Settle down

2010-04-01T09:34:00.000-07:00

Anyone watching Newsnight this Wednesday would be forgiven for thinking that the entire debate about immigration comes down to numbers. Whatever people’s concerns about migration – be it the impact on the economy, public services or community cohesion – the answer from politicians is always the same: adjust the number of immigrants coming to the UK. Schools can’t cope with all the Polish kids? Stop letting so many Poles in. Pakistani immigrants aren’t integrating? Let fewer in to the country. The economy needs more skilled workers? Adjust the points system to let them in.

There is a danger with this approach that it assumes the only thing immigration policy can do is alter the number of migrants entering the country. But a lot happens once a migrant has crossed the border, too. Greater state support for settlement can improve integration and help tackle many of the problems people are concerned about. Schools can’t cope with all the Polish kids? Provide the schools with teaching assistants to help them cope. Pakistani immigrants aren’t integrating? Fund and support outreach workers to help them learn English and establish roots in the community.

I’m slightly bemused that while politicians are keen to point to Canada’s immigration system as a model way to control the number of immigrants arriving, they neglect to mention the fact that Canada also invests a great deal in supporting immigrants to settle in, and that their government endorses an official model of multiculturalism. Dedicated translation services, English language tuition, education programmes, information diffusion, citizenship instruction, employment programmes and social welfare policies are all part of the tool kit used. The evidence is that if you invest early in helping migrants to settle in to their new country, then you stave off many of the problems and tensions faced further down the line. It might just be more important to solving these problems than limiting the numbers you let cross the border in the first place.

Jonathan Clifton

From Copenhagen to UK marginals

2010-04-01T01:55:00.000-07:00

The Prime Minister is the co-chair of a new UN high-level advisory group on climate change finance. To mark the first meeting of the group (known inelegantly by climate wonks as the HLAG) Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, launched a new UK government International Climate Change Action Plan on Wednesday morning.

The HLAG is quite a big deal in the international climate change world, but more domestic concerns probably lie behind Ed Miliband’s Action Plan launch. Polling data comprehensively shows that climate change and environment are not decisive electoral issues. However, recent work by ippr – as yet unpublished – shows that an important minority (17 per cent) of floating voters in marginal constituencies list climate among their top three issues.

Our data suggests these voters are young, liberally inclined and important in the battle for the centre ground of UK politics. So while climate change may not matter electorally at the national level, constituency by constituency it may and Ed Miliband’s launch suggests that Labour is reading the runes on this (it’s important to emphasise that we have presented our poll findings to Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems).

The plan itself is somewhat short on substance, but the nature of the launch and its audience points to a wooing of groups to which the environmentally-inclined floating voters may belong. Sharing Miliband’s platform was President Jagdeo of Guyana – also an HLAG member – who heaped praise on the UK PM and DECC Secretary for their leadership prior to last year’s big climate summit in Copenhagen.

The audience was made up of green and development groups and others that have campaigns on climate change, such as the Women’s Institute. The question of whether Gordon Brown will continue as co-chair of the HLAG should Labour not be returned to government on May 6 is moot; he’s there in an official capacity and so his fate in this case would be in the hands of the new UK government. ippr’s polling data suggests that Ed Miliband’s green and development group-wooing strategy may increase his leader’s chances.

Andrew Pendleton

Fixing our 'unfriendly' family culture

2010-03-31T01:58:00.000-07:00

There’s a line in the Conservative’s Draft Manifesto that caught my eye. It says “Britain is one of the least family-friendly countries in the developed world. This will change with a Conservative government.”

It’s a phase that has every chance of making it into the final version. The Conservatives know that on many indicators – relationship breakdown, risky behaviour by teenagers, the emotional well-being of children – Britain does not score well.

But it’s not altogether clear that they understand how to improve Britain’s family-friendliness. Most of the trends associated with Britain’s poor family record have been shaped by rampant individualism and consumerism, our tendency to act selfishly and fetishise making money over making time for one another.

Labour’s response in government has been to launch a thousand policy initiatives, to make it a bit easier for families to live within this culture, rather than challenging the culture itself. But this is really a sticking plaster approach – it doesn’t address the bigger problem.

Could politicians do more to make us influence our unfriendly family culture? Here are three things politicians could do during the election to make a start:

Politicians need to talk about why family life matters. It’s important not just because it produces better children but because relationships sustain us all.
Policies need to address the real issues. The problem with the debate about whether or not you support marriage through the tax system is that it takes an important issue – relationship breakdown – and reduces it to a discussion about financial transactions. Relationships aren’t breaking down because people can’t see the monetary benefit of staying together.
Finally, politicians could make family life more visible in politics. I don’t mean by parading your children (or even your pregnant wife) but by demonstrating that time spent with your family matters, by bringing people into the next cabinet who are allowed to work part-time to balance their work and family life and by contemplating better ways to fitting the demands of a job to family life, rather than vice versa. A new cabinet with job share ministers? Now there’s a thought.

Lisa Harker, co-director, ippr

The Chancellors' debate: low key but fascinating!

2010-03-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

Some commentators on last night’s Chancellors Debate have suggested that it lacked a bit of spark and drama – including, it must be said, my colleague Tony Dolphin (see 2 posts below).

No gaffes, no bombshells, no personal attacks – so no interest.

I beg to differ – here were serious issues being discussed in a serious way by serious politicians. Even the much criticised George Osborne seemed to rise to the occasion and to – by and large – engage constructively and effectively with his counterparts, Vince Cable – everyone’s idea of how a grown up politician should act– and Alistair Darling – whose reputation seems to be growing by the day. Without getting too dewy-eyed – or indeed po-faced – about it, this was just the sort of political debate that the country needs at this time.

There was point-scoring of course, but there were also plenty of points of agreement and a strong sense that the argument was constructive – and, yes, interesting. (All three seemed like decent, nice, sensible human beings as well – and when was the last time anybody said that about a group of politicians!) We the viewers were treated as adults up to the task of listening for an uninterrupted hour to informed debate about the country’s future. This is a high cry from the ridiculous pantomime of parliamentary exchanges, the inanity of so many studio discussions and the complete emptiness of Piers Morgan style ‘lifestyle’ interviews.

Can we dare to hope that the spin doctors, the strategists and tacticians, the rebuttal units and ad agencies – and yes the party leaders - will reflect on last night’s low key, but fascinating debate and think: Hey! How about having a serious, constructive, instructive campaign?

Tim Finch

Where is fuel poverty in the party manifestos?

2010-03-30T04:01:00.000-07:00

This week dreams of balmy Spring sunshine have been put on hold. With some parts of the country facing the prospect of a white Easter, the issue of fuel poverty is once again receiving particular interest from policy makers.

Today sees the publication of the Energy and Climate Change Committee’s report of its inquiry into fuel poverty. It highlights the fact the Government is likely to miss its 2010 and 2016 targets to eradicate fuel poverty and suggests that a ‘road map’ is needed to set out how the 2016 target will be met. The report contains some other interesting proposals on improving data so that measures can be better targeted and reviewing the markets for fuels for people who are not connected to the mains gas network.

All of the proposals are welcome but of course the question is whether any will be picked up in election manifestos.

Winter Fuel Payments (made to everyone over the age of 60) have always been a vote winner despite the fact that they are an exceptionally inefficient way to tackle fuel poverty. Only a small proportion of pensioners are living in fuel poverty, yet this measure cost the Treasury £2.7 billion last year alone. Scrapping this payment ahead of an election might be politically unwise (and both Labour and the Conservatives have pledged to continue it) yet it desperately needs to be reformed so that it is better targeted at those in need, as we have argued in our recent report The Long Cold Winter.

What other fuel poverty measures are likely to make it into the manifestos? The Government has championed fuel poverty as an issue but its strategy has not been able to match the sharp rises in energy prices seen over the last few years. Even with the new price support measures in the Energy Bill it is still hard to see how targets for 2016 will be met. The Liberal Democrats also emphasise the importance of tackling fuel poverty and have proposed an energy efficiency programme to insulate 1 million fuel poor homes. The Conservatives, however, have been much quieter on this issue and have put forward very little in the way of concrete proposals for addressing fuel poverty.

