Unintended consequences or not, Budget cuts for the very poorest will boost fuel poverty and undermine efforts to tackle climate change. Households in fuel poverty are already concentrated among exactly those families where the cuts will hit hardest. Worse, DWP Minister Steve Webb has not ruled out cuts in weekly Cold Weather payments this autumn. Media reports put Winter Fuel Allowance in the frame. Yet regressive Budgets sustain the high energy use of the most well off, widening the fuel divide between the poor and well-off.

The more unequal our society, the more remote are our CO2 reduction targets. Yet yesterday’s IFS report shows that the very poorest families with children lose more from the June Budget than any other group – facing a 5% cut in their total income. Yet the lowest third of households by income account for over 90% of those in fuel poverty in England. 

Rising energy prices drove an extra half million households into fuel poverty in the UK in a single year in 2007. The June Budget cuts looks set to accelerate this trend. Of the four million fuel poor households in total, most (3.25 million) are defined as “vulnerable households”, one that contains the elderly, children or somebody who is disabled or long term sick. A household is said to be in fuel poverty if it needs to spend more than 10% of its income on fuel to maintain a satisfactory heating regime (21 degrees for the main living area, and 18 degrees for other rooms). Fuel poverty figures are rising due to the overall effect of energy price rises since 2004, which far outweighed the impact of increasing incomes and energy efficiency. Now, a new driver will be cuts in household income, with regressive cuts signalling further upward pressure on the fuel poor.

The Spirit Level warns that “Governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality.” The bottom 10% of households spend less than half as much (£12.90) a week on fuel 2008 as the top 10% spend, at £28.70 a week. Overall, households in the UK spend £20 billion on energy each year, mostly on electricity and gas, and account for 27% all energy consumed.

Rising inequality matters in the fight against climate change.  The reforms announced in the June 2010 Budget disproportionately affect the income and spending of the poor and those groups that are most reliant on benefits, namely the single unemployed, lone parents  and zero-earner couples. There are further cuts to come in the CSR and benefits that are specifically aimed at preventing fuel poverty do not appear to be protected. While the Coalition has pledged to maintain winter fuel payments, there has been significant media speculation as to whether their total value may fall. In addition, the Government has yet to confirm what the level of cold weather payments (the additional payments provided those on low incomes during exceptionally cold weeks in winter) will be this year.

All this contrasts sharply with the lack of attention paid to significant tax avoidance or to taxes on the extremely wealthy (as well as the income tax break for those on the middle band).

Inequality profoundly matters in our efforts to tackle climate change and prevent runaway global warming. Risks to climate change policies are inherent in the coalition’s unfair and regressive cuts programme - like Winter Fuel Payments - squeezing the poor while effectively allowing the rich to continue to produce much higher levels of emissions. The Spirit Level warns that “Governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality.”

In the UK, we consume on average around 8.4 tonnes of CO2 per head of population (2007), with wide and distinctly wealth-related variations between local authorities. Comparing local authority CO2 figures for 2007 with their indices of deprivation shows some strong associations: 

• The lowest per capita CO2 emissions are recorded in inner London boroughs such as Hackney  (4.2 tonnes per head) and Islington (6.2), or in cities such as Liverpool (6.5) and Manchester (6.9).
• Some of the highest rates are in the least deprived areas, such as South Cambridgeshire at 13.1 tonnes per head, Uttlesford (12.4) and South Northants (11.8).

In The Spirit Level , co-authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett provide international evidence that carbon emissions per head in rich countries are between two and five times higher than the world average. At the extremes, the US emits over 20 tonnes of CO2 person, which is roughly 200 times the rate in a developing country such as Tanzania, with emissions of one-tenth of a tonne per head. 

But further economic growth in the developed world no longer necessarily improves health or wellbeing. Sure, Wilkinson and Pickett show a strong relationship between life expectancy and national income per person. But “some countries achieve life expectancies close to 80 years at a fraction of the CO2 emissions common in the richest countries.” Good health can be obtained at the minimum environmental costs – in countries as different as Sweden, Chile, Cuba, Jamaica or France. Clearly, we need to reduce emissions far below current levels.

The UK’s Climate Change Act 2008 introduced a legally binding target to cut our CO2 emissions by 80% below 1990 levels in 2050. We are working towards this target in a series of five-year “carbon budgets”. 

But cutting CO2 comes at a price, in both public investment and the price domestic and industrial consumers pay for climate change policies. Last December, the Committee on Climate Change looked at the impact of meeting the proposed CO2 budgets on fuel poverty. By 2017 the number of fuel poor households would rise by up to 1.3 million households, and by nearly two million in 2022. According to Ofgem, in 2008, the average domestic consumer paid £33 a year for the price of CO2 in their energy bills. 

We are all faced with the price of carbon emissions in everyday expenditure on gas, electricity, water supply (with its embedded energy costs) transport and many of the goods and services we buy. The Government has committed to legislation on a minimum price of carbon, to stimulate investment in energy saving technology. Yet over 40% of DECC’s £85m cuts are in low carbon technology projects, with offshore wind projects a major loser. 

