Work and pensions secretary says she will transform opportunities as Starmer bemoans ‘bulging benefits bill’…reports Asian Lite News
Young people who refuse to take up jobs or training will lose their benefits in the government’s crackdown on worklessness, Liz Kendall has said. The work and pensions secretary said, “If people repeatedly refuse to take up the training or work responsibilities, there will be sanctions on their benefits.”
Asked if this meant losing those benefits, Kendall replied: “Yes.” Ministers are preparing to announce sweeping changes to the welfare system and out-of-work support next week. It forms part of a drive to get more people into work and cut the government’s welfare bill, which has ballooned since the Covid crisis.
“The reason why we believe this so strongly is that we believe in our responsibility to provide those new opportunities, which is what we will do. We will transform those opportunities, but young people will be required to take them up, just as they did in the late 1990s with the new deal for young people, and the late noughties with the future jobs fund, because it is so damaging for young people not to have skills or not to be in work,” Kendall said.
Kendall added: “I do not want an ever-increasing benefits bill spent on the cost of failure, people trapped out of work, terrible for their life chances, and paid for by the taxpayer.” She said there were nearly a million young people – one in eight – who were not in education, employment or training.
Asked whether there were people who could work but did not work, Kendall said: “Yes.” She said: “I know from speaking to our job coaches, our fantastic job coaches in jobcentres, that there are people who could work, who aren’t. But I think they are in the minority.”
Kendall said some people who were out of work had “self-diagnosed” mental health problems, though she stressed there was a “genuine problem with mental health in this country”. She set out plans to overhaul apprenticeships and jobcentres in an attempt to reduce the number of people who are out of work.
In an interview Kendall said jobcentres had become a hollowed-out “benefit administration service” that was no longer “fit for purpose” and was being shunned by employers and jobseekers alike.
“Employers are desperate to recruit,” she told the Observer. “People are desperate to earn money and get on in their jobs. So we need big change. We need to see change in our jobcentres from a one-size-fits-all benefit administration service to a genuine public employment service.” In an article in the Mail on Sunday, Keir Starmer vowed to “get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society” in “the biggest overhaul of employment support in memory”.
But he promised not to “call people shirkers or go down the road of division” and said that instead ministers would “treat people with dignity and respect”.
“Next week, my government will set out radical reforms to get Britain working. No more business as usual,” the prime minister wrote. “And don’t get me wrong, we will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters. There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals.”
Poll reveals need to reduce pay gap between bosses, employees
Chief executives should have their pay capped to maintain a fair balance between workers and bosses, according to a survey that found a majority of respondents in favour of restricting top salaries.
A poll by the High Pay Centre thinktank of more than 2,000 people found that 55% agreed that chief executive pay should be set as a multiple of workers’ low or average earnings “so that pay differences between the high and low or middle earners don’t grow too wide”. Only 15% objected.
Against a backdrop of rows over bosses’ pay and bonuses in the water industry and calls by the head of the London Stock Exchange for chief executives to be paid more to retain “top talent”, the thinktank said the survey showed that there was a growing appetite for a rethink about the relationship between the boardroom and workers on the shop floor.
The thinktank, which said its survey was funded by the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust and conducted independently by the polling firm Survation, called on ministers to consider handing workers the right to be on company boards and to publish more information about top pay.
Asked if they supported the idea of voting for two workers on a board, 51% said yes and only 11% opposed. Enhanced transparency over the pay for top earners was supported by 70% of respondents, “meaning companies would publish more information on employees making over £150,000”.
The High Pay Centre will publish “A Charter for Fair Pay” this week ahead of the forthcoming Employment Rights Bill. It will argue that the UK needs to reset the relationship between workers and top executives to foster a more collaborative way of working and stronger economic growth.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has made it her central mission for the UK to become the fastest-growing economy in the G7 group of rich nations. In recent months the UK’s growth rate has slipped back to near the bottom of the G7, just ahead of Italy.
On Friday a survey of UK companies showed the first contraction in activity for a year as firms gave the government’s budget plans, which included extra costs on businesses to pay for enhanced public services, the “thumbs down”.
Reeves is also under pressure to tackle the UK’s income inequality, which the thinktank said was a “defining characteristic of the UK economy”. The OECD, which includes Germany, Mexico, the US, Costa Rica and Slovenia among its 38 members, ranks Britain as the eighth worst in terms of income inequality. Figures show that among EU member states, only Bulgaria and Lithuania are more unequal than the UK.
In 2022, income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) grew by 1.3%. The thinktank said the majority of the widening income gap was caused by a reduction in the disposable incomes of the UK’s poorest 20% of households by 3.4%, while the disposable incomes of the richest 20% of households grew by 3.3%.
Director of the High Pay Centre, Luke Hildyard, said there was an opportunity to use the new government’s legislative agenda “to strengthen worker voice and bridge the pay gap between top executives and the wider workforce.”
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