Energy prices are forecast to continue rising over the coming decade, which means that fuel poverty is set to increase. If the current cold weather focuses manifesto writers’ minds on developing robust policies to deal with the problem then we may stand a better chance of achieving affordable warmth for all.

Jenny Bird

Cable wins the Chancellors’ debate – by a short-head

2010-03-30T01:49:00.000-07:00

Mission accomplished – no gaffes. That was probably the initial reaction of Alistair Darling, Vince Cable and George Osborne to their live debate on Channel 4’s Ask the Chancellors programme. There will be no clips from this event being endlessly replayed on You Tube in coming days and weeks.

Unfortunately, the prospective Chancellors' safety-first approach also robbed the event of its drama. It was more like watching three academics debate economic issues than three senior politicians bidding for votes less than six weeks before a general election. Where were the fireworks? Where was the passion? It was all very civil and, therefore, somewhat flat.

Before the debate, Vince Cable was expected to emerge the winner and he did, though only by a narrow margin. He scored points for honesty - on several occasions he was the only one of the three men prepared to tell the audience just how bad things are. He was not attacked by the other two, though he was happy to round on both Alistair Darling and George Osborne. And he got the biggest rounds of applause, when calling bankers ‘pin-striped Scargills’ and accusing the Tories of wanting to get their ‘snouts back into the trough’.

Alistair Darling was, well, Alistair Darling. He said his main quality for the job was ‘tenacity’ and he did a dogged job of keeping the debate on the future, so avoiding having to explain why everything went wrong while Labour were in charge. But he was vulnerable to criticism about the lack of detail in his plans.

George Osborne came into the debate with a new pledge announced earlier in the day – to halt Labour’s planned rise in national insurance contributions in April 2011, a plan he will finance through government efficiency savings. While this has some electoral appeal, economists have already questioned how it can be squared with the Conservatives’ previous view that reducing the deficit was the number one economic priority and how it fits with previous Conservative descriptions of efficiency savings as fictitious. Alistair Darling and Vince Cable made these points, but neither landing a knock-out blow on Osborne.

So now it is on to the leaders’ debates. Will David Cameron make important policy announcements on the days of the debates, so he has something to focus on, as George Osborne did? Will Gordon Brown and David Cameron give Nick Clegg as easy a ride as Vince Cable enjoyed? If they do, the Liberal Democrats will emerge as winners from the debates and, assuming their target is a hung parliament, possibly in the election too.

Tony Dolphin

Immigration in the Election 2: The Conservatives

2010-03-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

All three main parties are keen to emphasise that they would be tough on immigration. The Liberal Democrats talk about a ‘firm but fair system’ while Labour emphasises its ‘tough but flexible’ Australian-style Points-Based System.

But the Conservatives have gone a step further and have made a cap on (net) immigration a headline policy. They have been reluctant to specify the details, so it’s not clear which immigration flows they would cap, or at what level. However, based on some reasonable assumptions about what an immigration cap might look like, ippr has produced a briefing paper.

To sum up our findings, setting a numerical limit on (net) immigration isn’t the simple idea that its proponents sometimes suggest – the changes in policy that would be required could cause the UK significant economic harm, and it would not be at all straightforward to limit immigration to a specific level.

Giving the reduction of immigration the status of a policy objective in its own right (which a cap would do) begs the question of what policy problem they're trying to solve. If it’s population growth, a cap would only make sense as part of a wider population policy, and presumably the real objective would be to reduce population growth, rather than immigration. If the concern is about public services, then it matters much less how many migrants come to the UK than how many go to the South East of England, or London, or Barking, or the catchment area of a particular school. A national cap with nothing to say about regional population distribution would not solve this problem.

So it doesn't make much sense from a policy perspective, but would a cap give the Conservatives a political ‘quick win’?

Actually, the Conservatives’ immigration policies may backfire on them. The public want government to be in control of migration and to be honest about the numbers. But control does not mean a drastic limit on net immigration. In fact, what often gives the public the impression that immigration is out of control is politicians making promises to ‘clamp down’ that they then can’t deliver. The immigration cap risks becoming one such promise unless the Conservatives can put forward a clear plan for how they would deliver it in government.

Sarah Mulley

Apprentice pay

2010-03-29T02:35:00.000-07:00

Apprentice pay might not be top of everyone’s agenda as we head towards a general election, but making sure apprentices get a decent wage is an important way of guaranteeing a bit more fairness for young people. So it’s great that government has agreed that all employed apprentices will be entitled to a minimum wage of £2.50 an hour from October. This single rate will replace a series of complex arrangements where some apprentices in England were paid a minimum £95 a week, but there was no minimum pay level for apprentices in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

ippr carried out some research with apprentices last summer and we met many apprentices doing hard and menial work four or five days a week for £95 a week, or less – in Belfast, we found hairdressing apprentices earning just £60 for a five-day week. Our research found that low apprentice pay was often linked to poor quality training and was a particular problem for young women in sectors like hairdressing and social care.

The apprentices we spoke to didn’t expect to be paid the same as friends working in call centres or offices, or more experienced colleagues. But they did expect a fair deal in return for their passion, commitment and growing skills.

The rate of £2.50 an hour can be criticised as being too low – apprentices will have to work at least 38 hours a week to earn the equivalent of the £95 weekly rate currently in place in England. Given the problems with youth unemployment at the moment and the difficulty in convincing some employers to take on apprentices, the £2.50 rate was probably the most that the Commission thought it could recommend.

But the move creates a framework for apprentices of all ages to receive an hourly, legal minimum wage, which is reviewed annually by the independent Low Pay Commission - and a rate that can be built on in future.

Kayte Lawton, research fellow, ippr

Why might we want a Child Poverty Act?

2010-03-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Child Poverty Act, which commits future governments to meeting Labour’s goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020, received Royal Assent yesterday. But why might we want an Act of this kind?

The obvious answer is that ending child poverty is the right thing to do and making it law will ensure the goal is met. But the greatest progress on child poverty was made in the first part of the 2000s, before Labour had even thought about enacting a child poverty law. Tony Blair’s pledge to end child poverty was made in 1999, yet the idea of enshrining it in law wasn’t aired until Gordon Brown’s 2008 conference speech. So why do we need a law now?

Child poverty rates began to creep up after 2004, which reflected a slackening off in investment in anti-poverty measures. So perhaps Labour felt that it needed a law to make itself put its investment back on track. Let’s hope not – it would be a slightly odd way of going about things. And it hasn’t worked, as the meagre child poverty measures in Wednesday’s Budget showed.

A more plausible explanation is that this is a political move, because it forces the Conservatives to stick to Labour’s poverty goals. The Tories have come round to the idea of relative poverty but often argue that poverty is about much more than income. Should they form the next government, they may prefer not to have their hands tied by an Act that so explicitly prioritises income-based measures of poverty.

The other view is that the government wanted to look like it was doing something on child poverty at a time when the figures were, and still are, going in the wrong direction yet it was difficult, and still is, to find the cash to put things back on track. Drafting a bill and steering it through Parliament is a lot cheaper than putting an extra £4 billion into tax credits, which is what the Institute for Fiscal Studies said it would cost to half child poverty by this year.

It’s important not to get too cynical and forget the very impressive work that this government has done in tackling poverty, particularly among children and pensioners. But if you set yourself challenging and important targets, you have to do everything in your power to meet them. Now that we’ve got a Child Poverty Act, we should use it at every opportunity to hold the government, now and in the future, to account – but ending child poverty takes real action not just legislation.

Kayte Lawton, research fellow, ippr

An old age question

2010-03-26T04:51:00.000-07:00

In his budget this week the Chancellor announced that us younger folk will have to wait a bit longer for our bus pass - he’s raising the entitlement age for concessionary travel to age 65 and hopes to save £60 million in the process. This makes a lot of sense – there isn’t any reason why benefits designed for older people should kick in before the age of retirement.

However the move raises a much thornier question. To what extent should benefits for older people be universal for all or targeted according to need?

