Category Archives: Labour’s future

One in ten now can’t find the hours they need because this government has failed to get Britain moving

Liam Byrne MP, Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, commenting on today’s ONS report on underemployed workers in 2012, said:

“This government is creating a short-time Britain, just when we need all hands on deck. One in ten now can’t find the hours they need because this government has failed to get Britain moving.

“Millions are locked out of full-time work because the Work Programme is failing and George Osborne has throttled the recovery. Now we have a spiralling welfare bill that Britain’s strivers are having to pick up the tab for.”

Ends

Editor’s notes:

 

Today programme interview

LIAM BYRNE – Welfare reform

Today Programme

Tuesday, 2nd October 2012

Speakers:        Liam Byrne

                        Evan Davies

ED:                  How typical are those views [that a large proportion of people claiming benefits are scroungers]?

LB:                  I think those views are quite widespread.

ED:                  Is that a problem for you in framing a policy? Have you lost.. has the system lost legitimacy?

LB:                  I think the truth is that social security today doesn’t enjoy widespread support but for many people, nor does it offer much security and those two things are linked. The truth is that the world of work has now changed very radically since social security was set up back in the 1940s and for many people in work they don’t actually feel that they get much out for the pressures that they have to contend with in everyday life so I think that fractures support and I think that’s why we do have to reinvent social security for modern times and the world of work today.

ED:                  Let’s take a couple of things that the coalition has done to try and, if you like, deal with some of those attitudes and let’s start with the tests, quite controversial tests for disability. Now there has always been, as I understand it, there has always been some kind of test to determine whether you are eligible forDLA; you can’t just walk in and say could I have  it please, you have to get some sort of certification to do so. but there seems to have been a toughening up of those tests – do you support that?

LB:                  Well if you [inaudible] the position we started back in the 1980s when millions of people had been put on incapacity benefit when the manufacturing industry in this country went through those difficult times and what Labour did in office is say look, there does have to be a test introduced so we are not just looking at people’s disability we are looking at people’s ability. And when we introduced the test we said look, this is a new system, it’s going to be complicated, things are going to go wrong, we shall review it every year and make changes. So the principle of the test is absolutely right but the truth is that what is happening right now is just arranging a bureaucracy against disabled people – it is not putting a team behind them to help them get back into work. And that is why I have called for fast and fundamental reform of the test because the principle of the test is right but this is about making sure people get the right support, and crucially it is about supporting people getting back into a job where they can be playing in tax, not sitting out of work taking out benefit.

ED:                  Right, so it is the way they are doing it rather than the principle that you are opposed to then. What about the benefit cap. Interestingly when I spoke to those folks in Collyhurst they seemed to have no problem wit the cap at all. I know a lot of experts in this area feel the cap had a some what clunky, clumsy method of trying to restrain benefits spending, what is your view?

LB:                  My starting point is you have got to be better off in work, I mean that is why we supported tax credits and that is why we opposed the cuts I tax credit that means many people are actually now better off on benefits than they are in work. But the flipside of that is that there should be a cap on benefits and a bone of contention with the argument is that they have, in a clumsy and pretty politicised way, tried to set one national cap for the country whereas everybody knows that one cap for the whole of Britain would be pumped  up by the very very  high levels of rent and housing benefit that you see in London. So, we have said look come one, think about this carefully – it would make much more sense to have a different cap in different parts of the country and let’s try and take the politics out of that a bit. Let’s get an independent panel of wise experts who can look at this and say, what is the right level in different parts of the country so that no matter where you live you are better off in work?

ED:                  So again you are saying, support the principle but you will do it a different way?

LB:                  Exactly.

ED:                  Have you got any ideas of your own about reforming welfare? We know Iain Duncan Smith has got a universal benefit – he is replacing a lot of the means tested benefit with this single universal credit. You have said you think the system should be somehow aimed at getting people into work – I don’t see any disagreement there with the Conservatives, the Conservatives want to get people into work as well, the coalition is clearly aiming at trying to get people into work – what are your bug ideas for welfare? Where do you take it, what do you d with it now in the 21st century?

