Evening Standard comment: Labour’s jobless plan and a welfare debate

 
4 January 2013
WEST END FINAL

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Labour's new scheme for the long-term unemployed is in part an intervention on an issue where polling suggests the party is perceived as weak: welfare.

It comes before a crucial vote next week on the Government’s planned cap on increases in some benefit payments. Both sides are keen to seize the initiative on this emotive issue.

Labour’s plan is reasonable enough, offering those out of work for more than two years a government-funded job for six months on the minimum wage. Labour estimates that the scheme would help more than 129,000 people on current figures, at a cost of £1 billion, which it would raise through a cut in the tax relief on pension contributions of those earning more than £150,000 a year.

In itself, this looks a more convincing plan than the Government’s Work Programme, which pays employers to find work for the long-term jobless: recent figures showed that only around 3.5 per cent of those on the scheme found jobs for six months or more. The problem with Labour’s idea is partly that it does not go far enough: as this paper’s Ladder for London apprenticeships campaign has shown, we need to think much more imaginatively to help the mass of unemployed young people.

More important, as a political intervention Labour’s plan fails to address the central issue of the latest clash over welfare: how much those on benefits should be paid. The Government wants a three-year cap of one per cent on rises in most working-age benefits and tax credits — a real-terms cut. Labour opposes the move, partly on the grounds that the cap will penalise not just those out of work but those receiving in-work benefits and working tax credits. Labour’s difficulty — precisely the trap set for it by George Osborne in announcing the cap last month — is in arguing with ministers’ position that benefits should not rise faster than wages. That, rather than specific plans for the jobless, will be the crux of next week’s vote — and of the welfare debate as it moves up the political agenda.

Council cash cow

Westminster council has long relied on money from parking charges and fines as a major source of income, indirectly funding things such as its very low council tax. But new figures published suggest the true extent of this pattern: Labour says that the borough rakes in five times as much in charges and fines per household than other boroughs — more than £637 each in 2011/12. The average for the other 19 London boroughs surveyed was just £121; Kensington and Chelsea charged nearly £500.

Labour’s claim that the average for Conservative councils is higher than that for Labour ones means little: there are far more people visiting Westminster than, say, Labour-controlled Barking and Dagenham. What is certainly true is that Westminster treats parking as a cash cow to an extent unequalled elsewhere. This bends the borough’s policies out of shape, resulting in absurdities such as the council’s 2011 attempt to impose evening and weekend charges on single-yellow lines. We need parking controls to avoid anarchy on central London’s roads. But Westminster should not milk its cash cow in this way.

Malala’s courage

It is enormously heartening that Malala Yousafzai has left hospital in Birmingham, where she was being treated for serious injuries after being shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban. The 15-year-old’s courage while recovering from her injuries — and in campaigning in Pakistan for girls’ education — is remarkable. As the hospital’s medical director says, she is indeed a “strong young woman”.

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