A number of the benefits that older people receive – such as the winter fuel payment and free TV licence – are handed out on a universal basis. There are some big advantages to this: the take-up level is high so people don’t miss out; there is no stigma attached to getting support; the process is easy to administer; everyone has a stake in what is available; and it’s popular.

The trouble with universal benefits is that they are costly and do not distinguish between the different circumstances of the people who receive them. The bus pass may help someone who can’t drive or afford transport, but it also allows the well-off to travel from one end of the country to the other at no cost.

With spending cuts looming, the challenge for policy makers will be to find a better balance between universal and targeted support for older people. There are three options:

1. Introduce some form of means testing for these benefits. The trouble is that many people who would be eligible for the support would not claim it – we already see this problem with the Pension Credit Guarantee where take-up is about a third lower than it should be. That’s a lot of people missing out.
2. Keep the benefits as universal, but make them taxable. This would ensure that those who can afford to contribute towards the cost of their support do so, but they would do it through the tax system rather than up-front means testing.
3. Raise the age people are eligible to receive these benefits – perhaps to around 75. This is a very blunt way to save money, but we know that the risks of poverty, illness and low levels of well-being all increase rapidly after this age and that broadly speaking it’s that age group that need most support.

For what it's worth I think the second option is the best way to tread the line between ‘universal’ and ‘targeted’ support. But I wouldn’t expect any of these decisions to get much of an airing before the election – as yesterday’s budget demonstrated, tricky decisions about spending cuts will be saved for after May 6th.

Jonathan Clifton, researcher, ippr

Cider house rules?

2010-03-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

‘Leave cider alone’ groups on Facebook are proliferating as we speak. Who would have predicted that, faced with unprecedented levels of public debt and the need to drive down an enormous deficit, yesterday’s budget would be remembered as the day Alistair Darling cracked down on scrumpy.

The introduction of a10% above inflation rise in duty on cider is intended to address a ‘long-standing anomaly’ where cider drinkers have paid less duty per drink than beer drinkers. This is in line with budgets of the past few years which have tried to address another anomaly – up until the last few years, alcohol was around 70% more affordable as a proportion of income than it was in 1980.

But if this is also intended to address concerns about teenagers bingeing on Diamond White on park benches, it is unlikely to have a major impact. Underage drinking is most often done through older teens or adults buying cheap alcohol from supermarkets or discount stores, rather than pubs or clubs. The major supermarkets will simply absorb the increased duty rates and continue to use alcohol as a loss leader.

Political parties are caught between wanting to address the very real problem of vast increases in drinking among young people and adults over the past few decades and not wanting to penalise moderate drinkers. Only the SNP-led Scottish government is sticking its neck out by planning to introduce a minimum pricing policy which would see a floor price set for a unit of alcohol.

Some commentators have dismissed this approach as ‘regressive’, describing it as part of a ‘new temperance’ movement led by public health officials intent on restricting individual choice.

But we are living in a country which has seen a fivefold increase in liver disease over the last 30 years. Though fewer young people are drinking overall, those who do drink are drinking twice as much as their counterparts in the 1990s. Enforcement measures have, unsurprisingly, proven useless, resulting only in the criminalisation of more young people than virtually any other country in Europe.

According to research in the Lancet published yesterday, a 50p per unit minimum pricing policy would save around 2,900 lives a year and reduce costs to the health service by £270 million a year. So surely this is a policy at least worthy of serious consideration?

Clare McNeil, research fellow, ippr

Basic bank accounts to solve the personal finance crisis?

2010-03-25T05:07:00.000-07:00

It’s safe to say that the Government’s Budget announcement that banks will be forced to provide basic bank accounts to everyone is a Good Thing. The Labour Government has already halved the number of people without a bank account, which, as Darling pointed out, is a useful tool for people’s personal finances. From buying a holiday to getting wages paid in, a bank account certainly comes in handy.

But is access to a bank account the critical personal finance issue of our times? Measures to increase financial education and improve access to financial products and services have been a major feature of efforts to tackle poverty and debt in recent years.

In fact, before the banking crash in 2007, the light touch regulation of banks was paralleled by increasing focus on the ability of individuals to manage their finances. Concern about the extraordinary rise in personal debt focused almost entirely on poor people: those with the smallest levels of debt but most associated with ‘problem debt’.

But, as ippr’s recent report Strength Against Shocks showed, people rarely get into financial difficulty because of ‘bad’ financial management. Poverty, sickness and unemployment are by far the biggest drivers of over-indebtedness.

The disparity between low pay structures and consumer-driven growth is an integral part of the story of debt in low income households. Successive governments have encouraged and supported our cultural obsessions with consumer comforts and home-ownership. But while Britain remains one of the most unequal countries in the developed world, many people on low incomes can only keep up with the Joneses – and the rising cost of living – by taking on debt.

Banks, as we know, have been only too happy to oblige, offering no-income-no-job-no-assets loans and mortgages. Low income families that took part in our research had been inundated with calls, letters and visits from loan companies urging them to manage their poverty through debt.

Financial products simply offer practical ways for poor people to manage limited resources, and access to basic bank accounts barely grazes the surface of Britain’s personal finance crisis. A radical pre-election pledge this is not.

Tess Lanning, researcher, ippr

Energy: the new political battle ground?

2010-03-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

Last week’s publication of the Conservatives’ energy strategy paper Rebuilding security: Conservative energy policy for an uncertain world shows a new kind of rhetoric from them on this issue. In a departure from last year’s climate-centric papers The decentralised energy revolution and The low carbon economy, the focus of this latest paper is very much on improving energy security. Although the language is mainly about security, a closer look at the proposals reveals that many of them also featured in last year’s climate-change-focused green papers. These include:

Reforming the Climate Change Levy so that it is a tax on carbon rather than energy (a reform that ippr argued for back in 2005). This would help provide a ‘floor price’ for the price of carbon.
Supporting the development of a new fleet of nuclear power stations
Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) demonstration (partly through the introduction of an Emissions Performance Standard)
Developing a smart grid (or ‘energy internet’ as they call it)
Introducing a ‘Green Deal’ programme, which would offer loans to homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their properties.

Many of these proposals do not actually differ significantly from the Government’s own – particularly the support for new nuclear, a smart grid and a loan programme for domestic energy efficiency measures (the Government’s version is called ‘Pay-As-You-Save’ and is currently being trialled across the country).

There are some new ideas. The most radical is a proposal to allow feed-in tariffs to be used for large-scale renewables investments (as opposed to the current Renewables Obligation). Some people in the renewables industry fear that this would introduce unnecessary uncertainty around the future of support mechanisms for renewable energy.

A glaring omission is how the Conservatives would tackle fuel poverty. Apart from an objective to make energy affordable and speculation that the Green Deal ‘could provide new and effective options for the deployment of public funds to combat fuel poverty’, there are no further mentions of the issue and certainly no concrete policy proposals for dealing with it.

The number of people unable to afford to heat their homes properly continues to rise, so energy policy must get to grips with this problem as well as meeting security of supply and climate change objectives. ippr recommends establishing an independent commission to create a new UK fuel poverty strategy. It is a shame that the Conservatives have missed this opportunity to develop new thinking on addressing this growing social problem.

So will energy policy represent a new dividing line as the election campaign hots up? Perhaps on style – Conservative energy security versus Labour decarbonisation. But on substance, with the exception of the issue of fuel poverty, the approaches don’t look all that different.

Jenny Bird, research fellow, ippr

Society and the state: does size matter?

2010-03-19T06:14:00.000-07:00

Anyone tuning into political debates over the last few months would be forgiven for thinking we were back in the 1970s. ‘Government has got too big’, the Conservatives argue. ‘We need an active government’, Labour reply.

But there’s a key difference this time round. While in the 1970s the Conservatives wanted smaller government in order to give more room to market forces, this time it is society that they feel has been squeezed out by the state.

I’ve recently been involved in an online debate on this topic with Policy Exchange, who claim that the Government spends too high a percentage of GDP, warning that this can 'crowd out important aspects of society such as family, clubs, faith groups, charities'.

