Benjamin Harris-Quinney: Almost 50% of black students believe that their pathway to government is blocked by discrimination

Benjamin Harris-Quinney is the Chairman of the The Bow Group

The Bow Group produced its first research paper in 1952, entitled “Coloured People in Britain”. It served as a study into the British Afro-Caribbean community, and the issues and barriers that were faced by these citizens, to integrate and succeed in British society.

Sixty years later, whilst much has changed, the Bow Group’s latest research paper “Race to the Top – The experience of black students in higher education”, sets forth broadly the same aims. This alone demonstrates a disappointing failure in strategy at national, local and party level, in ensuring citizens from all backgrounds have equality of opportunity in our country.

A recent survey commissioned by the Runnymede Trust demonstrated that people from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds are least likely to vote Conservative, and our studies show a similar disengagement with government as a whole.

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Matthew Tinsley: To find employment, older workers need support too

Matthew Tinsley is Economics & Social Policy Research Fellow at Policy Exchange.

The government finally launched its £1billion Youth Contract earlier this month in an attempt to help young unemployed people back into work. Today, the latest set of job market statistics will be published and yet again the focus will be on the plight of younger workers.

Employment prospects for young people are clearly important and helping them into work must be a key priority for any government. However, there remains a question over the impact this persistent focus might have had on unemployed people of other ages. Are we helping young people at the expense of older generations?

Many of the arguments used to back a strong focus of support on younger workers rely on evidence that young people suffer significant scars from periods of worklessness. The argument being that, as young people spend time unemployed their future employment and wage prospects deteriorate. Unemployment today causes long-term damage to their future prospects.

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Professor Philip Booth: Environmental problems and the “Big Community”

Professor Philip Booth is Editorial and Programme Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The concept of “community-based” solutions to environmental problems should be attractive to both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, given the former’s interest in decentralisation and the latter’s interest in free-markets.

What do community-based solutions to environmental problems involve? Professor Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner in economics, gave us an insight last night at the IEA’s F. A. Hayek memorial lecture which was attended by about 600 people. There is some hard and abstract theory, but amidst that there are important principles that can be enacted in policy. It is a pity that the same intellectual effort is not put into examining how communities can manage their own environmental problems as has been put into, for example, Downing Street’s “Nudge” unit.

Ostrom’s ideas are designed to deal with “common pool resources” and the management of environmental problems. The basic idea is that the specifics of different problems are different along a wide range of dimensions but that the government often does best by setting general rules and allowing those who have an interest in solving the problem to design the specific rules and enforcement mechanisms.

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Christian Guy: The Social Justice Strategy should become the centrepiece programme of the Coalition

Christian Guy is Director of Policy for the Centre for Social Justice.

The ability of the British people to move on and to rebuild distinguishes our country from countless others.  How quickly our determination in the face of adversity rises, and how effectively we recover in the wake of destruction.

Such resilience was evident again last summer, as Britain stared down the rioters, looters and vandals who turned parts of London and our cities into no-go areas.  Before the police gained control, it was ordinary citizens who took a stand.  As each morning came and the cowards went home, it was people of all ages, backgrounds and beliefs who came together to clean up and help those who had lost so much.  This was, and is, what citizenship looks like.

But in our ability to regroup and rebuild, there is one thing we have to be careful to avoid: the tendency to forget.  Seven months on it is easy to forget the sense of siege on the streets last August, the riot vans, the shops and businesses ablaze, our boarded up high streets and offices closing early.

That is why yesterday’s report from the Riots Communities and Victims Panel should act as another reminder to Government that although public order is restored, the threat is far from removed.  In general the Panel’s report contains helpful diagnosis and several valuable, if sometimes vague, recommendations for the political classes.  It is refreshing to read calls for a focus on the 500,000 ‘forgotten families’, often chaotic and dysfunctional, that we so often encounter at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), and it is about time that others in the policy field recognised how absent fathers damage children.  It is right that the Panel called for action in our schools to ensure those graduating the system are literate, numerate and ready for the real world.  Given the links between rioters and educational exclusion (a third of those rioting were excluded the previous year and a similar number persistently absent from school) we should hit schools that wash their hands of challenging pupils without consideration of their welfare.  And our undemanding, revolving door criminal justice system was again the subject of criticism.  There can be no doubt that the re-offending crisis which endangers our communities played its part in fuelling last summer’s disturbances – many involved had no fear of a criminal record because theirs is already a tome.

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Alex Morton: The National Planning Policy Framework changes nothing

Alex Morton is Policy Exchange's Senior Research Fellow for Housing and Planning.

The current planning system has utterly failed. Even after recent falls, the current system has seen house prices triple since the mid 1990s, and rents have soared with them.

At the same time as prices have gone up, housing construction has fallen back, because market forces do not really operate in housing. Analysts like the McKinsey Institute and the London School of Economics say that our creaking planning system puts us at a huge competitive disadvantage compared to our international competitors. On top of this the planning system lowers our quality of life.
 