Wilkinson and Pickett argue that: “If policies to cut emissions are to gain public acceptance, they must first be seen to be applied fairly. The richer you are, the more you spend, the more you are likely to contribute to global warming. The carbon emissions caused by the consumption of a rich person may be ten times as high as the consumption of a poorer person in the same society. If the rich are the worst offenders, then fair remedies must surely affect them most. Policies that squeezed the poor while allowing the rich to continue to produce much higher levels of emissions would be unlikely to gain public support.” 

As Richard pointed out, leaks about cuts to Winter Fuel Payments and Child Benefit would therefore represent a continuation of a policy trend towards widening inequality that is already established.  The Budget froze Child Benefit for three years and the re-testing of Disability Living Allowance claims is supposed to cut back the number of people receiving the benefit by one fifth. How will impoverished consumers pay for home insulation, electric cars or energy from costly renewable sources?

Today’s employment figures confirm the problems facing older unemployed people. In the first two years of the recession, it was clear that young people were being hit harder than any other group, and I argued that they should be the primary target for government support.

I still think that we have to pull all the stops out to stop creating another generation of young people facing greater poverty and worse employment prospects for the rest of their lives. But it’s becoming plain that there’s a group of older unemployed people who are finding it hard to get back into employment. Since the start of the year, when the labour market began to recover, over-50s have gained less than other groups.

If you look at today’s figures, overall employment is up by 184,000 compared with the previous quarter, but workers aged 50-64 saw their employment levels fall by 11,000 in the same period. If you look at the unemployment figures, overall unemployment was 49,000 lower, but for over 50s the fall was just 2,000. (Nicola has a post on Left Foot Forward taking a broader look at today’s figures.)

It’s still  true that unemployment rates are lower for this age group – 4.6%, compared with 8% overall. On the other hand, the proportion of older unemployed people who have been unemployed for over a year – 43.3% – is significantly higher than for unemployed people of all ages, for whom the equivalent figure is 32.3%.

And, as Age UK have pointed out, older women have been particularly badly affected. In the past year:

• The number of unemployed women over 50 has risen 14%,
• Compared with 1.3% for men in the same age group.
• The number of women over 50 unemployed for over 12 months has increased by 81.4%,
• Compared with 39.7% for men over 50.

I don’t often agree with the Daily Mail, but it’s worth pointing out that they have covered this issue very well. And, while I’m at it, I liked their cartoon today, a very nice comment on David Cameron’s benefit fraud speech.

Here are some videos of yesterday’s Cuts Briefing event, “Did the Budget pass the fairness test?”. We’ve got the opening presentations by Tim Horton of the Fabian Society, showing how the brunt of the losses are borne across the UK’s income groups, Professor Ruth Lister on the impact on women and families, and Richard Capie of the Chartered Institute of Housing on the likley implications for housing.

Ruth Lister has also outlined some of her arguments in a guest post for us.

And our own Richard Exell has also done a quick round up of the whole event for the blog, which you can read here.

When we apply the fairness test, our starting point is, rightly, the overall distributional impact according to income level.  But gender and family-friendliness are also important factors when deciding whether the Budget passed the fairness test.

The Conservative Manifesto promised to ‘make Britain the most family-friendly country in Europe’.  In a recent speech, Nick Clegg declared that the government’s agenda for children and families stands ‘at the heart of our coalition’. [1] Yet in some ways it looks as if families with children have been singled out to bear the brunt of cutting the deficit and there is no attempt to assess overall how the Budget will or will not contribute to this family-friendly agenda.

Given the role that women continue to play within families, family-friendly must also mean women-friendly.  Yet the impact analysis contained in the Budget report doesn’t even mention gender.  Has the government simply forgotten the gender equality duty?  It was left to Yvette Cooper to commission a rough and ready gender impact analysis from the House of Commons Library[2] and then the Equality and Human Rights Commission to remind the Treasury of its legal obligation to carry out an equality impact assessment.  So a clear demand is that the Treasury should now produce this assessment together with an analysis of the Budget’s impact on families with children.

In the absence of such an assessment, I am drawing on Yvette Cooper’s analysis and that of the Women’s Budget Group[3] to highlight some key implications for families, children and women, many of which overlap because of women’s continued caring responsibilities and the role they play as the managers and shock-absorbers of poverty.

Benefits for children

Benefits for children figured prominently in the Budget measures.  As signalled by both the Coalition partners in their manifestos, child tax credit is to be cut back ‘to ensure support is targeted on those most in need’.[4] This will be done through a combination of reductions in the family element and an increase in withdrawal rates to 41%.  The effect will be to reduce eligibility for families with a household income above £40,000 from April 2011, with further changes in 2012-13.  It will also adversely affect marginal deduction rates, increasing the numbers of families on low incomes facing deduction rates of over 90. 70 and 60 per cent (though slightly reducing the numbers facing over 80 per cent).[5] Given that one of the Tories’ priorities has been to improve work incentives, reiterated by George Osborne in his Budget speech, this aggravation of the poverty trap is perverse.