A quick glance around the world tells you that things are more complicated than this. There are plenty of countries that have small states with very weak participation in society (think the USA) and plenty of countries with a big state that score well on levels of civic participation and social ties (think the Scandinavian states). And it is a bit silly to suggest the reason people break up their marriages and don’t join clubs or go to church is because of the size of government – it’s because they want to spend their time in other ways.

By the end of the debate I was convinced that politicians and the media get too hung-up about the size of the state. Debates that focus on size miss the far more important question – about how effectively the government works. Just as bad government can sometimes stifle economy and society, good government can support and enable people to take and use their power. It’s time to move beyond the argument that assumes an irreconcilable trade-off between active government and strong society. We need both.

You can read the full debate between ippr and Policy Exchange here .

Jonathan Clifton, researcher, ippr

Immigration in the election: 1. The Liberal Democrats

2010-03-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

Immigration isn’t attracting the kind of attention in this election campaign that it has in the past, in part because, although you’d never know it from the political rhetoric, there’s a good deal of consensus. The Government has made significant progress in reforming the immigration regime, and the Conservatives and Lib Dems don’t disagree with the basic policy ‘building blocks’ now in place: free movement within the EU, the Points-Based System (PBS) for work/study migration, and a much improved (if still far from perfect) asylum regime.

But there are some policy differences, so this is the first of three posts to take a quick look at the flagship policies of the main parties.

The Liberal Democrats have two important proposals for change.

An earned amnesty for irregular migrants: This is a sensible and brave policy position. There are between 500,000 and 750,000 irregular migrants in the UK, and it is simply not credible to suggest that they all be removed. Unless we are prepared to tolerate the exploitation and costs to society which stem from irregularity, some kind of earned regularisation is the only option. This isn’t easy politically but neither is impossible. ippr has found the public’s main concern about immigration is control – facing up to the problem of irregular immigration is actually a key component to demonstrating control over the system.

A change to the PBS to reflect different regional economic conditions and capacities to absorb migrants: this responds to a real problem, which is that immigration rules are national, but needs and impacts are local. But a regional PBS would further complicate a system that is already difficult for employers and migrants to navigate, and would be hard to enforce. And under the existing PBS if there are regional labour shortages, the system automatically allows employers in those regions to recruit more migrants as they can demonstrate they haven't been able to recruit locally.

A regional approach to immigration policy does have one thing to recommend it though – it’s a way of politically recognising the different local and regional contexts for the debate. That’s not to be sniffed at. If the Liberal Democrats can find a way to have a grown-up debate about immigration policy in an election campaign, they will have really achieved something.

Sarah Mulley, senior research fellow, ippr

When I’m 94

2010-03-19T03:39:00.000-07:00

Cross party discussion behind closed doors on social care quickly turned into hostility between the main political parties. However, efforts are again being made to engage in cross party debate. Our latest research 'When I’m 94' highlights that the public are not prepared to face up to the challenges of paying for social care. Politicians need to engage with and remember that citizens are important stakeholders in determining the future of social care.

There is consensus that social care should be provided by the state for everyone according to their needs; but not unlike politicians (although much less bitter) the consensus becomes fragile when it comes to discussions about how to pay. Despite not necessarily agreeing on the method of payment – as people often make decisions about care when they are financially and emotionally vulnerable – most people we spoke to wanted financial decisions to be decoupled from choices they made about care. And many were reluctant to pay a lump sum at the point of need. Indeed, there was a preference to make payments over the life course.

But the system is far too complex, even those who were navigating their way through it thought so. The public do not have a clear idea of how the care system works beyond rejecting what is currently available and asking for a fairer and simpler system. As the issue of social care seems likely to remain on the election agenda and beyond, the public needs to be better engaged, to build a wider consensus that includes current and future care users.

'When I’m 94: How to fund care for an ageing population' is available now from www.ippr.org/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=737

Dalia Ben-Galim, senior research fellow, ippr

Here’s to Healey!

2010-03-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

The Government’s announcement today that it is to reform beer ties is the biggest shake up of the pub trade since Mrs Thatcher’s Beer Orders in 1989.

The Government has faced down the large pubcos and backed the recommendations of the Business Innovation and Skills Committee and a recent ippr/CAMRA report to reform tied pub leases.

Most pubs in this country are owned by large pub companies and thousands of them have tied leases, which means that licensees have to buy all their beer from their pub company rather than on the open market. There has been mounting evidence that tied tenants have been suffering because they have to pay more for their beer than free of tie houses.

The Government responded by appointing John Healey as Pubs Minister – and he has announced a 12 point action plan to support the struggling pub trade. The Government is giving the trade a year to reform itself – by offering tenants the choice of a tied or free of tie lease, and by allowing tied tenants to buy in guest ales from outside their tie. It has said it will legislate if action is not taken.

This is strong stuff – we now need clarity from all parties that they will support this approach, whoever wins the election. The signs are positive: Peter Luff the Conservative chairman of the BIS committee has been a leading campaigner for change, as has the Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland. There is a growing political consensus that the relationship between the pubcos and their tenants needs to change.

Healey has also announced funding to allow communities to buy their local pubs to help keep them open – and changes to planning rules that will make it more difficult for developers to close pubs and change them to other uses. This is important: ippr research shows that the pub is the most important place where local communities mix and get together, outside people’s own homes. These measures are a much-needed shot in the arm for the great British pub. I’ll drink to that.

Rick Muir, senior research fellow, ippr

Leaders’ wives or readers' wives?

2010-03-18T04:07:00.000-07:00

A lively debate at a Women’s Question Time earlier this week (organised by Eaves in association with Stylist magazine) provoked heated discussion. But perhaps the most incendiary topic of all was the growing sexual objectification of women and girls in our society.

A debate on this subject was timely: the Lib Dems are under fire for appointing Anna Arrowsmith, a pornographic film-maker, as their parliamentary candidate for Gravesham in Kent; earlier this week The Sun led with a front page splash on a 14 year old girl who was discovered working as a lap dancer; and a recent Home Office report, by Dr Linda Papadopoulos, established a clear link between sexual imagery and violence against women.

Theresa May outlined the Conservatives’ plans to make the teaching of consent compulsory in the sex education curriculum and she stressed that more needs to be done to increase women’s confidence and self-esteem. But when rape conviction rates are at an all-time low, rape crisis centres are suffering from funding cuts and the Council of Europe estimates that 1 in 4 women suffer from domestic violence in their lifetime, these proposals, while important, fall far short of the action required to tackle the root causes of discrimination against women.

The mainstreaming of the porn and sex industries, be it through advertising, lad mags or lap dancing clubs, is widely acknowledged by human rights treaties and by research as promoting attitudes associated with discrimination and violence against women. Unless this connection is recognised and acted on by our politicians, equality between men and women will remain elusive, and violence against women will continue.

These issues are important for women voters – there is a real appetite for serious discussion of gender in the election campaign. Labour and Conservative efforts to woo female voters so far seem to be focused on promoting the wives of their party leaders and discussing biscuits on Mumsnet. But if they are really committed to tackling the underlying issues of discrimination that affect women, the political parties need to commit to taking urgent action to tackle the sexual objectification of women. We would see more action on these issues if the most prominent women in the election campaign were female politicians and party leaders, rather than leaders' wives.

Alice Sachrajda, researcher, ippr

Regulation, regulation, regulation

2010-03-18T02:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (17 March) saw the launch of the interim findings from Peter Mandelson’s Low Carbon Construction Innovation and Growth Team, who have been tasked with conducting a review of the construction industry to ensure it is fit for purpose for delivering a low carbon economy.

The report identifies big opportunities for the industry in building the low carbon homes of the future, upgrading the existing housing stock and providing new infrastructure for low-carbon energy and transport systems. It also identifies a host of barriers that need to be overcome before the industry can fully benefit from these low-carbon options.

The LCCIGT have a clear message for government, which is that in order for the industry to transform its products to low-carbon models, it must be confident that the market is also transforming. They go on to suggest that ‘the evidence is that the clearest signal of this will be taken from well-designed regulatory standards, underpinned by the presumption of a stable and realistic price of carbon.’