Planning affects everything else in the country.  The current system leads to so many bad consequences, that it’s difficult to know where to start.  But amongst other things it means:

• A housing benefit bill heading to £25 billion.
• Around half of all areas now ‘unaffordable’ for private renters.
• A social housing waiting list of over 5 million people, almost 2 million households.
• Falling home ownership for the first time since the first world war.
• Ever smaller and unattractive housing.
• A destabilising housing bubble (which areas outside the Euro with more liberal planning avoided).
• The massive diversion of bank funds from small business investment into property speculation (75% of lending was for mortgages by 2007 and mortgage lending is rising while SME lending falls).
• The practice of ‘land-banking’, a necessary part of risk management in our slow and unwieldy system. This makes developers unable to cope with land prices falling and creates a cyclical trend of fewer and fewer homes.
• Destruction of green urban space, London lost greenery at 1.5% a year, while only 10% of England is developed. 67% of green belt is intensive farming or already used.
• Six of the top 50 most expensive cities in the World for office space (there simply isn’t that much derelict brownfield to convert and our system is bad at doing it).
• Destruction of manufacturing as no new sites can be built and old ones are converted (Brownfield first and the collapse of manufacturing as a share of GDP both begin in 1995).
• Land with planning permission costs over £1 million a hectare across England, versus £20,000 a hectare for intensive farming, meaning nothing left for quality construction.
• A quasi-cartel of housebuilders, creating high profit for large developers and less competition over time.

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Think tanks give mixed reaction to Budget

The TaxPayers' Alliance is, on the whole, pleased with the Budget:

“There is a lot of good news in the Budget for families who have struggled in the recession. The cuts in corporate and top rate taxes will improve the incentive to invest and innovate, meaning higher wages before tax. Then a higher personal allowance will mean they can keep more of the money they earn. Unfortunately some of the money is coming from higher taxes on pensioners; there is no relief for motorists from terribly high taxes on petrol and diesel; higher taxes on tobacco will be a boon for criminals selling dodgy cigarettes; and yet another higher rate on Stamp Duty is an unfortunate hike in an ugly tax. But overall this is a Budget that should ease the pressure on people’s living standards and allow most of them to keep more of their money.”

The Adam Smith Institute fears the cut in the 50p rate to only 45p will institionalise the top rate of tax at a new high level:

"It’s encouraging to see some steps in this budget towards greater tax simplification. Cutting the 50p tax rate to 45 percent is a step in the right direction, but the Chancellor should have scrapped this altogether. The danger is that the 45p will become a permanent rate.  It is also very welcome that the personal allowance has been raised, but the reduction of 40p rate threshold will mean that only basic rate taxpayers will benefit from the personal allowance rise. Up to 300,000 people will now find themselves upper rate taxpayers as a result. This will hit single-earner families particularly hard."

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Richard Mabey: The wider debate about bankers' bonuses is about income inequality - and we can win it

Richard Mabey is Research Secretary of the Bow Group.

Sometimes governments get so bogged down in the minutiae of policy making that they lose sight of what they set out to achieve.  With a portfolio of domestic crises, and international conflicts raging, the risk of the Prime Minister becoming a firefighter rather than a visionary is omnipresent.

Just occasionally, however, an opportunity comes along that can be a vehicle for real reform: reform that is proactive rather than reactive.  An example of such an opportunity stems from the recent debate over directors’ pay at RBS.  In the Stephen Hester debacle, comment was generally about how much say the public should have over its own capital, RBS being owned largely by the state.

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Patrick Nolan: There really is no money left and no scope for giveaways in next week’s budget

Patrick Nolan is the Chief Economist at the pro-market think tank Reform. Its report, “Reformers not spenders,” is available here.

In a foreword to Reform’s alternative Budget in June 2010 Paul Martin, the former Canadian Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, argued that Canada’s successful fiscal consolidation in the 1990s was based on clear fiscal targets and a position that these targets would be achieved “come hell or high water.” In a report released today Reform highlights that when it comes to fiscal consolidation the current UK government is, in comparison, wobbly.

When faced with difficult circumstances the Chancellor’s response has been to shift the goal posts. Rather than eliminating the structural deficit by 2014-15 (the target set in the 2010 Budget), last year’s Autumn Statement said this would happen by 2016-17. Rather than public sector net debt of 69.4 per cent of GDP by 2014-15, debt is expected to be 78.0 per cent. Rather than spending 40.9 per cent of GDP by 2014-15, spending will be 42.2 per cent.

This means that claims that the Coalition is meeting or beating its fiscal targets must be taken with a pinch of salt. Net government debt is still expected to increase by £471 billion over the next 5 years. Far from being out of the danger zone the public finances remain fragile. People who argue that the Coalition should ease up on its spending plans or introduce tax cuts do not grasp the fiscal position. There really is no money left and no scope for giveaways in next week’s budget.

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Policy Exchange begins its second decade with a focus on the striving classes

By Tim Montgomerie
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A belated happy tenth birthday to the Policy Exchange think tank. Alongside the Centre for Social Justice it has been the most influential centre right think tank of the last decade.

Francis Maude - described by PX's current director Neil O'Brien as the organisation's godfather - delivered a lecture on Wednesday evening to mark the think tank's role in delivering "modernisation".

During the long, hard years in opposition Francis Maude was likened to the Private Fraser of the Conservative Party. He is a much more optimistic figure of late and I recently noted how such a controversial figure in opposition has become one of the Coalition's most effective ministers.

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Neil O'Brien: If we want smaller government, we will have to think big

Neil O'Brien is Director of Policy Exchange.  Follow him on Twitter.

Public spending in Britain rocketed from consuming just over a third of our national income in 2000 to just under half in 2010 - from 36% to 48%. In other words, we are right back to where we were before Mrs Thatcher. The coalition aims to get the state share of spending back down to 40% by 2016. But that means it will still be higher after the cuts than it was during most of the Blair years (1997-2004). So we are not heading for some small-state paradise once this is over.

Could the government go further?  Over the long term I think it can, and must.  Economic research in react years has shown a clear link between higher public spending and slow growth. Our large but inefficient state is one reason the UK has been so comprehensively outclassed by our international competitors over the last couple of decades.  At the same time many people feel crushed by the rising cost of living. Anything the government could do that would allow sustainable reductions in income tax, VAT, fuel duty and council tax would help a lot.  

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