Emma pops up again

Emma Harrison made another appearance on the BBC today, this time on Pienaar's Politics on 5 Live.  I haven't listened to it yet.  Fortunately the Scottish Sunday Express has provided a summary of Harrison's views under the headline "PM warned over vulnerable families".  She is described as "the woman appointed by David Cameron to get families back into work".   And she's worried that the £26,000 benefits cap could harm some families with a number of seriously disabled children, families in which the parents are the full-time carers and which would cost the state millions without that parental care.  Can't argue with that.  And she's right that it's a "populist movement" (though I wouldn't use that phrase) that wants to cap benefits.  However, it grates when she says, "I know families ...".  We are always told that it's Harrison's personal knowledge of the unemployed which informs her opinions.  And she seems to row back a bit at the end of the article:"Of course we should reform welfare. We should make it work for today. Somehow it has become possible for 120,000 families to live on benefits. Now within that group of families there might be a small percentage who will always have to live on benefits because of some very, very extreme circumstances." 
If Harrison is going to use her position to challenge the government's more extreme moves, we can only applaud.  But she will need to be armed with some genuine figures.  And she will need to face some informed questioning about A4e's activities.
Perhaps I'll grit my teeth and listen to the programme tomorrow.


Monday:  Harrison's remarks have made other newspapers, including the Financial Times, (which thinks her remarks will be a blow to David Cameron), the Mirror (which says that the "Jobs Tsar" has turned on the Tories) and a brief piece in the Scotsman.  

Playing with figures

The unemployed have enough to worry about without being made to feel guilty; but the Sunday Express quotes "Westminster sources" (must be true, then) that "Rising unemployment will send the welfare benefits bill rocketing by £7.5billion a year." And "It means every household in Britain faces a bill equivalent to £3,425 a year to pay for the growing army of the unemployed." (Does that include unemployed households?)

The problem with all this throwing about of figures is that nobody is sure what's included. "Recent figures from the Commons library show unemployment is already costing around £61billion a year. That sum includes the total for jobless benefits – including jobseekers’ allowance and incapacity benefits – and lost tax revenue resulting from reduced earnings and spending." Does it include the huge cost of the various programmes, such as New Deal, aimed at getting the unemployed back to work? I don't know. But as the article points out, the government has "promised that extra measures to offer training and advice will be in place to deal with any sharp rise." Presumably that means FND and the support contracts. So not everybody is losing money. And as Dave Osler points out on the Liberal Conspiracy blog, "Total bonuses to those in financial services reached £7.6bn in the five-month period between December 2008 and April 2009, which is regarded as the peak season. But in back of an envelope terms, you can double that figure for the full year, and you come to a total considerably higher than the annual £11 billion cost of jobseekers' allowance." In fact you can draw any conclusion you want to. The Benefit Busters programme drew an unexpected response from the Adam Smith Institute, that cheerleader for capitalism. It concluded that "Those in minimum wage jobs who can be rewarded with more money on benefits need to have their allowance levels raised so they are removed from paying tax."

The debate is welcome; but let's have the real figures, and let's not lose sight of the misery of unemployment.