The three main political parties have all shied away from the use of regulatory standards to drive improvements to the existing housing stock (in the privately-owned sector at least), preferring instead to focus on the use of financial incentives to entice homeowners into ‘greening’ their homes. All three parties have announced plans to introduce loan schemes to pay for energy efficiency improvements as they vie to win green votes, but none have suggested that our homes ought to be required to meet minimum energy efficiency standards.

The Government’s recently published Strategy for Household Energy Management announced a consultation on regulations to make cavity wall and loft insulation compulsory in all privately-rented properties, but since there would be no compulsion to improve boiler efficiency, draughty windows and other causes of inefficiency, this falls a long way short of providing the kind of powerful signal the industry is seeking.

Similarly, while Europe has an emissions trading scheme, the price at which permits are trading has so far been too low to send a significant signal. Moreover, the uncertain conclusion to the global climate summit in Copenhagen last year and the likelihood that US climate laws will not be based on carbon trading make ‘…a stable and realistic price of carbon’ any time soon highly presumptive indeed.

Thus regulation is all the more important. ippr’s new report on fuel poverty calls for the introduction of minimum energy performance standards for all homes, including rental properties, in order to deliver on both poverty and climate change goals. Politicians have traditionally seen regulation as a last resort and in the run up to the election will fear frightening the business lobby with anything that might be perceived to be an unnecessary burden on industry. But today’s report shows that business may suffer without tougher regulation. Why not give them what they want?

Jenny Bird, research fellow, ippr

Fearing the Double-Dip

2010-03-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

We learn today (17 March) that the jobless rate in the UK remains unchanged at 7.8%. Nevertheless nerves are fraying about the possibility of a ‘double-dip’ recession, with large public sector job losses in prospect and figures also showing an increase in long-term unemployment.

The dreaded ‘W’ shape looms large on both sides of the Atlantic. Politicians here are anxiously eyeing the situation in the US where the pain of a ‘human recession’ has been felt sooner and more sharply.

US employers reacted to the recession by shedding workers rather than ‘hoarding’ them as in the UK, through wage freezes and shorter working hours. Heavier job losses are in part behind the doubling in long-term unemployment in the US over the past year, with an astonishing 4 in 10 unemployed workers out of work for six months or more.

The Government has now become part of the jobs problem in the US. States have reacted to large deficits by introducing deep spending cuts. New Jersey for example has seen widespread job losses among teachers and other state workers, with parents up in arms about the impact on their children’s education. A large number of February’s job losses were in government, with local government shedding 31,000 jobs (24,100 of those in education).

The Centre for American Progress has warned of the impact this is having on consumer spending, arguing that these actions are exacerbating the downturn rather than reinforcing the move towards recovering.

So what does this mean for the UK? Here there have been modest increases in public sector employment since the recession began. But this is set to change as the task of tackling the deficit begins in earnest, with a third of public sector employers planning job cuts in the first quarter of this year alone.

Long-term unemployment is creeping up here too. Despite extra government investment Jobcentre Plus and other employment programmes, the rate of those out of work for 12 months or more has reached its highest point since 1997.

Leaders on both sides of the pond will have a tough balancing act to negotiate in the coming months and years between tackling the deficit and spurring jobs growth. But politicians can take one lesson from the US. President Obama has, rightly or wrongly, been perceived as focusing on healthcare when large numbers of US citizens feel they are being left behind by a struggling economy. In terms of electoral strategy then, one message is clear: jobs should be the number one priority in this election. Uncertain times leave space for little else.

Clare McNeil, research fellow, ippr

Beware attacks on the BBC

2010-03-17T03:10:00.001-07:00

Popular outrage over the BBC’s pre-emptive cuts has revealed some curious fans of 6 Music and the Asian Network. Followers now include Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw and his Shadow counterparts Jeremy Hunt and Don Foster. But these three have all recently called for the BBC to be pruned, its ‘expansionist’ tendencies reined in.

This echoes the claim the public broadcaster drowns out commercial rivals. Allegations that the BBC is ‘dumbing down’ fuel catcalls demanding it stops ‘chasing ratings’. In a country where 30 per cent of people now have cable TV, critics claim the licence fee is no longer justified.

But the BBC provides immense value for money. For a fraction of the cost of satellite - up to £50 a month - we have an extensive network of high quality TV channels, radio stations and online services. The licence fee allows the BBC to provide unrivalled global news coverage and a wide range of programming for all sectors of society.

It is true that BBC One has become more populist in recent years. But the BBC should court mainstream audiences, who also pay the licence fee. The diversity of programming has not been sacrificed. Older audiences are still catered for on BBC Two and arts and politics covered on BBC Four.

The 88-year-old broadcaster has also experimented to bring science and politics to wider audiences with programmes such as Jimmy’s Food Factory. But the high end documentaries remain. What commercial broadcaster would have commissioned the recent Horizon on the concept of ‘infinity’?

Ratings are all that matters in the commercial sector. The BBC is the only broadcaster mandated to provide national coverage, and without it local TV would disappear. Every radio station would play commercial music. Documentaries, arts coverage and serious talk would be shelved.

Be particularly wary of calls for commercialised broadcasting in the run up to an election. With the news that financial clout may hold sway in marginal seats, the mandate to provide equal coverage to all political parties means no billionaire backers are able to buy airtime on the BBC. Cuts to curb the innovation, creativity and inclusiveness of this national treasure are not in the public interest, and the role the BBC plays to keep money out of politics is critical to democracy.

Tess Lanning, researcher, ippr

The problem with tax cuts

2010-03-17T02:49:00.000-07:00

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg used a speech to ippr yesterday (16 March 2010) to reiterate his party’s commitment to increasing the income tax personal allowance to £10,000 – part of their agenda of ‘fairness’ in their proposals for tackling the fiscal deficit. This is an expensive move that would cost £17 billion in lost revenue, but made cost neutral by removing some of the loopholes that allow the rich to avoid paying their fair share.

Tax cuts for the lowest paid, funded by the well-off – what’s not to like? But the problem with tax cuts is they don’t benefit the poorest families, where no one works or where earnings are below the existing personal allowance. This is an obvious point that Clegg is upfront about, but it’s vital – under his plans, £17 billion would be spent without any of the extra cash going to our poorest families. In a country with some of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world and little sign of extra money to tackle child poverty, there are better ways to spend £17 billion. Funnelling just £4 billion extra through the tax credit system could have halved child poverty this year.

Nick Clegg spoke about families on £30,000 feeling financially stretched. He was ‘unashamed’ that they would benefit from his tax plans. But what about families struggling to get by on the tiny incomes they get from out of work benefits or part-time low paid jobs? As we are constantly being reminded in this election campaign, politics is all about making hard choices. The progressive choice to make now to is stick to our child poverty targets and give ourselves the best chance of achieving them. Tax cuts for low earners may be a fine aspiration, something to look at when the public finances are in a healthier state, but right now we should be focusing any extra resources on those who need it most.

Kayte Lawton, research fellow, ippr

Northern Ireland and the balance of power

2010-03-16T04:19:00.000-07:00

To those who take only a passing interest in Northern Ireland politics recent events will have run true to form. On-going disagreements, mild political hysteria, governmental interventions and a thirteenth hour agreement on the devolution of justice and policing powers all sounds very familiar. Whilst these scenes sparked little outside interest, the increasing likelihood of a hung parliament means that the political goings on in Northern Ireland may take on a far greater significance for all of us over the coming months.

On the one side there is the spectre of one or both of the main Unionist parties forming the makeweight in a Conservative-led coalition and on the other Sinn Fein’s abstentionist MPs. Both could be crucial in determining the shape of the next government.

On the Unionist side, the fact that the two major parties have all but swopped positions in respect of the peace process - the Ulster Unionist Party now appearing the more sceptical, makes everything so much more interesting. The division of votes and ultimately seats will be intriguing, particularly given the emergence of True Ulster Voice, but it is arguably in its wider significance for the UK that there is most interest. In the event of the Conservatives having the largest share of seats in a hung parliament the two Unionist parties will be viable coalition partners. In return for their support the Unionists will demand influence in key policy areas. This could arguably push Europe centre stage and seriously curtail whatever progressive tendencies Mr Cameron harbours, whether on climate change, social reform or the Peace Process itself.