LB:                  Well we have got to recognise that the world of work is now very very different to when the system was set up back in the ‘40s. So half of jobs inBritain today are either part-time, temporary or self-employed. Now to help people work in this more flexible life we have got to do things differently. The job-for-life has gone, women are now at work, we sold off lots of council houses and of course we are ageing. That means people need different things out of social security and that’s why we have said look, we have got to have a much bigger push to get young people into work – that’s why we have said there should be a bank bonus tax to focus on getting young people into jobs, and by the way if young people aren’t prepared to take those jobs there can’t be a life on benefits. Second we have said look, there has got to be new investment in areas like childcare because if we had as many people, as many mothers in particular, in work as they have for example inDenmark we would have a million more women in jobs and £4.5 billion in extra tax receipts each year. And I guess the final area that I’d sort  of pick out is that we need to be much better organised in helping disabled people get back into work. One in four, one in five of our fellow citizens is disabled and in a world where things are becoming much more competitive we need to draw on every ounce of talent in our society so we need to be thinking much smarter about how we set the system up to help disabled people work.

ED:                  Okay, I hear you have got a few ideas there, perfectly arguable ideas, not terribly controversial I wouldn’t have thought, getting young people back into work and get helping women get into the labour market, I don’t think anyone is going to disagree with that.

LB:                  Well you say it is beyond argument but in fact it isn’t. I mean there isn’t much money going in to help young people get into jobs. There is a lot of new childcare has been cut.

ED:                  Right well we’ve got the phrase said, there isn’t much money going into it – ah that’s because there isn’t much money going into anything at the moment. My sort of final question to you is, do you accept that this is an area where, after five years, money needs to be found, to be saved or do you think this is an area where you can reform by putting more money in because that is the essence of it isn’t it?

LB:                  I work on the assumption that we are going to inherit a dog’s breakfast in 2015. The national debt is going to be over £400 billion higher than it was at the last parliament. Savings are going to have to be made and I think there will be savings that are needed on welfare spending too and our challenge is how we spend that money differently to support more people in work.

ED:                  Give us, just finally, give us a clue as to one saving, one area where you think the big savings can be made?

LB:                  Well I think you have got to bring down the unemployment bill and you have got to bring down the housing benefit bill. The best way to do that is to get people into jobs.

ED:                  Right, and apart from getting people in to jobs because of course everybody would like that, they would like a big portion of motherhood and apple pie, if that doesn’t turn out to be easy, one last.. one area of saving? Middle class benefits, winter fuel allowance…

LB:                  Well there has always been a balance in the welfare state between universal benefits and targeted benefits and I’m afraid as part of Ed’s zero-based review that balance has got to be looked at. But the chief focus has got to be on getting as many people into jobs as possible – that’s good for living standards, it’s good for growth and it’s good for tax.

 

-ends-

 

My speech to Labour Party Conference

Press release

Monday 1st October 2012

 Liam Byrne’s speech to Labour Party Annual Conference 2012

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Liam Byrne MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, said today at Labour Party Annual Conference 2012, delivered live via Skype from a Jobs Summit at Manchester College:

Conference, let me apologise for not being with you in the hall right now.

But sometimes you have to strike a balance between argument and action – and when it comes to youth unemployment what we need right now is action.

So I’m here with Tony Lloyd at the fantastic Manchester College.

Where we’ve brought employers, colleges, business with apprenticeships, and hundreds of young people to see what we can do to get young people in this city into jobs.

And what I’ve heard this morning is just wrong.

It’s wrong that young women like Nazish have been out of work six months, desperate for a job or apprenticeship.

It’s wrong that young men like Colm who’s 23 have been out of work since July.

This is the economics of the madhouse.

You know our welfare is rising by £29 billion

And yet people like Colm and Nazish and a million others just like them and hungry to work and are forced to stand idle.

Now as some of you know, I represent the constituency in Britain where youth unemployment is highest.

What I’ve realised is that the anger we feel about youth unemployment is the anger we feel when we see our values under attack.

We believe in the pride and dignity of work. That’s why we’re called the Labour Party.

We believe that we’re stronger when we pull together as a country. We don’t believe in the economics of you are on your own.

We believe in an economy that works for working people.

And we believe that when you see an injustice, you don’t just walk past it.

You roll up your sleeves and you do something about it.

Today every single one of those values is under attack and it’s our young people paying the price.

So we have to take a stand.

That’s why Labour are calling for a real jobs guarantee – paid for by sensible tax on bankers bonuses.

And, we have to organise the fightback.

We can’t and won’t stand on the sidelines and watch our young people take a kicking.

So today I’m very proud to launch our Youth Jobs Taskforce.

Just because we’re not in government doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference.

We run Wales, and London’s big boroughs and Britain’s big cities.

Right now it’s our councillors and local leaders who leading the charge for youth jobs: thinking, organising, making a difference to get young people work.

