Ed Balls, the shadow schools secretary: 'Once again we have clear evidence that the victims of the ... unfair and economically dangerous cuts are the poorest and those in most need.' Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA Children from the poorest homes will suffer the most from the coalition's decision to axe the school rebuildling programme, the government has admitted for the first time, prompting renewed accusations that it is failing to keep its promise to make cuts fairly.
The 675 schools that were told in July that plans for refurbished or rebuilt buildings had been stopped have higher proportions of children on free school meals, who speak English as a second language and have special educational needs, than the national average. The Department for Education's (DfE) own assessment of the consequences of the decision to scrap Labour's Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme concludes that children from disadvantaged homes will be more affected.
Ed Balls, the shadow schools secretary, said: "Once again we have clear evidence that the victims of the Tory-Lib Dem government's unfair and economically dangerous cuts are the poorest and those in most need.
"Michael Gove has got the wrong priorities. He has spent four months working on a plan for just 16 free schools while some 700,000 children have started the new term in schools that will now be condemned to having second-class facilities."
The DfE insisted that other plans, including a pupil premium to pay schools more for children from poorer backgrounds, would help close the attainment gap between rich and poor. But the admission adds weight to recent claims that the coalition's promises to introduce spending cuts fairly have been broken. Research by the Trades Union Congress to be unveiled at their conference tomorrow reveals that the full impact of the public spending cuts will fall on the poorest in society who are most reliant on state services.
The decision over the axing of BSF also highlights the problems the coalition face once the cuts begin to fall in its MPs' constituencies. There was a backlash against the education secretary Michael Gove from MPs on both sides of the coalition under pressure from their constituents. Today, the Sunday Times reports that the Liberal Democrat children's minister Sarah Teather arranged a meeting between Gove and council leaders from her Brent constituency days before those schools won a reprieve from the cuts.
The equality impact assessment required by law, after the decision to stop the school rebuilding programme, concludes: "It is clear from the data that the stoppage of these school projects has inadvertently impacted slightly more on children who can be seen to be disadvantaged in terms of social deprivation." Schools that were previously earmarked for rebuilding had on average 17% of pupils on free school meals compared with a 13% national average.
A DfE spokesman said: "We understand people's disappointment but the BSF programme was wasteful, needlessly bureaucratic and seriously behind schedule. It would have been inexcusable to have continued with the programme.
"Ministers have been clear that their overriding priority is closing the gap in attainment for pupils from disadvantaged communities by focusing capital investment in areas of the greatest need and introducing a new pupil premium to provide additional support in the classroom." Source
George Osborne revealed an extra £4bn was to be earmarked for the Treasury, last week. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters George Osborne was today forced to defend himself from claims by a coalition colleague that he was indulging in an "immature turf war" with the Department for Work and Pensions over plans to cut at least extra £4bn from the welfare benefit bill.
The £4bn annual cut emerged from Treasury briefings last week, but was not accepted by senior figures at the DWP. The £4bn figure focuses on out of work-related benefits and is separate from plans to limit the age threshold for access to child benefit, or the winter fuel allowance.
Ministers have been looking at reducing the age at which child benefit is available to 16, as well as to raise the age threshold for the winter fuel allowance from 60 to 70. Such reforms could save billions.
In the Commons, Bob Russell, the Liberal Democrat backbencher, attacked Osborne for indicating he planned to make an extra £4bn in cuts during a BBC interview last week. Russell said: "While I have no time for the welfare cheats, to try and blame this country's financial ills on this small category of the population is unethical".
He added: "It would be ethical to show an equal determination to tackle the cheats who avoid and evade tax.
"I find it somewhat immature this turf war between your office and the secretary of state for work and pensions".
The Speaker, John Bercow, had granted a request from Russell that Osborne be forced to make a Commons statement on his welfare cuts plans. Osborne denied he was involved in any dispute with the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, describing some of his welfare reform plans as inspirational.
But Osborne insisted he had always suggested he would be looking for extra cuts in the welfare budget, and added "staggering figures" are expected to be published later this week by the Office of National Statistics on the scale of "the tax gap" that Gordon Brown allowed to develop. The tax gap is the difference between what is forecast to be collected and what is collected.