In addition, the baby element will be abolished and the planned infant supplement will not go ahead.  Also the treatment of in-year changes in income will be altered yet again, with a phased reduction to £5,000 from £25,000 in the disregard for an increase in income and a new £2,500 disregard for an in-year fall in income.  Given the level of fluctuations of income among low earners this is likely to increase insecurity, exacerbate the problems created by over-payments and cause hardship where there is now an under-payment.  This could well undermine confidence in the system and adversely affect take-up.

The good news is that the child element of child tax credit will be increased by more than normal indexation in both 2011 and 2012.  However, the further bad news is that this is to be paid for by freezing child benefit.  This means that, even though child benefit itself mercifully is not to be means-tested despite the rumours, there is a further significant shift in the balance of financial support for children towards means-tested away from universal provision.  And I don’t think we can relax about the future of child benefit.  There was no unequivocal commitment to its universality in the Budget statement, even if George Osborne did – sort of – acknowledge some of the arguments in its favour.

The decision to freeze child benefit, he stated, ‘strikes the right balance between  keeping intact this popular universal benefit while ensuring that everyone, across the income scale, makes a contribution to helping our country reduce its debts.’  But, in fact, he is asking families with children to make an additional contribution.  This needs to be understood in the context of the decision to increase personal tax allowances.  It is important to remember that child benefit replaced child tax allowances as well as family allowances in the late 1970s and at that point the Tories accepted the argument that it should be seen as the equivalent of a tax allowance for children (even if this wasn’t always reflected in their subsequent actions in government in the 1980s).  It does feel like we are going to have to refight the battles of the 1980s to save child benefit.

Furthermore families with children are the losers as a result of the phased abolition of the child trust fund, the restriction of eligibility for the sure start maternity grant to the first child only and the abolition of the health in pregnancy grant.

It is women who will typically bear much if not most of the burden of these cuts.  Black and minority ethnic women are particularly vulnerable.  And although lower income women will benefit from the increase in child tax credits, the eligibility test for means-tested financial support for children cannot take account of where income is not shared fairly within families and hence of any hidden poverty within families.  In contrast, child benefit provides mothers directly with a secure source of income, which is particularly important if they do not have an independent wage.

The Budget report claims that the increases in the child element of child tax credit (CTC) means that ‘this Budget will have no measurable impact on child poverty in the next two years’,[6] during which time Frank Field will make his recommendations.  It is an advance on the 1980s that the impact on child poverty is a criterion that the Government takes seriously.  However, as Nicola Smith has argued, the claim is ‘dubious’.[7] This is partly because of other cuts, of which more below; but also because of the effects of the interaction between CTC, child benefit and housing benefit.  CTC is not disregarded for housing benefit purposes whereas child benefit is.  This means that families in receipt of housing benefit are not protected against the freeze in child benefit by the increase in CTC.

Benefits for adults

The living standards of children depend not just on the benefits earmarked for children but also on what happens to the benefits paid to their parents.  Adult benefit rates have fallen further and further behind average living standards because of up-rating policy.  According to Peter Kenway, they are now worth one-fifth less relative to average earnings than in 1997 and their real value is the same as 25 years ago.[8] This is the context in which we have to assess the change in the index to be used for up-rating benefits in future.  The change from the RPI to the CPI will mean a further deterioration in relative living standards at the bottom.  The magnitude of the overall effects can be gauged from the amount of money saved (although the figures include public service pensions as well as benefits and tax credits): £1.17 billion in 2011-12 rising to £5.8bn by 2014-15.[9] According to the House of Commons Library analysis, women represent 65% of those directly affected.  And again mothers as the managers of poverty within families (and also pregnant women on benefit) will bear much of the burden.

The same applies to the various cuts in housing benefit.  According to the House of Commons Library calculations, women represent three-fifths of those directly affected.  One of the changes will in effect mean that housing benefit recipients in receipt of jobseekers allowance for more than 12 months will have the value of their JSA cut because housing benefit awards will be reduced to 90% of the initial reward so that claimants will have to make up the difference out of their JSA.  This crude stick to beat people back into work will be combined with a further intensification of conditionality for lone parents so that they will be transferred to JSA once their youngest child is aged 5 from 2011-12.  Nicola Smith points out that the Budget costings assume that the great majority will remain on benefit, thereby making them a prime target for the 10% housing benefit cut.[10]

According to the House of Common Library women represent half of those who are likely to be affected by the new assessment of disability living allowance.  However many more are likely to be indirectly affected as carers because eligibility for carers allowance depends on the person being cared for receiving the middle or higher rate of DLA or attendance allowance and presumably the intention of the new assessment is to reduce the numbers receiving the middle or higher rate.  About ¾ of carers allowance recipients are women.

The one benefits change from which women will disproportionately benefit – by just over three to two – is the more generous up-rating formula for the basic state pension and pension credit as from 2011.  This is sooner than Labour had proposed and the formula is more generous.  However, it’s worth remembering that it was the Thatcher government which broke the link with earnings in the first place,

Taxation and spending

The increase in personal allowances has been presented as key to this being a fair and progressive Budget.  But unlike child benefit, it provides no help to those whose incomes are already too low to pay tax.  This probably explains why the House of Commons Library estimates that women will reap only 45 per cent of the benefit.  However, not surprisingly, they are much less likely to be adversely affected by the freeze on the basic rate limit and changes to capital gains tax.  Although the VAT exemptions will mitigate the effect of the VAT rise, it is still likely to impact harshly on lower income families and hence women.