Today, these local leaders are coming together in a new coalition to galvanise action.

They are going to join forces with good people from our trade unions, from business, from enterprise, from civil society, and from our youth movement.

We want to make sure that the best ideas anywhere, become the way we do things everywhere.

We know how high the stakes have become.

The young people we serve are good people.

They don’t dress up in white tie and smash up restaurants.

And they don’t swear at policemen.

They are people who want to work hard and get on in life if only someone will let them.

And today we send an emphatic message: that we are on their side.

Let me just finish with a story.

You know Iain Duncan Smith likes to boast that he was once inspired in his reforming zeal to smash up the welfare state by what he saw in Easterhouse in Glasgow’s East End.

Well last week I too went to Easterhouse, together with the great Margaret Curran.

To meet a group of young people to talk about the future.

What they say inspires them, isn’t yet another Tory attack.

It’s investment in skills. In jobs. In chances.

Those young people are just like people we’re here with today.

They’re people who want to rebuild Britain.

And Labour is going to help them.

Because we’re the party that knows how futures are really built.

It’s built by people like those behind me here in Manchester today – and a million more like them all over the United Kingdom.

They might have a do-nothing Government.

But they’re going to have a do-what-it-takes Labour Party.

So thanks for listening.

I’ll let you know how we get on a bit later.

If you’d like to get involved in the taskforce, drop me a line: we’d love to have your help.

And I’ll catch up with you later this afternoon.

ENDS

 

Is there a new centre-ground and how does Labour win it?

My speech to Progress Annual Conference on Saturday 12 May.

 

 

Keep centre

 30 January 2012

In the 1990s, progressives learned an important lesson about how to win elections: we built wide coalitions; we held firm to traditional values; but we freed the political mind for new solutions, new methods, new ways of doing business. We kept our philosophy. But we changed the policy. We forged a new path between old-fashioned leftwing statism and new-fangled rightwing laissez-faire.

That new approach worked for Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, the Australian Labor party, the New Democrat party in Canada, social democrats in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway – and, yes, for New Labour.

And today it feels like a long time ago. The political confidence of the third way has taken a battering. Yet faltering growth, worried financial markets, rising unemployment and social unease all point to one thing: the need for a new progressive politics. Yet outside the United States, Brazil, Norway and Denmark, progressives are not winning by default. We need a new way back to the centre-ground.

Now some, of course, will say: ‘New Labour was the mistake. Let’s go back to the 1980s.’ Others will counter: ‘We were not modernising enough.’ A debate like that will not get us far. In 2015 we face a new world: a new global balance of power between Asia and the west, and a budget £30bn in the red. So Ed Miliband is right: we need hard thought now about what to keep from the third way and what to change for new times.

So first, let’s move on from the 1990s. Why? Because, as the world changed, politics changed – and we did not. Tony Blair once argued: ‘What of policy? Our approach is “permanent revisionism”, a continual search for better means to meet our goals, based on a clear view of the changes taking place in advanced industrialised societies.’

But our politics did not keep pace with the change we helped to author. By 2005, progressives had helped create a vast new global market that linked six billion of the world’s seven billion people. Massive new movements of capital kept interest rates low but fuelled asset bubbles. The market, our society and technology changed fundamentally. New challenges emerged: a new inequality between the middle and the top and young and old; living standards plateaued; old solidarities, old communities felt pressured; asset bubbles burst; and banks crashed.

Back in 1958, Tony Crosland wrote: ‘The intellectual framework within which most prewar socialist discussion was conducted has been rendered obsolete.’ Economic growth and ‘a different configuration of economic power … call for a complete reappraisal of the socialist position.’ The revisionist’s lesson? Change as the world changes.

That is why, after the third way, we need a new way back to a new centre-ground. Let’s keep the insights of the 1990s but build on them for a different era. Let’s keep the best of New Labour, not least the late Philip Gould’s basic insight: ‘What most voters want is over time and without greed to advance and improve their lives. In short, to become better off.’

Let’s keep the insight that elections are won in the centre-ground by building an alliance around the values – aspiration, responsibility and community – that unite traditional supporters with footloose voters who change sides.

What does that centre-ground look like? It is bigger than before. More voters are more likely to switch sides. Look at Scotland. No one can win elections trading on old loyalties. That is true for social democrats everywhere. Attitudes have changed too. Take the latest British Social Attitudes Survey which found that support for tax increases to spend more on public services has halved from nine years ago and only a third now say that government should redistribute wealth.