Osborne promised "the government will be taking steps to reduce tax avoidance including tax avoidance by some of the richest people in society". He said the overall aim is to cut £61bn from the departmental budgets – £17bn more than planned by Labour in its pre-election deficit reduction programme.
But Osborne implied that the treasury wanted to retain some of the extra DWP savings to reduce the overall deficit, and not allow the savings to be ploughed back entirely into potentially expensive DWP plans to reform the benefits system to increase work incentives.
Duncan Smith believes better work incentives will in the medium term reduce the overall size of the welfare bill. He also believes changes in the way that the government can calculate an individual's income in real time through better computer software will make it easier to introduce welfare reform, and reduce fraud and error.
The government in the emergency budget in June announced plans to save £11bn from welfare, and at the time Osborne indicated he was looking for further savings from the welfare budget if at all possible.
The chancellor said yesterday: "The failure of welfare reform of the past decade had been one of the worst failures of the last government."
The shadow work and pensions secretary, Yvette Cooper, highlighted leaked letters suggesting reforms to the employment support allowance, the chief benefit for the sick, have been agreed within government delivering an extra net savings of £2.5bn by 2014-5. She claimed these savings can only be achieved by creating an additional 800,000 jobs, or by targeting those that are genuinely too sick to work. Source
Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary. Photograph: Phil Noble/ Reuters Unions today approved the use of widespread, joint industrial action to oppose government cuts, to be preceded by a campaign to force the coalition into a U-turn through multiple protests in areas where coalition MPs are most vulnerable.
The government said it wanted to form a "genuine partnership" with the unions, and union officials confirmed they would remain in discussions with ministers while opposing the coalition's economic strategy.
But on the platform at the Trades Union Congress annual meeting in Manchester, union leaders issued a flood of strike rhetoric, condemning the coalition's plans to reduce public spending to cut the deficit rapidly and claiming it would lead to a "darker, more brutish" society.
The TUC agreed a motion which will see it launch an intense programme of lobbying MPs in the coalition while reserving the right to take "co-ordinated" strike action, which could include general strikes once the cuts start to bite in the new year.
The action plan will include a Westminster rally on the eve of the comprehensive spending review in October, a national demonstration in March and a co-ordinated campaign of industrial action after that.
The TUC is attempting to delay any strike action until the spring, when it believes it will get more public support as people start to feel the impact of the cuts. One senior union official said: "It's not a question of if, but when."
That strategy was immediately tested when the biggest local authority in the country, Birmingham city council, revealed it had written to its 26,000 non-school staff threatening them with redundancy if they did not accept new employment terms. The council said it had to save £330m but unions said they would resist the move.
Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said: "Ministers must understand this: what they take apart now could take generations to rebuild. Decent public services are the glue that holds a civilised society together, and we diminish them at our peril. Cut services, put jobs at peril, and increase inequality – that is the way to make Britain a darker, brutish, more frightening place. And let no one doubt that unions and the TUC will protect and defend dedicated public service workers."
Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport union, who is on the more militant wing of the union movement, called for civil disobedience to defend public services and told the TUC conference: "We lie down or stand up and fight."
Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, said that "when the call was there", they would move to "co-ordinate industrial action to defend all we hold dear, all that past generations have fought for".
With the unions separately issuing verbal threats, the government attempted to seize the moral high ground by offering an olive branch. The Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, said: "We are not going back to the days where there was a complete stand-off between the trade unions and the government. Those days are gone."
Downing Street emphasised the desire of the government to work with the unions, and denied it had any plans to amend trade union laws.
"We want there to be a genuine partnership with the trade unions," the prime minister's official spokesman said. "We need to deal with the deficit, we want to work with everyone in tackling that."
Addressing the TUC, Harriet Harman, the acting Labour leader, offered the unions the party's support. "We will not be silenced by the right wing characterising protest as undemocratic," she said. "Trade unionists have the democratic rights to protest. We will not be deterred by suggestions that this is illegitimate – it is perfectly within the law.
"We will not be cowed by accusations that this is irresponsible and putting services at risk – the very opposite is true."
The threat to jobs in Birmingham drew sharp criticism from unions. Stephen Hughes, the chief executive of the authority, which is run by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration, sent letters to the entire non-schools staff – covering everyone from street sweepers to clerks, carers, and cleaners – warning that they would receive new contracts imposing cuts in pay and conditions.