Because the increase in personal allowances is not fully funded, as the Women’s Budget Group points out, the cost will be met through expenditure cuts elsewhere.[11] Typically these will hit families with children and women more than men – both as users of services and workers in them.  Although hitherto the recession has hit men’s jobs more than women’s, it is women’s jobs which are at greatest risk from public expenditure cuts.  And women tend to make greater use of public services both for themselves and those for whom they care.  It is likely to be women’s unpaid labour that has to fill any gaps.

Conclusion

Overall, the House of Commons Library estimates that women will pay roughly 72% of the net cost of the changes in taxes, benefits and tax credits that it analysed.  Families with children are also overall losers – in a country which was recently awarded only a C- for family-friendliness by the Family and Parenting Institute.[12] Despite the Budget’s mitigating measures, it does not meet the fairness test from the perspective of women, children and families.  And as we face further cuts, benefit recipients are being played off against service users by Osborne – either way women, children and families are likely to be losers.

I suspect that we will look back on this Budget and subsequent expenditure cuts as a watershed as significant as the measures taken in the early years of the Thatcher government.

What was the last government’s record on employment for people from disadvantaged groups? What, in particular, has happened during the recession?

An important article by Ruth Barrett in the latest issue of Economic and Labour Market Review (the Office for National Statistics’ on-line magazine) looked at this issue. It measured what has happened to the employment rates of disabled people, lone parents, members of minority ethnic groups, people aged 50 and over, people with low qualifications and people who live in the most deprived local authority wards.

Each of these groups has a lower employment rate than the rate for people generally. In December 2009, the overall employment rate was 72.6%. The employment rates for members of the disadvantaged groups were:

• Disabled people – 46.6%,
• Lone parents – 57.3%,
• Members of minority ethnic groups – 59.6%,
• People aged 50 to state pension age – 71.0%,
• People with low qualifications – 55.8%, and
• People who live in the most deprived local authority wards – 62.7%.

This is a persistent problem, and members of these groups faced employment disadvantage before the last government was first elected. We can measure whether they had any success in reducing this disadvantage by measuring what happened to the gap between members of a group and everyone else who wasn’t a member of that group.

Importantly, Ms Barrett also looked at what happened during the recession. In previous economic cycles these employment gaps have often been ‘hyper-cyclical’ – members of disadvantaged groups gain jobs even more quickly than the rest of the population when the economy is growing, so the gap shrinks. But then they lose these jobs just as quickly during recessions, returning to much the same starting point.

Employment gap: disabled people

Between 1998 and 2009, there was a substantial narrowing of the disability employment gap, from 41.3 percentage points to 31.0.

Since the start of the 2008/9 recession, both disabled and non-disabled people have lost jobs and their employment rates have fallen. Disabled people’s employment rates have not fallen as much, however: the employment rate for disabled people fell by 1.2 percentage points, the employment rate for non-disabled people by 2.4 points, so the gap has shrunk during the recession, though at a slower rate than before.

Employment gap: lone parents

Between June 1997 and December 2009, the gap between lone parents and people in all other types of family shrank from 29.5 percentage points to 16.5.

Since the start of the 2008/9 recession, lone parents have been the only disadvantaged group that has actually seen its employment rate increase, by 0.9 percentage points. As the employment rate has fallen for everyone else, the employment rate gap has fallen by 2.2 percentage points during the recession.

Employment gap: members of minority ethnic groups

The article measures the gap in June 2001 and December 2009. During this period, the ethnic minority employment gap fell from 18.6 percentage points to 14.5.

During the recession, employment rates have fallen both for white people and people who are members of minority ethnic groups. The fall has been a little larger for white people – 2.2 points – than for people from minority ethnic groups – 1.9 points.

Employment gap: people aged 50 and over

The article measures employment rates in March 1995 and December 2009 for people aged between 50 and state pension age and for people aged 25 to 49. Employment rates rose for both, but more for the older group, so the gap narrowed, from 14.6 percentage points to 9.2.

Employment rates for both groups fell during the recession, but much more for the 25 – 49 year olds, so the employment gap fell by 1.2% during this period.

Employment gap: people with low qualifications

Between March 1995 and December 2009, the employment rate for people with low or no qualifications actually fell substantially, from 60.1% to 55.8%. As a result, the employment rate gap grew, from 17.0 percentage points to 21.6. But part of this change may actually be a success story – the article notes that, during this period, the proportion of working age people with low or no qualifications fell just as substantially, from 36.6% to 22.7%. The article does not consider what has happened to this group during the recession.

Employment gap: people who live in the most deprived wards

The article measures the gap in December 2003 and December 2009 (for Great Britain only: the other groups are measured on a UK-wide basis). In this short period, there has been little change in the gap, which has shrunk from 12.9 percentage points to 12.3. This 0.5 point shrinkage includes 0.2 points since the start of the recession.

