So announcements focused on lowering the rate of corporation tax, removing regulations, and more apprenticeships and work experience to help young people into jobs.
These changes don’t do much to help the poorest and the unemployed. Indeed, the fear of a so-called ‘jobless recovery’ (if we ever get there) remains very real. As growth slows under this government, unemployment’s going up. Nearly one million young people are now out of work: 100,000 short-term work experience places and 40,000 apprenticeships won’t make much of a dent in that.
The attack on regulations owes more to ideology than helping people into work. Cancelling the right to request time off to train or for parents to work flexibly will make it harder for people to get into or stay in work, or to progress when they do.
It’s especially ironic that the announcements of new enterprise zones and bigging up the role of local enterprise partnership should coincide with the demise of the regional development agencies. The sums available to the new bodies fall well short of what is needed to regenerate the most disadvantaged regional economies and are less than was available under the RDAs.
So we’re left with cutting corporation tax as the same-old Tory one-club approach. But corporate profitability is affected by more than just tax – the overall economic context is important if business is to thrive. With billions taken off consumers’ spending capacity as a result of the chancellor’s fiscal decisions last year, and with demand from a significantly shrunk public sector having a direct knock-on effect on private companies who will see order books adversely affected, this isn’t a Britain that’s ‘open for business’ at all. Investment in infrastructure, jobs and skills should have come before tax cuts. But Tory ideology doesn’t acknowledge that.