Failure to accept the new deals would result in dismissal from the council with three months' pay.
The GMB's Birmingham and West Midlands regional officer, Joe Morgan, said unions representing workers at the council would co-operate in their response to the letter, with a mass meeting already organised for next week.
"The workers have been told that if they don't accept new contracts they will be dismissed and re-engaged on worse conditions," said Morgan. "The council's chief executive is acting like a school bully by saying that workers have to accept this or they will be sacked without compensation. Our members are in shock and are up in arms."
The unions hope to emulate the success they believe the education unions have had in opposing both the cuts to the school building programme and the government's academies programme.
The education secretary, Michael Gove, had suggested there would be hundreds of new academies and free schools by this September, but education unions have claimed they prevented the widespread conversion by working with local parent groups to oppose them.
Coalition MPs also came under intense pressure in their constituencies when 675 school rebuilding programmes were cancelled. The unions now want to form local campaigns against cuts in social services, children's centres and health provision to put maximum pressure on MPs.
Union leaders believe that once the cuts start to really bite in the spring, when the spending review decisions start to take effect, the public will back their campaigns and support industrial action where necessary. Source
The elderly poor will be among the hardest hit in the government's forthcoming cuts, according to TUC research. Photograph: WoodyStock / Alamy/Alamy The coalition's spending cuts will hit the poorest in society 10 times harder than the richest as the health, social and education services they rely on are slashed, an extensive new study for the Trades Union Congress has found. The TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, says the research proves that the Conservatives are breaching their election promise to introduce cuts fairly.
Lone parents and pensioners will suffer the most from the public spending cuts, the study finds, with everyone but the top 10% of earners losing more from cuts than from tax and benefit changes. Barber told the Guardian that the study, which will be unveiled on Monday as the TUC meets for its annual conference in Manchester, proved that the Conservatives had betrayed their election promises to protect frontline services and ensure any cuts are fair.
"It's a real threat to social cohesion," Barber said. "Public services are a part of the glue that holds society together. This mantra that the Tories followed, 'we're all in this together' – public services are a part of being a shared community. When you start weakening the seams you threaten the fabric of society."
The TUC intervention comes as the coalition leadership struggles to contain a row over the announcement by the chancellor, George Osborne, of £4bn in welfare cuts and amid warnings from the Police Federation that 40,000 frontline police jobs are at risk if they go ahead with the cuts suggested. The Treasury is now at the height of the negotiations with ministers over the next public spending round, with departments jockeying to protect their budgets from the worst-case 40% cuts.
David Cameron and Nick Clegg must also face their parties at the forthcoming party conferences to justify the government's decisions and maintain unity across the coalition. That will be tested on Monday when Osborne will be called to the Commons to answer an urgent question from Bob Russell, a Liberal Democrat who objected to Osborne's assertion that he would reduce the number of people who claim welfare benefits as a "lifestyle choice". Russell, the MP for Colchester, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Yes, let's deal with the welfare cheats. But the notion that they are responsible for all the ills of the nation is in fact a smokescreen and it's not very ethical."
The research predicts the impact of the cuts across the country using publicly available data profiling the services people use, from healthcare to education and transport, and the planned cuts. It shows the profound effect the deficit reduction plans will have on families and lone parents in particular.
Excluding benefit cuts, single people will lose the equivalent, on average, of £817 a year in services, while a couple with no children will lose £1,012 and a single pensioner £1,017. A lone parent, meanwhile, will lose £1,880.
Osborne promised at the time of the budget in June that his plans would be fair and hit the richest hardest. In the dying days of the election campaign, Cameron also guaranteed that the cuts agenda would not affect frontline services.
Barber said that Liberal Democrats had fundamentally changed their position on the economy to secure a place in the coalition, but he also questioned the Conservatives' mandate. "Have they got a mandate? Not with a proportion of thirtysomething per cent of the votes. I don't think there was a clear mandate for savage cuts of the sort we're going to see.
