Coalition

There was a time when Nick Clegg was the most agile and persistent defender of the coalition’s deficit reduction programme. But now — although he’s still got it in him — he is more often wheeled out to announce some spending wheeze or other. A couple of weeks ago, it was the next instalment of the government’s regional growth fund. Today, it’s a £1 billion scheme, spread out over three years, to encourage companies to take on young people. This latest scheme is one of those that looks very neat on paper. Put aside questions about how it will be funded, and what we have is a plan whereby £2,275

Yesterday’s housing strategy offered a mortgage guarantee for first-time buyers of new properties, one of the few new announcements in a document largely consisting of re-hashed policy. At best, the mortgage guarantee helps to provide a boost to house builders and welcome relief for some credit-worthy borrowers who simply can’t build up a sufficient deposit. At worst, it encourages risky lending, subsidises high house prices and raises unrealistic expectations for young families. Unaffordable, reckless lending (at least, up until the credit crunch and collapse of the sub-prime market) threatened the stability of the financial sector and caused misery to thousands of homeowners who later found themselves falling behind on payments

The government’s announcement on housing today is an attempt to square the circle. On the one hand, a return to excessive lending and sub-prime mortgages is clearly not a good thing. Critics say, with justification, look where government backed mortgages got America. But on the other, there are clearly problems when people who aren’t fortunate enough to have parental help aren’t getting on the housing ladder until well into their thirties. Conservatives who understand the importance of a property-owning democracy should be concerned about this. The Coalition’s solution — and this is the most genuinely coalition piece of policy we’ve seen in months — is partial government indemnities for people

Should GPs determine whether people on long-term sick leave are too ill to work? Perhaps not, according to the draft copy of a government-commissioned review into sickness absence. It proposes setting up a new, separate and independent body to assess those on long-term sick leave, on the grounds that doctors have no incentive — nor, perhaps, the specific knowledge — to prod and coax them back towards employment. The new service, it is said, would advise sick leavers, and their employers, about just what they can and can’t manage. If the government does introduce this, it will be another sign of their intent to untangle the problems with sickness benefits.

Jill Sherman, the Whitehall editor of The Times, reports tomorrow that the government will not raise benefits in line with September’s inflation figures as normally happens. However, there’ll be no freeze in benefits. Instead, they’ll rise in line with a six month inflation average which stands at 4.5 percent rather than September’s 5.2 percent figure. This move will save the government a little less than a billion pounds as pensions will be exempt from the move. I suspect that there’ll be objections to this shift from various quarters. But it is worth remembering that 4.5 percent is far larger than the pay rises most private sector workers will see while there’s

Today’s New York Times has a fun piece about Google X, the secret lab where Google is working on its special projects. The ideas are, suitability, far out. They are, apparently, looking at connecting household appliances to the internet and creating a robot that could go to the office so you don’t have to. It would be tempting to laugh if not for what Google has already pulled off. Indeed, the NYT reports that Google’s driverless car might soon go into production. But in political terms what struck me about the article is that this is the culture that Steve Hilton embraces. Remember that when Hilton was working from California,