Education has a crucial role to play in lifting this country out of recession and I urge Alistair Darling to use the Budget to support staff, students and, crucially, the country by properly investing in further and higher education. The Budget is the perfect opportunity for the government to demonstrate its commitment to both education and helping people who need to try and restart their lives.
 
It is appalling that at a time when we should be supporting lifelong learning that money is being taken away from it. The withdrawal of funding for people studying second degrees and from adult education courses are hitting the people who most need support as we try to come out of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.
 
UCU is deeply concerned that over 100 universities have signalled an intention to cut jobs. Such widespread redundancies would severely damage our ability to provide high-level teaching for students and halt research in key areas. The recent axing of the University of Reading’s School of Health and Social Care has taught us that nowhere is safe. It seems utterly perverse that at a time when the UK is crying out for social workers that Reading saw fit to shut down a profitable and strategically important department. If the government is serious about meeting its national priorities it must stop large scale job losses, and provide extra funding where necessary. The stakes are too high to sit idly by.

The government must also deal with the shortfall in further education funding. The current building crisis, which threatens as many as 144 building projects, is in need of urgent Treasury support. Colleges really come to the fore in tough economic times, playing a key role in helping to retrain adults, especially those made redundant. However, they need the funding to complete new building programmes that had approval to go ahead. I have written to the government, and asked them for additional money within the budget, and will hold further education minister, Sion Simon, to his promise, that ‘no college will go bust’.
 
Funding allocations for further education colleges need to be increased, especially as more 16 – 18 year olds will remain in education. UCU welcomes the move by the Welsh Assembly to inject £8.9m into the further education sector in Wales to support those colleges and school sixth forms hit by recent budget cuts. This needs to happen in England too, where current budgets are not large enough to deal with the demand in places from young people, who must not be condemned to joblessness at the start of their adult lives.

We are extremely concerned that any cuts in the government’s workplace learning programme ’Train to Gain’ will create severe financial difficulties for many colleges, affecting students and lecturers. Staff in further education already work some of the longest hours in the UK, with college lecturers in England earning six per cent less, on average, than teachers. They have a vital part to play in ‘re-skilling the population’, and Alistair Darling should follow the example of Wales where further education lecturers are now paid the same as teachers.

In higher education, we need to encourage people to consider university. Saddling students with thousands of pounds of debt is not the way to achieve this. We fully expect the government, with Treasury input, to bring sensible alternative funding models for higher education to the table as part of its promised review into student funding.

In the week that the government publishes its ’strategic plan’ to invest in Britain’s economic and industrial future, ministers should be looking to harness the power education has to change people’s lives, and transform our economy. In tough economic times it is essential that the government properly funds it.

Now I could start with an appalling joke – along the lines of a dragon, a banker and a tax inspector walk into a pub… However a comedienne I’m not and this is unfortunately not a laughing matter.
 
Two issues will dominate this week; the Budget and St. George’s Day, on a personal level the two are very much entwined. On Wednesday the Chancellor of the Exchequer literally has the future of an English (not to mention British) institution in his hands. In a Budget, which is going to be full of content and controversial policies, there will be many people across the country, in pubs and breweries everywhere looking for the details of one specific issue – probably buried in the detail.

Will the current proposals for the “Duty Escalator” on beer be imposed? In last year’s Budget, the chancellor implemented an increase on beer tax of 9 per cent and proposed the creation of an alcohol duty escalator, which is designed to raise duty on beer by an additional 2 per cent above the rate of inflation in each of the next four years.

As a regular consumer of Burton beer I already pay 33 per cent of the cost of every pint I buy in my local to the Treasury. If the duty escalator goes ahead a typical pint of Grolsch or Pedigree (my personal favourites) could go up by as much as 10p overnight. I can’t exaggerate the impact that an additional tax rise will have on the longterm viability of the community pub.

Even with the current tax regime, over five pubs are closing every day across the country. If draught beer, sold in local community pubs, becomes even more expensive in comparison to the options available in supermarkets then it really will be the final nail in the coffin. I am not going to write again in detail about the importance of the British pub to local communities, but I ask you just one question – where would you go after your GC if the pub was closed?

Today Janet Dean the MP for Burton is hosting an event in the Commons celebrating Burton produced beer. Our constituency is the home of British brewing and decisions taken on Wednesday will have an immediate impact on our local communities and our local economy.

So I call on our Chancellor, Alistair Darling MP, to not protect the British pub but simply to leave it alone. Remove the duty escalator and freeze current beer duty. If not we will be pricing pubs out of the market and ultimately obtain less tax revenue as demand falls.

Next week’s budget was always going to be an important one for the government’s child poverty ambitions: the 2010 target to halve child poverty is fast approaching, and we’re still some 700,000 children short of being on track to meet the target. Campaigners have been urging ministers to find at least an additional £3bn to invest in financial support for families with children to bring it within reach. Now the exceptionally difficult economic circumstances and the fallout of recession mean that it’s all the more imperative that the government takes action fast.

We know that failure to protect family security in the 1980s recession left a legacy of intergenerational poverty that still costs us billions of pounds today. If we’re to avoid the long-term scarring effects of recession on the poorest, we need to ensure adequate financial protection through the benefits and tax credits system, as well as investment to help employers protect jobs. Future-proofing the economy also means investment in training and skills to enable those whose jobs are at risk or who are out of work to be equipped for new jobs when the economic recovery begins.

Some have argued that we can’t afford further stimulus for the economy, pointing to the dire state of the public finances as an excuse to “do nothing” now. Such an approach would not only be disastrous for our most vulnerable families, but makes no economic sense. Protecting the incomes of the poorest is the quickest and most effective form of stimulus for the economy, as they immediately spend the additional income in local businesses: family security and economic security are inseparable, the right moral and economic action to take.