Multiple disadvantage

One objection to this way of looking at employment might be to suggest that these groups aren’t independent of each other – disabled people have low levels of qualifications and members of minority ethnic groups often live in deprived areas, for instance. How do we know that the lower employment rate of disabled people isn’t because of their low qualifications, rather than the fact that they are disabled? How do we know that older people’s lower employment rate isn’t because older people also tend to have lower qualifications?

A strong indication is the fact that the more of these groups people are members of, the less likely they are to be in employment:

• No groups – 82.6%
• 1 group – 75.4%
• 2 groups – 62.4%
• 3 groups – 42.9%
• 4 groups – 28.2%
• 5 or 6 groups – 14.5%
• Total – 72.7%

All in all, the case for action to help members of all these groups to get jobs is strongly borne out by this article. It is morally right – all these groups have lower than average employment rates. And this story shows that it is possible to make a difference employment rates have been rising for most of these groups and employment rate gaps have been coming down, even during the recession.

Now is not the time to cease these efforts. One point the article forbears from making is that disabled people and members of minority ethnic groups are particularly likely to work in the public sector: for them, the arguments about public sector cuts will have an extra resonance.

Next time you hear people talking about the social change that must be brought about, or some new reform agenda they are developing, ask them this: will it lead to a redistribution of power so that the gap between the powerful and the powerless is significantly reduced?

Anyone who claims that people should just be left alone as they are to interact with others sensibly and responsibly, and all would be for the best of all possible worlds, is either remarkably naïve or deviously misleading. If history has one consistent message for us, it is that genuine cooperation and mutual respect only flourish if none is so powerful as to be able to dominate others, and no one is so weak as to be at the arbitrary mercy of the rest.

So if we really want to release people’s potential to collaborate for the good of all, we have to target any concentration of power and press for a more balanced redistribution.

This is not an idealistic aspiration of armchair theorists or some form of envy-driven impulse amongst those on the margins of society. It is the guiding principle of every self-respecting state since time immemorial.  Where one state is too powerful compared with others, the latter would have a choice – take collective action to bind the powerful into an agreement to treat them with respect, or risk being picked off by it one by one.

Britain was a past master with strategic alliances across Europe to keep Spain in check in the 16^th/17^th centuries, oppose France in the 18^th/19^th centuries, but left it too late in the face of the rise of Germany in late 19^th/early 20^th century. And if the balance of power is a critical objective in maintaining constructive relations between nations, it is equally so in securing positive relations between different groups within nations.

The lesson, as I draw out in my new book, Against Power Inequalities, is a simple one. For centuries it is where people have effectively joined forces in their struggle for a more inclusive, balanced power structure that the human condition has truly been improved for the benefit of all. On the other hand, once anyone – a nation, a political leader, an institution, a business, a church – is allowed to accumulate vast power in relation to others, the interests of the latter would almost certainly be thoughtlessly disregarded – workers with insecure jobs, women stuck in discriminatory cultures, victims of military conflicts, people harmed by environmental degradation, the poor, immigrants, and other vulnerable minorities.

But isn’t it impossible to ever attain a greater balance of power? Those who are already more powerful would use their strength to resist change. And any attempt to invest someone with sufficient power to challenge them risks a new autocrat taking over. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to leave power relations well alone, and rely on the charity of the rich and the magnanimity of the strong to get a few more drops of amelioration trickle down? Of course not. The past is already replete with countless examples of the powerful riding roughshod over those who cannot stand up to them.

The truth is that we can redistribute power without letting power flow into a new form of authoritarian control – the key being democratic collective action. Through unions, cooperative workplaces, citizen-based reform movements, and accountable governments, power can be spread more evenly. And the extent to which that is going to be achieved is the measure we should use to judge any new plan for change and reform to be put before us.

The decision of President Mutharika of Malawi to pardon Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, convicted of gross indecency after celebrating their engagement in December, is a welcome step forward. Hopefully, it was, as he claimed, because he believed it was the right thing to do. That would be better than the other possible explanation, which was that he caved in to pressure from outside Malawi.

Not that I’m against such pressure – the TUC supported the picket outside the Malawian High Commission today, and we were glad to see the British Government make its position clear before and after the pardon (although it would have been better to respect Tiwonge’s transgender status more by not referring to her as “Mr”). But it would be nice to believe that this decision was a turn in the direction of human rights and equality in a world where LGBT communities face oppression, hostility and worse – from Iran to Jamaica, as well as in Africa.

And we can’t be too smug in Britain, either. Apart from the British Empire’s role in promoting the criminalisation of sexuality (it may not be solely down to the Empire, but it’s notable that homosexuality is much more likely to be illegal in a Commonwealth country than on average), this weekend’s revelations about the lengths David Laws went to to hide his sexuality should remind us all that Britain is only recently as tolerant as we now are (still not enough).

The No 10 Briefing on the flexible working and equal pay bill contains a brief reference to ‘looking to promote gender equality on the boards of listed companies’. The TUC has long been an advocate of greater diversity on boards, including, but going beyond the important issue of gender diversity.

At present, company directors are drawn from a very narrow range of backgrounds and we believe that the quality of discussion and decision-making on boards would benefit from a wider range of voices being heard in the boardroom.

