Centre for social justice

The UK economy suffers from low productivity. Productivity measures output per person, or per time worked. If productivity was higher across the economy then people could work less, or be paid more, or both. Productivity drives an economy’s output and thus its potential growth rate and, in turn, living standards. So low productivity economies find to hard to keep up with high productive ones. This is not a new problem. Ahead of the financial crisis the UK was making progress in closing the productivity gap that existed with major competitors such as the US. Since the crisis, though, all western economies have suffered. At various times over the last decade this

On Broadcasting House, one of my favourite Radio 4 programmes, was this morning discussing a report (pdf) from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty commission. It finds, amongst other things, that ‘education at a private or a Grammar school is also associated with an increased chance of labour market success’ amongst dim kids. Who’d have thunk it? During the subsequent R4 discussion, the Labour peer Joan Bakewell referred to a ‘two-tier education system’. It’s a familiar phrase and a familiar idea: that British kids are somehow cast in a binary divide: the privately-educated and the state-educated. You hear this analysis all the time. Only yesterday, my Spectator colleague Matthew Parris referred to the

In today’s Observer, Will Hutton unwittingly highlights the poverty of the inequality debate in Britain. Gifted writers like him bang on about private schools the whole time rather than look at the far greater problem: inequality within the state system. He devotes a column moaning about the schools which, I suspect, will supply a good chunk of the students he’ll meet in his role as Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. “Social apartheid,” he says: a lazy analogy, suggesting a binary divide between state and private. In fact, the truth is far worse. Britain doesn’t have a two-tier system: we have a multi-tier system where educational attainment is directly linked to parental wealth.

As every prisoner and ex-prisoner knows the most frequently used route for drug smuggling into all categories of jails is ‘bottling it’. This is the crude but effective smuggling technique of inserting a package of drugs into an inmate’s anus. Unless prison staff receive a tip off that a particular prisoner is acting as ‘a mule’ for this route they will likely avoid detection, as routine anal searching at prison receptions is rare. It is not generally realised how many prisoners have to go in and out of prison during their sentences for court appearances, requisition order hearings, hospital check-ups, legal town visits, or transfers to other establishments. The pushers

Britain’s banks aren’t working for the poor. We, the better off, might moan when our internet banking crashes or in-branch mortgage advisers can’t meet us on Saturday mornings; but these are frustrations the poor can only dream of. The individuals and families most in need of ethical finance, clear rules, reliable advice and appropriate products, have almost nowhere to turn on our high streets today. As a result some people never bother: 1.4 million people in the UK have no transactional bank account. For others, the banking industry’s hidden charges, penalties and standard fees mean they crash out of mainstream finance in even worse shape. Exasperated and bruised, many turn

It’s fashionable nowadays to claim that young people in Britain don’t know how to have a good time. There’s certainly plenty of evidence to suggest we’re avoiding the drugs our parents’ generation got their kicks from. Fraser Nelson discussed this in The Spectator last November, arguing that Britain’s youth were becoming more abstemious: ‘Marijuana, LSD, speed, cocaine — surveys show that every drug you can think of is plunging in popularity amongst the young. The proportion of under-20s who say they have taken drugs in the past month has halved over the last decade. Only two drugs are on the up and both are legal: Ritalin and Modafinil, stimulants that can power students through

Despite ‘the age of austerity’, Britain still has a debt problem. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Centre for Social Justice. It suggests that personal debt in the UK has reached a record high of £1.4 trillion, or 90 per cent of the UK’s economic output last year. That’s not happened overnight; but the debt level has increased steadily over the last decade: Breaking this down, the CSJ says that the average household debt is now £54,000 (nearly double what it was a decade ago). Thanks to the increase in borrowing, 5,000 people were made homeless last year due to mortgage and rent arrears. Christian Guy, director

Beneath your noses, a great change in this country is being planned. Secret polls have been taken, and a private member’s bill has been tabled. The euthanasia lobby is limbering up for the fight of its life: to change the law for once and for all. The Assisted Dying Bill, introduced by former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, is the fourth such to come before the House of Lords in the last decade. Since it is almost identical to the last bill, which sought to let doctors supply lethal drugs to terminally ill patients and which Parliament rejected in 2006, why is this one being introduced? The answer has largely to

With all these tax cut suggestions kicking about — and with the British economy desperately in need of some oomph — it’s worth asking: which would help growth the most? It’s not of course the only consideration, but it is clearly an important one as we struggle to find our way out of recession.   Fortunately, the OECD is on hand with two recent reports to help answer our question. The first, ‘Tax Reform and Economic Growth’, divides taxes into four broad categories and ranks them on how harmful they are to growth: This suggests that the Centre for Policy Studies is right — on growth grounds at least —

This morning’s welfare event was one of the great “Who’da thunk it?” moments of this government so far. Here we had the Lib Dem leader providing backing vocals for a former Tory leader who has not only become a minister, but who is implementing an agenda that only a few months ago was little more than an idea in a think-tank report. Reviewing that Centre for Social Justice report for Coffee House at the time, I said it deserved to influence welfare policy for years to come. Now, it looks as though it will do just that. The immensity of Iain Duncan Smith’s achievement should not be underestimated. No doubt,