A further twist is added by the presence of Sinn Féin. In the event of a hung parliament the absence of Sinn Féin MPs will have a profound impact on the mathematics of government formation, reducing numbers required for power. Ironically, a spilt Unionist vote may increase the Sinn Féin haul further.

Whatever the actual division of the eighteen available seats, the General Election could see the voters of Northern Ireland holding a disproportionate influence within UK politics. As a consequence we may suddenly all become more interested in events in Northern Ireland.

Phil McCarvill, Visiting Research Fellow, ippr

Sloganeering?

2010-03-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

So now deciding how to vote all becomes a lot clearer. By unveiling their official campaign slogan today the Liberal Democrats have completed the set - and the choice is (between the three parties at least)….

Conservative – 2010: a year of change

Labour – A future fair for all

Liberal Democrat – Change that works for you, building a fairer Britain

You can see a pattern here. Change and Fairness – with the Lib Dems claiming, in typical third party fashion, some might say, that they can deliver both.

Change was always going to be an obvious word for the Conservatives after 13 years of Labour in power – but their change message lacks much in the way of sunny optimism. Obama coupled his ‘Change we can believe in’ with the up-beat 'Yes we can'. Some of the more modernising strategists close to Cameron, in particular Steve Hilton, would probably like more positivity, but other voices – which seem to be prevailing at present – think that lacks credibility given the economic crisis.

The other problem with espousing change is that sooner or later people ask for some detail on the changes you have in mind. The Obama slogan cleverly suggested that his change had inbuilt credibility. But a demanding British electorate seem to want more policy detail.

With hard times ahead, the Tories might also have thought along Lib Dem lines of coupling change with a fairness message. Some sense that we are all in this together might help to reassure a nervous electorate, who seem to have become more concerned in recent weeks about the impact – and fairness – of the Conservatives’ approach to tackling the deficit. Instead their other slogan – things can’t go on like this – is more of a negative one (and slightly despairing?)
Not that going negative is necessarily bad tactics, of course. It was not any great new vision that underpinned Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1979 it was the resonant: ‘Labour isn’t working.’

2010 feels more like 1979 than 1997, with the economy in such poor shape, so there’s no talk now of New this and that or things only getting better. We wish! But it is interesting that over the last few months change suddenly seems less appealing – while fairness in difficult times has more traction. Something for Tory strategists to ponder, perhaps?

Tim Finch, Director of Strategic Communications, ippr

A 'leading role' in the EU?

2010-03-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague said yesterday that Britain would play a 'leading role' in the EU in his speech to the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. Hague has made no secret of his deep-rooted Euro-scepticism in the past, but perhaps he is coming round to the idea that, though useful as a populist rallying cry in the safe haven of opposition, distancing Britain from the EU would be a risky strategy in government.

So, if the Conservatives really do wish to play a 'leading role' in the EU, how would their recent policies stack up with EU members? Campaigning for a ‘no’ vote on a UK referendum of the Lisbon Treaty would have incurred the wrath of some European leaders. Leaving the European People’s Party, by far the biggest party in the European Parliament, has left them with far less influence over policy areas decided by simple majority (Ordinary Legislative Procedure), from the single market to fisheries. Instead they have allied themselves with small fringe parties which have little credibility in the Parliament. Meanwhile the Tories’ plan to introduce a UK Parliamentary Sovereignty Bill would have no real impact aside from giving the rest of Europe (and of course the UK public) the perception that the Conservatives are not invested in the European project.

In fact, the pressure of the anti-EU Tory backbench and the perception of an anti-EU public sentiment have infiltrated virtually all Conservative policies and conversations with regard to Europe. So much so, that French President Nicolas Sarkozy will tomorrow warn Cameron to engage over the future of Europe, or risk French non-cooperation in key areas of policy. This is not the first time France has criticised Conservative policy on Europe.

If a Conservative government is going to play a leading role in Europe it will need to mend some fences with European allies as the idea that their political movements have gone unnoticed in Europe is clearly not the case.

Ellen Bloomer, intern, ippr

Game on: But where are the women?

2010-03-11T03:42:00.001-08:00

The election season is well and truly underway with two cross party debates on news programmes yesterday. Both were tackling critical societal issues; one on education and the other on social care. Alongside the economy, these areas are going to be key election battlegrounds. All six MPs representing these issues were men.

This may not be that surprising as the UK still lags behind many other countries in terms of the number of women in parliament. Only 19.5% of MPs in the House of Commons are women, and the UK comes in at a disappointing 62nd (out of 187 countries) on a global classification of women in parliament. The reasons for this dismal ranking are numerous, but much can be attributed to the UK’s first past the post electoral system.

There is a large gap between the rhetoric of the political parties about representation and the reality of who represents its citizens. Current polls suggest that the number of women in the next Parliament is likely to fall. In the week when we ‘celebrate’ International Women’s Day, where are all the women?

Dalia Ben-Galim, senior research fellow, ippr

How fair is Brown’s recovery?

2010-03-11T01:58:00.000-08:00

In his speech on the economy yesterday the Prime Minister underlined the need for a fair economy, with growth that will ‘preserve and expand the jobs – and lift the standards of life – of the British people.’

But a fair economy is not simply about restoring growth. Brown’s progressive goals are dependent on how the rewards of growth are distributed. Several high profile reports have recently revealed that strong growth in the decade before the financial crisis failed to address the acute inequality – geographic, social and economic – embedded in British society.

So, after the bust, how will Brown’s recovery fare on fairness?

Efforts to tackle inequality have typically focused on reducing poverty – a noble aim, but it offers limited mileage without parallel endeavours to redistribute the vast wealth at the top. Brown is therefore right to limit top earners with wage freezes for senior public sector workers – a measure first advocated by the Conservative Party.

But while the public sector may hope to set an example, Brown remains silent on wage inequality in the private sector – an indication, perhaps, of the persistent belief that high wages drive entrepreneurialism.

Over a fifth of UK workers are low paid – and millions more are stuck in poor quality, insecure jobs. The rewards of the boom years passed these workers by. The rise of the knowledge economy led to new highly skilled and highly paid jobs, while the low skilled sector consisted increasingly of poor quality jobs in the service economy. Social mobility has remained stagnant for decades, partly as a consequence of this polarisation between lovely and lousy jobs.

Yet the strategy announced yesterday does not rise to this challenge. It reiterates promises from January’s growth strategy to invest in high quality infrastructure and scientific innovation. These measures may well create jobs of the future, and high skill industries will surely secure UK growth and a strong position in global trade. But the Government has offered no policies to improve the quality of employment at the bottom or tackle the low pay that persists in many industries.

Tess Lanning, Researcher, ippr

UK exports collapse in January

2010-03-10T02:13:00.000-08:00

The latest UK trade figures were awaited more eagerly than usual. Exports are seen as crucial to the UK’s economic recovery and the main political parties are all eager to present themselves as having the best policies for the sector.

Figures released on 9 March show the UK’s trade deficit in goods widened to £8.0 billion in January from £7.0 billion in December. This was mainly the result of a 6.0 per cent fall in export volumes (excluding oil and erratic items).

This will come as a blow to those looking to the export sector to strengthen the UK economy’s recovery from recession. Sterling’s effective exchange rate fell by 25 per cent in 2008; this was supposed to make UK industry more competitive and boost overseas sales of British goods. So far, there is little evidence that this is happening.

The January data are probably a blip – trade data are among the most erratic of all data releases. More worrying is the underlying trend, which shows only modest growth in export volumes over the last year. Of course, this is due in no small part to the weakness of demand in the UK’s main export markets, particularly in the rest of Europe, and it should be that export growth will improve once Europe’s economic recovery picks up speed.