The TUC has for years called for all non-executive director posts to be publicly advertised, to encourage a wider range of applications to boards. We have also suggested establishing a pool of potential non-executive director candidates drawn from a range of experiences and backgrounds, on which companies could draw.

Another recommendation is that there should be a central site on which all non-executive director posts are advertised and that all nomination committee members should undergo equally opportunities and recruitment training.

So there are things that can be done to tackle this area; we will wait and see what the Government’s proposals will be.

One of the quiet success stories of this election has been the way some academics have contributed their expertise to the debates. My favourite has been the series of analyses of key policy battlegrounds published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. CEP has now published the full set and if the subjects where I know something are anything to go by, they are fair, authoritative and expert.

On public finances, they point out that, in the ten years before the recession the government increased both taxes and spending. “The higher spending on police, education and hospitals has reduced crime and improved schools and healthcare – but public sector productivity has fallen.” The CEP is critical of all the parties’ proposals for cutting the deficit, arguing that they are “not specific enough to be credible” and rely on efficiency savings that are “elusive and hard to achieve.”

Inequality has been rising for three decades; this has happened around the world, but especially in the USA and the UK. Inequality is worse now than it was in 1997, but the policies of the last dozen years have ”significantly redistributed income to the less well off. Inequality would have been much higher otherwise.”

Employment: despite the great recession (which has cut GDP by more than any other post-war recession) the increase in unemployment has been “far less than expected”. Young people have been hardest hit, but this always happens in recessions and ”there is no evidence that they are doing relatively worse this time round than in previous recessions.”  The New Deal and other employment programmes have “helped to constrain unemployment”, but the weakening youth labour market began before the recession it isn’t possible yet to be sure why.

Migration did rise between 1995 and 2008, but ”while there may be costs to particular groups, there is little evidence of an overall negative impact on jobs or wages.”

The series also looks at health, education, crime and bankers’ bonuses, amongst other issues. This is how academic expertise should be applied to public policy debates. It is ACE – expert, calm and authoritative – and should be used as a model for everyone with an interest in any of the policy areas.

According to Nobel prize-winning economist, and presenter of this year’s Demos Lecture, Amartya Sen, “the capabilities a person does actually have…depend on the nature of social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedoms. And there the state and society cannot escape responsibility”. Indeed, a state can be judged on the extent to which it empowers those less able to realise their own vision of a free, fulfilling life.

The economic crisis hit all sections of society, but people with disabilities were struck particularly hard – entering the recession on very unequal footing in terms of savings, income and employment. During the months that followed, disabled people were considered to be at greater risk of redundancy, more exposed to economic insecurity and vulnerable to increased discrimination from corner-cutting employers.

Studies show increased incidences of disability discrimination in employment between 2007 and 2009; elsewhere, research reveals the gap between levels of poverty between disabled and non-disabled widened during the downturn, compounding the extreme economic disadvantage that disabled people already faced. 34% of disabled people are estimated to live in low-income households compared to 17% of non-disabled people, and surveys also suggest over 50% of disabled people have had no savings to fall back on in these austere times.

Now, as the economy convalesces, disability inequality remains entrenched and endemic. Our disabled population face multiple barriers to equality; barriers to education, employment and access to goods and services; barriers likely to be reinforced by the coming spending squeezes. Disabled people are heavily dependent on the public sector not only for its services, but also for employment – nearly a third of disabled workers work in the public sector. In a report released last year, Leonard Cheshire Disability warned: “a programme of public spending cuts would clearly have a disastrous impact on disabled people…further undermining employment opportunities, independence and quality of life”.

Labour’s record on disability discrimination cannot be disregarded. The last decade witnessed employment rates rise, legislation fortified, support systems strengthened. Now, prior to one of the most anticipated elections in recent memory, Labour has, belatedly but thankfully, produced something in the way of a coherent policy programme for tackling disability inequality – one that finally transcends traditional tendencies to typecast disability as a ‘health issue’. It’s long overdue; but it is very welcome nonetheless.

That said though, the left’s agenda on disability equality remains relatively tame. It lacks the aggression – audacity, even – requisite to remove an otherwise indelible stain on the fabric of a good society. Employment rates have increased (a little), but still studies show that employers are twice as likely to offer interviews to non-disabled candidates as they are to equally eligible disabled people. More than half our disabled workers are said to have experienced discrimination in the workplace, and the government lacks any standard measure for monitoring whether the laws they legislated are followed by employers.

However, monitoring mechanisms and act amendments are not enough. Disability inequality transcends socio-cultural domains as well as economic ones. Contrary to the Conservatives’ claims, Britain isn’t Baltimore nor is it broken. Yet, one in ten people with disabilities claim to be victims of hate crime. For many disabled people, abuse and humiliation are experiences that are all too real and all too recent.

Tackling disability inequality requires not just a change in policy, but a seismic shift in social attitudes. By no means will this be straightforward – research reveals that negative attitudes towards disability can develop in children as young as four. But a clear, bold blueprint, working on a multitude of levels at once, is paramount if Labour is to be the architects of a ‘future fair for all’.