"One of the key things they said was that their intention was to make the necessary changes to reduce the deficit, but in a way that would be fair, would protect the most vulnerable, and so on. Yet what is already clear … from the cuts that have already been decided on [is that] the impact is overwhelmingly on people at the bottom. This piece of work will demonstrate that. That will be magnified dramatically when we see an even bigger programme of cuts with the comprehensive spending review. On that absolutely core issue they will be absolutely in breach of what they committed to when they were campaigning in the election."
The TUC will launch a campaign next week to convince the public that the spending cuts are excessive and unwarranted, but Barber said it would not be calling immediately for a general strike. "There is potential for real disputes. We've got this whole cocktail of issues coming together: a pay freeze, potentially significant job losses … privatisation and restructuring.
"All of that adds up to a hell of an agenda of issues that could give rise to pretty difficult disputes, of course it could, but this campaign is about mobilising opinion and popular support across the community as a whole. It's a campaign to try to win political support and make people realise that although at the moment there seems to be public support there won't be that public support once the reality dawns of what it actually means."
TUC analysis shows in 10 local authorities long term youth unemployment more than doubled. Photograph Matt Cardy/Getty Images The number of young long-term unemployed people is still rising across two-thirds of the country, according to a TUC report today that slams the government for scrapping youth employment schemes.
With official unemployment data today expected to show a further rise in the long-term unemployed, the TUC argues young people were some of the worst affected by Britain's deep recession and their outlook could darken further as public sector job losses intensify.
Although the economy returned to growth at the end of last year, long-term youth unemployment is up more than a fifth on a year ago, according to the TUC's analysis of Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) data.
It says the number of 18-24 year olds on the dole for more than six months increased in 142 local authorities across the UK in the year to June, compared with just 78 where it has fallen.
The trade unions group is calling on the government to reconsider its "deep, early" spending cuts following signs they are already dampening growth and costing jobs.
"Young people were hit particularly hard by the recession and with the government focusing on spending cuts, rather than getting people back into work, they may not fare much better during the recovery," said TUC general secretary Brendan Barber.
The research gives more firepower to government critics who have lambasted its scrapping of the schemes such as the Future Jobs Fund, which helped charities and businesses to train young people and get them into long-term jobs.
"The government has yet to announce similarly well-funded support to get people back into decent paid work. Young people struggling for work this summer should be very concerned by the government's silence," added Barber.
In Scotland, where many areas are particularly dependent on public sector jobs and so are seen as vulnerable in coming months, the youth unemployment situation appeared particularly bleak. In 10 local authorities across the UK the number of long-term young claimants more than doubled, with Medway in Kent suffering the sharpest jump at 158% followed by three Scottish areas, West Lothian, South Ayrshire and the city of Edinburgh. The biggest falls in long-term youth unemployment were in Southampton and Stirling.
Economists expect Office for National Statistics data today to show some modest improvement in the labour market with the number of people claiming jobless benefits forecast to fall by 16,500 in July, the sixth drop in a row. But behind that, a further rise is anticipated in the number of people working part-time because they cannot get full-time jobs. As nervous companies shy away from hiring new full-time staff the number of long-term unemployed people over 50 is also expected to stay stubbornly high.
Still, ONS research suggests the labour market has been more resilient during this recession than in those of the 1980s and 1990s. Echoing relief among economists and business groups that unemployment failed to soar as high as initially feared during the downturn, the statisticians said that while this recession was "remarkable for its depth and duration", the loss of employment was relatively low. In an article yesterday, the ONS cited support this time around from lower interest rates, softer wage growth and the rise in part-time work at the expense of full-time jobs.
For those who did lose their jobs, the impact was also perhaps less severe than might have been expected. A separate article from the ONS concluded that although the number of households in which no-one worked rose during the recession, there was no change to average household disposable income partly thanks to a fall in income tax payments.
But the TUC argues that while the overall unemployment situation was not as grim as previously feared, young people still face particular hurdles to getting jobs. The youth unemployment rate at 17% is more than double the national rate and recent research suggested each graduate vacancy now receives an average of 69 applications. Source
tabloid 中譯為八卦小報，意在貶抑，原指的是報紙的尺寸，相對則是大尺寸（broad sheet）版面的報紙，tabloid雖然多是醜聞、暴露的照片，但是影響力絕不在 broad sheet之下，英國的《世界新聞報（News of the World）》每周出版，銷路達二百五十萬份，是世界上賣得最好的報紙。