There are also some grounds for optimism in the latest business surveys. The Bank of England’s agents’ report and the CBI’s survey of manufacturing both show a steady improvement in optimism about the outlook for exports in recent months. However, the Bank of England does note that some companies are taking advantage of sterling’s weakness to push up profit margins, rather than allowing it to feed through into enhanced competitiveness. Depending what happens to these higher profits, this probably means some of the potential benefits of sterling’s fall - in terms of more exports, more output and more jobs - are being lost.

Tony Dolphin, senior economist, ippr

Commitment to the living wage should be in every manifesto

2010-03-10T01:47:00.000-08:00

There is tussle going on inside the Conservative party apparently over whether the Tories should make a manifesto commitment to pay the lowest paid government employees the ‘living wage’.

The London living wage at £7.60 is £1.80 more than the minimum wage and better reflects the real cost of living in the capital. The ‘living wage’ campaign has been led by the Citizen’s Organising Foundation and ippr is proud to have been one of the first voluntary organisations to adopt a living wage for its staff.

An impressive array of London’s biggest employers are signed up and Boris Johnson took a truly progressive step for the Conservatives when he became Mayor of London by ensuring that City Hall and all its contractors would pay the higher rate. Now it seems David Cameron’s Head of Strategy Steve Hilton has lost a battle to introduce the living wage across Whitehall as a way of showing the Conservatives care about the poorest wage earners.

But at least there are top level Tories pushing the idea. Where is Labour on this? Despite championing the minimum wage, Labour has shied away from supporting a living wage. Now, with public finances so tight, there’s concern that it would simply be too expensive to pay cleaners, catering staff and other low paid staff a decent wage.

But low wage levels in the capital are already costing the taxpayer in tax credits and other low income supplements. With more than half of children living in poverty now living in a family where at least one parent is working, the promise to “make work pay” rings well and truly hollow. Shouldn’t hard working families be guaranteed a route out of poverty? It seems extraordinary to think that there are children living in poverty whose parents are working as cleaners, caterers and other staff in Whitehall.

In a recent poll on the Labour supporting Left Foot Forward website, the living wage came out as the most popular progressive manifesto idea.

There’ll be plenty of things that the main parties will disagree on in this election, but they should be as one in pledging that any government they run will pay its own staff a London living wage and not just a minimum wage.

Lisa Harker, co-director, ippr

The statistical war over ‘Broken Britain’

2010-03-09T06:19:00.000-08:00

The election battle over crime took another twist today. Chris Grayling has reiterated his assertion that violent crime has gone up since 1997. Weeks ago he was reprimanded by the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority Sir Michael Scholar for quoting these statistics on recorded crime.

The reason these figures are of dubious value is because in 2002 the way violent crime was recorded by the police was changed – leading to an artificial inflation of the figures. By contrast the British Crime Survey, which most criminologists and international observers regard as more reliable, shows that violent crime has fallen by 41% in the last 12 years.

Today the Conservatives have released new figures again claiming that violent crime has risen. They asked the House of Commons Library’s statisticians to work out what how much the 2002 change in reporting standards had inflated the figures. They concluded that even if you take that factor out of the equation, recorded violent crime would still be higher today than in 1997.

The reason all of this is so important is that demonstrating that violent crime has risen is central to the Conservatives wider political claim that ‘Britain is broken’. I have just returned from a speech by Alan Johnson in which he claimed that this was an attempt to paint a picture of a ‘Darling Buds of May past’ contrasting with ‘an Orwellian future’.

The problem for the Conservatives is that the UK Statistics Authority continues to believe, as do most independent observers, that recorded crime statistics are less reliable at measuring crime trends than the British Crime Survey. This is not just because the way police recorded crime is collected has changed – but also because not all crime is reported to the police.

The British Crime Survey is far more reliable because it asks a large sample of the public whether or not they have been a victim of a crime in the last 12 months – and these statistics show unequivocally that there has been a significant fall in violent crime since 1997. We are still internationally speaking a relatively high crime society – but one in which all types of crime have fallen over the last 15 years. Broken in some ways, perhaps – but getting mended?

Rick Muir, senior research fellow, ippr

Credibility on the fiscal deficit requires consistency

2010-03-08T07:28:00.000-08:00

Reports in the press suggest Sir Alan Budd, a former chief economic adviser at HM Treasury and the man picked by George Osborne to head a new independent Office for Budget Responsibility, should the Conservatives win the general election, believes the economy will fall back into recession if public spending is cut too quickly – or taxes are increased too quickly – in 2010.

At the start of the year, this would have clearly put him in conflict with Conservative policy but in recent weeks David Cameron and George Osborne have so muddied the waters about what a Conservative Government would do to reduce the deficit in 2010 that it is hard to say whether they agree with him or not. The official line has been reduced to the need to ‘make a start’ on reducing the deficit in 2010, in an emergency budget to be announced within 50 days of a Conservative Government being elected, without any indication of the possible scale of spending cuts or tax increases.

This ignores the fact that the present Government has already ‘made a start’. The standard rate of VAT was increased from 15 per cent to 17.5 per cent in January, income tax will increase for those on very high incomes from April and public spending on capital projects will fall by 13 per cent in 2010/11. The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinks total fiscal tightening in 2010/11 will be £23 billion.

Cameron and Osborne criticise the Government for not having a credible plan to reduce the deficit, but their own lack of consistency means they too lack credibility. As well as shifting their position on public spending in 2010, they have not told us how much discretionary fiscal tightening they think is needed in total, over how many years they would implement such tightening or what mix of tax increases and spending cuts they would use. They also express a desire to avoid some of the Government’s measures to reduce the deficit – such as the planned increase in national insurance contributions in April 2011 – without saying what they would replace them with.

Credibility on the fiscal deficit requires consistency and a clear set of plans. So far, the Conservatives have offered us neither.

Tony Dolphin, senior economist, ippr

Room for real political debate on development?

2010-03-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

International development sometimes feels like an issue in search of a debate. All three main parties are signed up to meeting the UN target of giving 0.7% of GDP as aid; and politicians of all persuasions seem united in their enthusiasm for initiatives to provide basic health and education to people in the world’s poorest countries.

But this consensus has its own perils.

Whoever wins the election, there will be a massive squeeze on public expenditure. This makes the politics of increasing aid budgets very difficult. So expect to see more aid routed through the FCO, MOD, DECC and other departments, as well as tough debates about what counts as aid.

Also, there may be consensus on how much should be spent on aid, but there isn’t much agreement on what aid is for. Labour has tended to make a strong moral case, while Andrew Mitchell for the Conservatives has been keener to emphasise that development is also in the interests of the UK.

Both arguments are valid, but they also show up real differences between the parties on how development policy would be delivered in practice. Labour made a significant break from the past in establishing DFID as an independent department. The Conservatives would keep DFID separate, but have sent strong signals that they would like its role to be more clearly supportive of the FCO.

And the most difficult issue of all is what the UK should do when domestic economic and political interests are not well aligned with those of the poorest countries. In some ways, aid is the easiest part of the debate for politicians to engage with. Although money is tight now, the aid budget is small fry compared to education or health. It’s much more challenging to take radical action for development in areas like corporate corruption, tax and financial reform; climate change; migration; or defence and security. Let’s hope that the election campaign delivers more real debate on these issues.

ippr’s report Policy coherence and the future of the UK’s international development agenda is available now

Sarah Mulley, ippr

Phoney debate on crime

2010-03-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

As we head towards the general election, the debate about crime looks set to be one of the most misinformed.

First, politicians constantly speak as if crime is out of control – Chris Grayling famously compared Britain to Baltimore, even though that single city records around 200 fatal shooting a year, compared to just 39 last year for the whole of the Britain. The fact is that crime is lower today than at any point since records began in 1981. Since 1995 vandalism is down 18%, burglary 58%, vehicle-related theft 65%, other household theft 48%, bicycle theft 20%, and violent crime 49%. Fear of crime has also fallen and even people’s perception of anti-social behaviour in their community is less today than in 2002/03.

Of course politicians are responding to people’s anxieties – the public generally doesn’t believe that crime has fallen – what pollsters have called ‘the perception gap’. But the facts are the facts – and politicians should treat them as such.

