Are There Secondary Effects In The Budget?
I have a feeling that there could be some secondary effects from the budget and particularly the announcement of a National Living Wage.
Nowhere will this measure be felt more than at the bottom end of the employers. If you read the tabloids, you get the impression that dodgy low-quality businesses are the big employers of illegal immigrants, keeping them in squalor and paying them in cash, if they’re lucky.
With a solidly enforced living wage, will this make it more difficult for these companies and operators to survive, so this country might be less of a magnet for illegal immigrants. I don’t know, but a higher level of living wage gives the Tax Authorities a good reason to investigate the sort of businesses who rely on no-questions-asked labour.
I very much watch innovation in the media and also have been in touch several times with universities in the last few years. I think we’ll see companies using their local innovators to make sure they support their now more highly-paid employees. I know several universities are giving students real projects in local companies.
So will we be pushing our employment up-market? I think we will!
As an example, an industry that we all seem to use more these days are couriers to deliver the goods we’ve bought on-line. They have got so much better over the last few years and that is just not the delivery reliability, but the staff as well, who seem to be polite and very much on-the-ball. Incidentally, most staff who’ve delivered to me lately seem to have been British born and educated.
I don’t know what will happen in the next few years, but I have a feeling that the Chancellor’s announcements may be helping to move the country on from a low-wage, low-skilled and badly-supported work force to one where a job, where you work hard and efficiently gives you a real living wage.
Of course Labour think that the restructuring of Tax Credits will mean many will lose out. But then Labour’s solution to a low-wage, low-skill economy was to pay people at the low-end to do nothing or crap jobs.
The other thing the Chancellor must do to help, is make sure that our transport links are improved. It’s one thing to get a job and often it’s a much more difficult thing to get to that job every day. You just have to see what the Overground and the fleets of new buses have done for Hackney and the surrounding boroughs, here in London, over the past few years.
The Anonymous Widower 
There is a scheme in Manchester, whose name I forget but it is Community something or other, which matches projects needing to be carried out within voluntary and not for profit organisations with students looking for a project as part of their course. Christie used it a lot when I worked them, and we had some really good work. I remember some geography students came and researched volunteer led community transport services in the (very large) catchment area of the hospital, to see if patients living a long distance away could be brought in by such in their home area each day for radiotherapy, instead of having to come into hospital for up to 6 weeks. The answer was that yes they could, and most patients preferred that option. Massive saving to NHS, great practical project for the students, at a very very low cost.
Comment by nosnikrapzil | July 9, 2015 |
Every business or organisation these days is close to a University, as we have so many of them!
Comment by AnonW | July 9, 2015 |
Transport is crucial. Our daughter had my old car when she she was in final year of uni; once she graduated she signed on with temp agency whilst deciding what to do career wise. One particular job the agency sent her on she was given largely because she had a car and the place is inaccessible by public transport. It worked out well, five years later she is still there, and has a an interesting well paid job which uses her degree subjects, and all because she able to get there under her own steam.
Comment by nosnikrapzil | July 9, 2015 |
It is my belief that everybody should be able to get to the nearest hospital, shopping centre or cinema/theatre using public transport.
Obviously, in some rural areas this would be difficult. But there are things that could be dome even there.
Comment by AnonW | July 9, 2015 |