This is no counsel of despair. Neither opinion polls nor by-elections point to any return to Maggie-mania. As Deborah Mattinson puts it: ‘When things get really hard the instinct to put nearest and dearest first is, understandably, paramount.’

This is why Labour’s leader is placing our party firmly in the centre-ground with new ideas not old attitudes. Globally, social democrats are pinpointing five basic principles that can deliver our values in tough times. But Labour is leading the way.

First, the deficit needs not denial but fiscal realism. That is why Ed Balls is tough on tax and public spending. But his approach marries aggressive short-term action to boost jobs and growth, with medium-term ideas to bring down debt. The crash taught us we cannot immunise the world from financial crashes; we have now had 40 since 1800. If we want to protect our room to act when future trouble breaks, we need to bring debt down. That is the best insurance policy for Keynesians. The Tories will leave us with debt at 80 per cent of GDP. That is too high, which is why we have to plan for budgets that are tight.

Second, new growth needs more than just any old jobs. We cannot compete with new economies like that. We cannot risk drawing so much of our tax from financial services. So we need a new active partnership between business and government to rebalance our economy, play to our national strengths, switch to low-carbon energy, strengthen infrastructure, redouble enterprise, and reform our banking system so that, once again, small business and entrepreneurs have the life-blood of credit to grow. This is the new bargain with business. And in return we expect business to behave in a way that values and does not vaporise trust. People want responsibility – on top pay and ethics – throughout society.

Third, we have to renew our welfare states to drive up the rate of employment. In tough times we need as many hands on the pump as possible. For some that means making sure services like childcare and social care are there to help families juggle the ‘care crunch’ so they are free to work when they like. For others it means firm action to ensure that if you can take a job, you do take a job. It is a renewal of William Beveridge’s belief that good social insurance helps people keep working.

 

Fourth, we know that to get through the next decade we need to draw not simply on the wealth of nations, but the ‘hidden wealth of nations’. The challenges we face today are too big to all be left to government. Governments and political parties alike need to help make it easier for good people to come together to make a difference through social action and innovation – and it is this kind of civic inventiveness that modern democracies need to renew the ties that bind strong communities together. That is why Refounding Labour is so important.

Fifth, we know that in tough times taxpayers’ money must go as far as possible. Standards in public service have to go up even when budgets are coming down. Only a revolution in innovation can square that circle. And that is very hard to mandate from the centre. So sometimes, the centre has to let go – set high standards, yes, but then free up the frontline and devolve power to speed up new ways of doing business, delivering for citizens better than before.

Finally, we need to advance this cause with confidence. Progressives win by mobilising an appeal to optimism. Conservatives want voters to feel disempowered and cynical. They want to diminish the appeal of politics. Where they are in power, they want a fearful electorate to cling to nurse for fear of something worse. Our task is to offer hope in an age of uncertainty, and optimism in an era of doubt. That is how we seize the centre-ground and build a new progressive majority.

Here is a link to my pamphlet “The new centre ground: how can progressives win a majority?” .

 

Our policy review: next steps

At conference this year we published four reports which draw together what we heard from the public over the last year, and some of the emerging conclusions and findings from the shadow cabinet-led policy groups. These documents will now form the foundations of our policy work over the next year. If you’d like to debate these in your local Labour Party of CLP or trade union, let me know!

Towards a new economy

Fulfilling the promise of Britain

Restoring responsibility, strengthening our communities

Britain’s role in the world

 

 

Labour party conference speeches

Here’s the links to my speeches to Labour party conference this week. First, my speech as chair of the Policy Review on what we’re heard going round the country this last year. The video is here. We’ve also made a short film about the Policy Review. It’s here

Second, here’s the link to my speech on how we need to renew the welfare state for working people. The video is here. Let me know what you think!

 

The Tories’ problem with the centre-ground

Here’s the link to my Telegraph op ed, on why David Cameron has failed to put the Tories on the new centre-ground in British politics

 

Eliminating ‘power failures’: a new agenda for tackling inequality

You can read the chapter I’ve written for the Progress ‘Purple Book’ by clicking the link below. Labour achieved a huge amount in Government to tackle inequality, but there is still a vast amount to do. I’ve set out my ideas about how welfare reform based on my experience as a Labour Minister, and my work in Hodge Hill.

Eliminating ‘power failures’: a new agenda for tackling inequality

 

Nick Clegg’s knockabout

Here’s the my response to Nick Clegg’s speech, published in the Guardian today.