Matthew Tinsley
Economics & Social Policy Research Fellow, 2011-2014
Taxing Jobs argues that because pay and productivity have remained strongly linked over the course of the recession, wages will begin to rise and productivity will improve as employers take on more staff. Providing a boost to the labour market in the form of a cut to the payroll tax for businesses would speed up the rate at which companies take on more staff. This would reduce unemployment more quickly and force employers to improve productivity and therefore pay among their workforces.
Parenting Alone calls for more support to help lone parents with young children into work. The report finds although the number of lone parents working is higher than in the 1990s, 650,000 – or 1 in 3 – are still unemployed. It recommends more intensive support for lone parents when their youngest child is 3 or 4 and measures to stabilise the income of those moving from benefits into work or to higher paid work.
Cultures of Dependency says that in the future employment support must better understand the pressures that families, social networks and communities put on unemployed people. Devolving power and money would allow individual Jobcentres to pilot new innovative ways of delivering local personalised support to help people find a job. Support could also be targeted at whole families, peer groups or estates in order to tackle serious barriers to work like a poor work ethic or family problems.
Outcomes, Not Just Incomes says that nearly one in five children (2.3 million) across the UK are living materially deprived lives and are not included in the government’s headline measure of relative income poverty. This is despite £170 billion of expenditure between 2003 and 2010. The report identifies a number of problems with the existing measure of child poverty and recommends a new Child Poverty Bill that would measure social poverty as well as household income.
Too Much to Lose finds that the valuable contribution that older workers - who at 8.3 million make up a quarter of the workforce - make to the economy is often ignored. The report makes recommendations for better helping unemployed older workers back to work, and to support individuals’ opportunities later in life.
Following the latest batch of unemployment figures, Matthew Tinsley, Research Fellow, Economics & Social Policy at Policy Exchange writes that if unemployment continues to fall at its current rate, it is extremely likely that we will see it dropping to 7% by 2015 raising the question of whether the Bank of England will increase interest rates just months before a general election.
Matthew Tinsley, Economics & Social Policy Research Fellow at Policy Exchange, writes that without strong economic growth the country faces an inevitable trade-off between unemployment and lower wages. Uncomforting though it may be, Matthew argues that the UK's focus on jobs rather than higher wages is the right side of that trade-off.
