Keeping Time For Children

If it is true that 93% of employers respond favourably to requests by staff to work flexibly, and if there is now a growing political consensus that parents should be more involved in their children's upbringing and education, surely there can be no question that the right to flexible working† should be extended to all parents — those of secondary as well as of primary-school aged children?

† Under current legislation, any parent who has been employed for at least twelve months can ask for flexible hours if their children are under six or are disabled. This includes flexitime, working from home, working a compressed week, working part-time, and job sharing. Employers can only reject a request on the grounds of excessive costs.

School Leaving Age

Can anybody tell me how compelling disillusioned and disaffected 16-year-olds to stay on at school until they are 18 is going to achieve anything besides delaying the day when they join the 1.2 million other 16-24-year-olds who are not productively involved in society?

Immigration: Not A Racial Problem

Once again, Simon Heffer does not mince his words in today's Telegraph:

This week, we were told there were 11,000 foreigners in our prisons – one in seven of those inside – and the Government, with typical incompetence, is struggling to negotiate deals to have these people serve their sentences back home.

Yesterday, an independent body called the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit said that the Government's plans to build three million new homes by 2020 were not nearly adequate.

Of course they are not, because of the state's determination to allow unlimited immigration and, with it, the end of the indigenous cultural identity. The tensions of what used to be called "multi-culturalism" are dangerous enough: but so are the practical issues.

Large parts of England will be concreted over to accommodate all these new people. There will have to be new roads, railways and airports. And since we are already full up, and our public services buckling, where are we going to put everyone?

Labour has covered up its failure to control our borders by saying that our economy needs immigrants.

Well, if you are determined to have a welfare state that tolerates about eight million economically unproductive people of working age – the unemployed, those in "training" and those on various benefits because they believe they are unfit for work – then of course you will. It is time someone got serious.

Policy Blizzard's First Flurry

Talk of a "blizzard of conference policy announcements" has begun the "Cameron fight back" with what must surely rank as highly attractive, family-friendly changes to the tax and welfare system: the abolition of stamp duty for first-time buyers on homes worth up to £250,000 and an increase in working tax credit paid to two-parent families (worth up to £2,000 a year for 1.8 million families with children), funded by a crackdown on "work-shy" benefits claimants, including "aggressive" penalties for those who turn down jobs.

Whether it and the flurry of other manifesto suggestions to be rolled out this week are seen to bring together and build upon the many recent policy group reports and whether they will prove sufficiently appealing to close the double-figure poll lead that Gordon Brown now enjoys remains to be seen...

If you want a reminder of the policies that you, The Difference readers, said you would most like to see the Party put forward, when David Cameron first suggested a blizzard of policy ideas, visit Your Policy Ideas Results.

Brown's Lurch to the Right

Nick Robinson and Matthew d'Ancona, among others, have commented on Gordon Brown's TUC pledge to deliver "British jobs for British workers," speculating on how such a phrase would have been portrayed by the media had David Cameron delivered it.

Looking beyond such "harsh realities of political life," the truth is that our European masters would never permit such employment protection rights. Moreover, given that employers are usually going to take on the best person for the job, then presumably the immigrants accused of "stealing our jobs" are better qualified and/or better experienced than the natives whom they are supplanting — which would seem to imply that there is something wrong with British education and training, requiring a more direct and substantial remedy than any diversionary "British jobs for British workers" sticking plaster.

New Deal's Woeful Failure

Gordon Brown's flagship New Deal scheme to help young unemployed people is a "woeful" failure and not adapting to fit the needs of participants or the current labour market, according to former Labour welfare reform minister Frank Field in a report for the think tank Reform.

What he says is, of course, not new. Other reports, such as last month's by The Prince's Trust, have noted that twice as many 16 to 24-year-olds are classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET) as are unemployed.

What is new is that a former Labour minister, albeit one who has been a long-standing critic of the Chancellor, now accepts that this is the case. Noting that, despite £3.5bn in funding, there are now 70,000 more 18 to 24-year-olds out of work than when the New Deal scheme began in 1998, Mr Field says, "The results show that even if the money was available, which it isn't, more of the same won't work and will be a betrayal of young unemployed people."  Just last week the National Association of Head Teachers criticised the Government's obsession with targets and testing, saying that schools are producing an "army of the unemployable" with tens of thousands of teenagers quitting education without any qualifications.

Mr Field echoes criticism made by the Conservatives, who have long claimed that many of the young people helped into employment by the New Deal would have found jobs anyway. He also adopts the suggestion made by Conservatives that time limits should be set for recipients of benefits — a policy that has proved successful in encouraging people back into work in America. In 1994, a record 5.1 million families were on American welfare. However, as a result of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act introduced by President Clinton in 1996, today just 1.9 million families get cash benefits—and in a third of those only the children qualify for aid. Overall, child poverty has been reduced by over 1.6 million, with unprecedented declines in poverty occurring among children of single mothers and the greatest decrease happening among black children. Whereas in Britain people on benefit frequently discover they will lose out financially if they seek employment, in America people who return to work are the ones who get help with child care, job training, and transportation.

The new American system has not been without its problems, but there is clearly a lot we could learn if we are to transform our own bloated state dependency and answer fundamental questions about how to guarantee the stability and security upon which the economy and well-being depend, such as:

• How can we best help poor families without fostering unintended consequences such as economic dependency and broken families that simply perpetuate rather than end poverty?
• How can we help children in poor families without rewarding the decisions of parents that may have contributed to their children's disadvantaged circumstances?
• How can we redress racial or ethnic inequality without adversely affecting the opportunities of others?

Labour's Lost Generation

A new report by The Prince's Trust confirms fears expressed by this blog as recently as Sunday, that Labour's neglect of the needs of young people over the past decade has lost us a generation.

The report reveals that:

• England and Wales has the highest percentage of prisoners under 18 in Europe and the second highest percentage between 18 and 21
  
• Youth crime is costing the UK economy £1,000,000,000 every year
  
• Twice as many 16 to 24-year-olds are classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET) as are unemployed
  
• The proportion of young people with low-level or no qualifications in the UK compares very unfavourably to competitors such as France and Germany
  
• Educational underachievement costs £18,000,000,000 each year in lost earnings
  
• Youth unemployment costs UK tax payers £20,000,000 per week in Job Seeker’s Allowance
  
• In addition, loss of productivity to the economy from youth unemployment costs over £70,000,000 per week

The Daily Telegraph comments:

In his first Budget, Gordon Brown gave a statement of the Government's intent to tackle the debilitating impact of state dependency with a £5 billion windfall tax on the privatised utilities to pay for an ambitious welfare-to-work programme. The scheme envisaged four options for the young unemployed: a government-subsidised job, voluntary work, full-time education or training, or a place on an environmental task force. "There will be no fifth option to stay at home on full benefit," the Chancellor warned. ... A "lost generation" of young people seem to have found Mr Brown's non-existent fifth option.

Having so thoroughly identified and described the problem, it is imperative that we now find new ways to re-engage young people and enable them to turn their lives around, helping them to gain the skills and qualifications they need to get a job, especially in the UK's poorest areas.