Second, the knee jerk policy response to crime remains pretty much the same: more bobbies on the beat! So, this week the Prime Minister said frontline police funding would be ring-fenced. Chris Huhne went further and said that we need to recruit even more officers.

Again lets reflect on some facts here: spending on the police service increased by 19% in real terms between 1997/98 and 2008/09. Most of this money was spent on increasing the number of police officers: police numbers increased by 11 per cent or by 16,326 officers between 1997 and 2009, meaning that there are more police now than at any time in our history.

Was this most well spent? Well crime fell, sure. But the government’s own strategy unit has estimated that 80% of that fall was due to economic growth, rather than expenditure on the police. In fact the government accepts that its neighbourhood policing programme is more about public reassurance rather than reducing crime.

We could maintain and even increase the number of officers currently out on the beat – important to reassure the public – without increasing the police budget or recruiting more officers. The way to do that is by reforming the way the police service works. No one seems ready to grasp that nettle.

Rick Muir, senior research fellow

Energy saving getting cheaper

2010-03-03T05:47:00.000-08:00

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has announced such a plethora of new policies in recent years that it can be quite a job just trying to keep up.

Today we add to the mix the Warm Homes, Greener Homes Strategy. At first glance it looks like a good step forward.

One highlight is the commitment to introduce legislation allowing loans to be provided to households to pay up front for energy saving measures (such as insulation or micro-gen renewable technologies like solar) and then for repayments to be made over a period of time out of the money saved off energy bills. When combined with the Feed-In Tariff (which will be introduced in April and will guarantee a rate of income for all energy generated through micro-gen) improving the energy performance of your home is about to become a whole lot more financially attractive.

We know from research (including ippr’s Positive Energy and Consumer Power) that the up-front costs involved in installing energy saving measures is a key barrier preventing their uptake and so this is a welcome announcement. However, it’s fair to say that it is not a particularly new idea. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats support the introduction of a similar scheme and it is something that we at ippr recommended back in 2007. Nevertheless, it is welcome that it is finally being introduced.

As with much climate change policy the difference between the major parties will be in the detail and the delivery. For example, what messengers and communications will be used to maximise uptake of the scheme? How else will householders be persuaded that installing the measures is worth the hassle? How will people living in fuel poverty who probably won’t benefit from this scheme be helped to improve the energy efficiency of their homes?

With each of the major party leaderships appearing committed to achieving action on climate change there often just isn’t that much to pick between them in terms of policy. As the temperature hots up in the run up to the election (climate change pun intended) what will be more interesting is how the parties relate to the electorate and their memberships on climate change, when levels of climate scepticism have recently increased and it’s just not a priority issue for most.

Reg Platt, Researcher, ippr

Only connect?

2010-03-02T01:50:00.000-08:00

Do your friends make you fat? Apparently so. In their new book Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler argue that human behaviours are contagious and spread like viruses through the social networks in which we are located. So, if your friends put on weight, then the chances are that you will too.

The findings come from the records of the Framingham Heart Study, a 50-year research project into the health of 15,000 people in the Massachusetts town, and they are startling: when a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese too. The effect even skipped links: so if a friend of a friend became obese, a resident was 20 per cent more likely to become obese. There were similar results for smoking, heavy drinking, voter participation and the likelihood of becoming depressed.

These findings are being absorbed by the political parties in the run-up to the election. The fiscal crisis has put a premium on finding ways to deliver change that do not require extra resource: a better understanding of people’s social networks could help government get more ‘bang for its buck’. So, if you want to encourage school children to do their homework, rather than focusing on each individual you go to the most connected child in the school. If they start doing their homework properly, others will follow their example. We know this from ippr’s work on climate change: by encouraging enough neighbours to behave positively towards the environment, a new social norm is set and other neighbours feel the need to follow.

Of course, there are justice considerations here: there are some services that everyone should receive individually on the basis of their needs, rather than because of how ‘connected’ they are. And we should not allow this new fascination with social networks to lead to more lonely or isolated citizens being even more marginalised.

Nevertheless these findings should be taken seriously as we think of ways to improve services in the absence of new money. Whoever wins the election should increasingly ask public services to understand the connections between the people they work with – and think of their users as members of social networks, rather than just as individual consumers of services.

Rick Muir, senior research fellow, ippr

We need convincing on continued presence in Afghanistan

2010-03-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

Gordon Brown said at Prime Minister’s Questions on 24 February that ‘We are in Afghanistan because there is a threat of terrorism on the streets of Britain... The majority of the plots that have been discovered in Britain… come from the Afghanistan/Pakistan area… They don’t come from plots within Britain. They don’t come from plots within Europe. They are organized from that area. And that is why we are in Afghanistan.’

It is not clear that this is true in the cases of the 200 or so individuals actually convicted of terrorist offences in the UK. Those who killed 52 people in London on 7/7 were all UK residents. And those languishing in Belmarsh are not from Helmand. If it is true, the Prime Minister needs to explain – not just assert – it to the British people, in whose name our soldiers kill and die.

We have a habit of externalizing the terrorist threat we face. Tony Blair did so by invoking Blitz imagery after the 7 July 2005 attacks. But our terrorist problem – unlike in the US – is primarily homegrown.

Terrorism at home vs wars abroad is not a zero sum game. Iraq has not made us any safer. We need convincing that Afghanistan will.

Andy Hull, senior research fellow, ippr

Strong and weak families?

2010-03-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

It is time to stop hiding behind the marriage debate, and to articulate a vision that families can respond to, not one where there are strong and weak families.

In January, the Government published Support for All: the Families and Relationships Green Paper, the Conservatives published Making Britain more Family-Friendly as part of their draft manifesto and the Centre for Social Justice also published a Green Paper on the family. Reading through these documents, you lose count of the number of times ‘strong’ families are referred to; either that strong families are important or we need to do everything we can to strengthen families. But what is it about strength that we are trying to promote; and does it mean that if you are not a ‘strong’ family, you are ‘weak’? The raft of policy proposals across these documents present a range of proposals – some of which are useful – but they don’t connect to the reality and issues that many families face.

In other countries, family policy has both direct and indirect aims that include promoting children’s development and well-being; supporting parents in work and gender equality. The political spat around marriage is monopolising the discussion about family policy and distracting political parties from outlining a vision of how to better support families.

Dalia Ben-Galim, senior research fellow, ippr

Who benefits politically from a weak economy?

2010-03-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

Figures showing the UK economy grew by 0.3% in the final quarter of 2009, rather than by 0.1% as previously estimated, are little help to either of the two main political parties in making the case for their economic policies ahead of the election.

Labour will be relieved that the economy has emerged from recession but reluctant to make too much of the stronger growth. In particular, they will be aware that growth in the first quarter of 2010 could disappoint due to the bad weather we have been experiencing and the likelihood that the increase in the main rate of VAT from 15 to 17.5% in January led to some spending being brought forward into the final months of 2009. And the first estimate of Q1 GDP will be published on 23rd April – probably right in the middle of the election campaign. Labour are also keen to emphasise that the fragility of the economic recovery makes it unwise to cut government borrowing by more than set out in last year’s Pre-Budget Report.

The Conservatives have stressed that they would take the health of the economy into account when deciding the scale of any spending cuts and tax increases to be included in the budget measures they hope to introduce within 50 days of winning a general election. But, as George Osborne made clear again in his Mais Lecture on 24 February, they would take steps to bring government borrowing down faster in 2010/11 than set out in the current Government’s plans. Whatever the economic rationale behind such a move, for this to seem like a sensible course of action the economy needs to be growing at something more than a snail’s pace.

So, while very low – or even zero – growth in the first quarter of 2010 would be bad news for Labour, it will be hard for the Conservatives to capitalise because it also throws into question one of their key economic policies. Perhaps the Liberal democrats would be the beneficiaries – not regarded as responsible for the recession and not advocates of early cuts in government borrowing.

Tony Dolphin, senior economist, ippr

ippr election blog

2010-02-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new ippr blog.

In the run-up to the general election ippr experts will be critiquing policy announcements, providing the best analysis of the parties' policy positions.

So stay tuned!