Such a strategy would need to account for not only the earning handicap (the effect disability has on the ability to earn an income) but, also the ‘conversion handicap’ (the amount a person must spend on services to achieve a good standard of living) – as recently outlined by Sen himself. A disabled person’s income may place them on or above the poverty line, but once we factor in the impact of the conversion handicap, many fall well below this measure. At present, official poverty figures make no consideration of this gross disadvantage.

The American clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick once said: “Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world – making the most of one’s best.” Policymakers, who have for too long overlooked and oversimplified the rights, needs and interests of disabled people, would do well to note Fosdick’s wisdom and inject some aggression, some assertiveness, some ‘adventurous daring’ into helping those less able to make the most of one’s best and live their version of a good life. For, as Sen says, it is precisely here the state and society cannot escape responsibility.

For Labour, this election presents a perfect opportunity to project a more hopeful vision for some 10 million people with an aggressive strategy on disability poverty.

“We will have to keep on working at national level to ensure Governments commit to an ambitious climate change treaty that includes the principles of just transition & decent work”.  This is the message from the ITUC’s representatives in Bonn as the UN ends the first of the 2010 round of negotiations on a global climate treaty.

The Copenhagen Accord, remember, was silent on labour and human rights. So we need to meet UK officials again, to ensure that our case for just transition is made afresh. And as climate change impacts increasingly affect life and livelihood in developing countries (see Oxfam’s report), so the ITUC will want to join forces with human rights campaigners to unify our demands. 

So the UN is drafting text for its next session in Bonn, set for two weeks from 31 May 2010. It has asked for Government input by 26 April. The UN’s report will combine these submissions with the Copenhagen Accord and other text already on the table, on Long-term Cooperative Action between Governments –including draft commitments on just transition and human rights.

Getting Just Transition into the UN agreement will hopefully spur many other Governments on to the action at national level taken by the UK Government. A national Forum for a Just Transition was set up in December 2009, “advise and provide oversight on the rapid economic and social transition to a low carbon future.”

Creating the joint Government-industry-TUC body is central to the Government’s Low Carbon Industry Strategy. The first two stakeholder meetings focussed on accelerating a mass market in low emission vehicles; building supply chains for the low carbon energy; public procurement; and skills for the new green economy – all TUC priorities.

So this is what the UN has adopted in draft so far, that:

• Climate change requires a paradigm shift towards building a low emission society that offers substantial opportunities and ensures continued high growth and sustainable development, based on innovative technologies and more sustainable production and consumption, while ensuring a just transition of the workforce that creates decent work and quality jobs.
• A broad range of stakeholders needs to be engaged on global, regional, national and local levels, be they governmental, private business or civil society, including the youth and persons with disability.
• Gender equality and the effective participation of women and indigenous peoples are important for effective action on all aspects of climate change.
• The adverse effects of climate change have a range of direct and indirect implications for the full enjoyment of human rights, including living well, and that the effects of climate change will be felt most acutely by those parts of the population that are already vulnerable owing to youth, gender, age or disability.

The UN will draft a roadmap for reaching a new agreement – inviting Governments to comment by 4 May 2010. Joint sessions on the Kyoto Protocol and Long-Term Co-operative action have been agreed. And two more UN meetings will be needed between Bonn in June and Cancun in December – here, the ITUC has appealed for delegates to be available for these as well.

Download the 16th TUC Recession Report

Today we’ve published our 16th and final Recession Report. From next month we will be moving to a shorter monthly Labour Market Report and a bi-monthly Economic Report. The latest labour market figures cover the
period October to December 2009, and show that 2,457,000 people were unemployed by the ILO measure − down 1,000 (effectively unchanged) compared with last month’s release, which covered September – November. Youth unemployment fell a little, with 725,000 18 – 24 year olds unemployed – 3,000 fewer than last month. Overall, these are quite good results – especially the fall in youth unemployment – but it is far too early to say we no longer need to worry about employment.

The continuing rising trend for involuntary part-time and temporary work is a sign of serious weakness. 34.6% of all temporary workers wanted a permanent job and there are currently 591,000 women and 450,000 male involuntary parttime workers. And growth in long-term unemployment is also a real cause for concern – while unemployment of up to 6 months looks as if it may be starting to level off, unemployment of over 12 months is continuing to rise.

In the second section of the report we review the impact that the downturn has had for women. The analysis shows that recent decades have seen enormous change for women at work. Larger proportions of women
than ever before are in employment and the number of women describing themselves as economically inactive as a result of looking after a home or family has been consistently declining – a trend that, in contrast to previous downturns, has continued during the recession. However, over 1.2 million women who are economically inactive say they would like a job – a figure that is likely to reflect factors including unmet demand for more flexible working opportunities and for quality affordable childcare.

The downturn has had a variety of impacts for working women. More men than women have lost their jobs during the recession, and the rate of male unemployment has increased faster than the female rate. However, in many sectors (including finance and business services and hotels, restaurants and distribution and manufacturing) men and women have seen similar proportional falls in jobs. The key reason that fewer women have so far been made unemployed is therefore not that their jobs are intrinsically safer, but that more (around 40% of female employees nationally) work in public sector occupations where large scale redundancies have not taken place. Should large scale public sector cuts take place, particularly in areas that already have high male unemployment, large numbers of working families therefore could face significant financial hardship.