Measures to ensure that those with the broadest shoulders bear more of the cost means that we can afford a package that is fiscally neutral over the medium term, without ratcheting up unaffordable public debt. Today the poorest pay proportionately more of their income in taxes than do the richest in society, and it’s clear the public are no longer prepared to tolerate special treatment for a privileged low tax elite. Increasing the top rate of income tax, reversing last year’s inheritance tax cuts, and removing top rate relief on pension contributions would not only raise substantial sums to meet the cost of the child poverty stimulus package, but would also help to address the inequality that is the underlying cause of Britain’s continuing high levels of child poverty, and which has so far shown little shift.

Last year, Alistair Darling provided a brave budget for children. One year on, the need is more urgent and more acute: now is the moment to be bold. If we fail to look after our children now we are storing up major social and economic problems for the future, and letting down another generation of our kids. Despite the recession and the pressure on the public purse, the country still has the resources to keep the promise to end child poverty. It’s a promise that must be kept.

This year’s traditional process of asking for various concessions in financial stimuli in the Budget can be likened to a child asking his parents, both of whom were just laid off, for a new X-Box. Very unlikely.

Instead, his parents will (with a cynical naiveté) unpack his old bicycle from the garage, dust it off, oil it, and, if he’s lucky, re-paint it. Then they’ll present it to him with much un-warranted gusto.

Brown and Darling are Mum and Dad. We (the collective, we) are the child.

With this analogy in mind, we must anticipate Wednesday’s Budget with relatively low expectations compared to years prior. There will likely be flashy headlines but ultimately there’s unlikely to be anything too juicy – just a bit of polishing and tinkering. There isn’t any money in the family purse.

The British Property Federation, which represents owners, investors, managers and advisors in the UK property sector, in its submission to the chancellor, has highlighted its policy priorities with the words ‘revenue neutrality’ reverberating in the background.

Last year’s untimely removal of tax relief for vacant commercial and industrial premises continues to prove the single most painful policy for the property sector. But it is much more than a property-only issue. Empty rates (as they are known) affect all businesses – large and small, owners and occupiers of commercial property. The BPF believes this tax on business failure and the impact of the recession will make the economic recovery more drawn out, and is therefore calling for reinstatement of empty property rate relief. While we know that such a move will be of significant cost to the Exchequer, we believe, in this case, the damage caused by this tax outweighs the need for fiscal prudence.

Real estate investment trusts (REITs), which are a tax efficient vehicle for property companies, are felt to be a one of the few chariots to help stimulate the property market. As it stands, there are a few technicalities that make UK REITs inflexible compared to other REIT models such as those in Australia and the United States. We are therefore asking the chancellor to liberalise the REIT regime to allow greater growth and investment in UK commercial property. Here, we believe the benefits of such changes outweigh the minimal cost to the Exchequer and therefore the more should be strongly considered by the chancellor.

Lastly, we believe a change to stamp duty to encourage bulk purchases of residential properties by property companies and institutional investors could be an answer to the ailing housing market. By changing stamp duty thresholds to even the playing field between individual purchases and bulk purchases, more institutional investors could enter the UK residential market and drive a recovery. Again, minded that the purse is empty, we believe such a change will stimulate the ailing housing market and fall within the ‘affordable’ category for the Exchequer.

Wednesday’s Budget will contain initiatives and concessions that Brown and Darling (Mum and Dad) believe will give them the most ‘bang for their buck’. The BPF believes Wednesday’s Budget must address the commercial and industrial property market in order to help Britain out of the current economic downturn.

The Work Foundation believes that the budget must contain another fiscal stimulus package with a focus on the following: 

•    A short-time working scheme to keep people in jobs and reduce the numbers becoming unemployed. The government, through the benefits system, should partially compensate workers for lost wages where a reduction in hours and earnings had been agreed with their employer.

•    Maintaining the quality of service offered by JobCentre Plus and pressing ahead with the welfare reform programme. The level of Jobseekers’ Allowance should be increased by at least £10 per week – at a cost of approximately £0.8 billion in the next year.

•    The creation of more (short-term) public sector employment. In previous recessions the public sector has stepped in as an employer of last resort. We support the proposal for a job guarantee for those that have been unemployed for more than 12 months. But these must be worthwhile jobs, filling genuine vacancies in the public sector and with proper opportunities for skills development.

•    Investment in “shovel ready” public infrastructure projects which can enhance the level of growth in the future. So far the “investment” component of the UK’s fiscal package looks small in comparison with the action taken elsewhere in the EU and by the US government. Spending should be targeted on housing, education (resolving the capital budget crisis in the FE sector) and “green jobs”, with incentives for R&D in environmental technologies. We believe that investment must be on at least the scale of the VAT cut – around £12bn.

•    Specific action to reduce the risk of youth unemployment, principally by encouraging young people to continue in education and upgrade their skills. This must be a priority, simply because the UK has a very large cohort of young people about to enter the labour market whose lives could be scarred by an early experience of unemployment. The number of FE/HE places should be expanded, the financial support available to students from poor backgrounds increased and the school leaving age raised to 18 at the earliest possible opportunity.
 
•    Offering a further targeted fiscal boost through an increase in tax credits for low paid families. We noted in Hard Labour, our paper published before the pre-budget report, that the most effective fiscal measures put extra money in the hands of those most likely to spend it. We remain committed to the view that there is still scope for government to implement such a policy at a cost of £2.7bn.

This package has been costed at £23bn, with a degree of uncertainty about the impact of a short-time working programme and the extent to which the public sector will be permitted to fill all potential vacancies. Measures on this scale are essential if the worst effects of a prolonged slump are to be avoided. Hesitation and political timidity are the surest routes to higher unemployment and economic failure. Now is the time for judicious risk taking and decisive action.