Download the full Recession Report here.

We’ve just published a new review of the impacts that the recent downturn has had for women at work, and examining how proposed public sector cuts might have a heavy impact on working women and families.

I’ve written a post about the issue for Progress Online, which you can read over here.

International Women’s Day has seen the release of a fascinating range of women focused facts. These range from the concerning (twice as many men than women think the sexes are equal when it comes to getting the top jobs with men also twice as likely to appear on TV) to the political (Boris Johnson aims to eradicate violence against women in London while Gordon Brown has called for dramatic change to increase female representation on company boards) and the slightly tangential (a higher share of women than men use internet banking in Estonia, France, Latvia and Lithuania).

The ITUC have published an illuminating report that documents the extent to which women still undertake a greater share of household and childcare duties than men, and considers the significant impact this has on women’s career possibilities and on working patterns. It includes analysis from an international WageIndicator survey (which included 345,000 responses over 43 countries) that considered women’s and men’s different opportunities at work. The analysis shows that when it comes to housework men with children contribute even less than those without children, while the opposite is true for women. These results are also broken down by country – although arguably variation in sample sizes limits the extent to which results are directly comparable. For example, the data reveal that 23.4% of British fathers are undertaking most of the housework surpassing most other countries in the report – including the Netherlands (14%).

Fawcett have also launched a new campaign aiming to document what the programmes of different political parties will mean for women’s lives and for gender equality. Their focus is broad – including the economy, crime and justice and political reform as well as the work and family life issues which are usually described as ‘women’s concerns’. As Lisa Ansell notes on Labour List – women don’t just care about childcare (and family issues should not solely be women’s domain).

Internationally the IUF are calling for rights and recognition for domestic workers – a cause that is championed in the UK by the fantastic Kalayaan. IUF note that domestic work is undervalued and poorly regulated and many domestic workers remain overworked, underpaid and unprotected – vulnerable to extreme mistreatment and abuse (as we highlighted in the final report of the Commission on Vulnerable Employment).

Women’s voices are not heard enough, in enough places, and there is still an enormous amount to do in the fight for gender equality. But at least today has provided space for some reflection on the extent and scope of the progress that is still to be made – and on the fact employers are legally required to allow women at work to go to the toilet.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Guardian’s “Citizen Ethics” series, including an important article by Julian Glover (“Liberty is equality’s intractable opposite.”) The article is a good example of a certain strand of liberal criticism of the current government, and it’s worth going into why it’s wrong.

The title is a fair summary of the article as a whole. Glover begins with an assault on “legislative declarations” like the Equality Bill (and, by implication, the Child Poverty Bill.) I disagree with him – the Child Poverty Bill, for instance, should make it harder for politicians to drop their commitments on poverty when no-one is looking. Nonetheless, he’s right that it’s a type of law-making that could too easily become a substitute for achieving the outcomes that are mandated – I’ll consider voting for any candidate who can get us a law saying that Liverpool have won the premiership.

But then he gets into his stride: “Equality is not fundamental to liberty. It is its intractable opposite. Labour has wanted to be both liberal and collectivist at the same time. But it can only be one of those things. Setting equality as the goal denies, not defends, the importance of individual difference. In effort or ability or circumstance people will never be alike. In a free society, some people must be allowed to fail.”

Apart from the Equality Bill itself, Glover fails to give examples of the New Labour legislation or other policies that have simultaneously undermined liberty and advanced equality. There is a reference to tax credits being used to “encourage parents into work”, but that hardly makes Gordon Brown a monster of illiberalism – indeed it sounds a lot more like the “nudge” approach that is supposed to typify Cameronism.

Even on the Equality Bill, Glover is strong on assertion and weak on analysis:

“The bill takes to extremes the self-contradictory idea that liberty can only be guaranteed by government. It seeks to lasso every characteristic of human diversity – from homosexuality to breastfeeding – into one official corral. Freedom is made dependent on state action. Everyone must be made the same in order to that they then be permitted to stand apart.”

Sounds horrific, but it is rather an over-statement of what the Equality Bill will do.

In fact, Glover levels two contradictory accusations at the Bill and neither fits. He begins by accusing it of being mere ‘hopeful words’ and ‘mushy ideals’ and then of taking to extremes the idea that “can only be guaranteed by government.” The Equality Bill is neither.

So why is it worth your while reading this critique? That’s because Glover’s belief that liberty and equality are incompatible is well-established in this country, and also because it’s a view one sometimes hears from liberal critics of the current government. But think about the legislation that is usually included in claims that the current government has undermined liberty, measures such as:

• The Crime and Disorder Act 1998
• The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
• The Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002
• The Terrorism Act 2006
• The  Identity Cards Act 2006
• The Serious Crime Act 2007
• The Coroners and Justice Act 2009

Now, you can have an argument about whether the government has the balance right between security and liberty, or in dealing with terrorism and other crimes. I don’t think they have. But you can’t argue that these measures were introduced because the achievement of greater equality would have been impossible without them. It simply isn’t true that any loss of liberties in recent years illustrates an unavoidable tension between equality and liberty.

Compare the UK now with this country in the past or the UK with other countries now. Are all these counter-factuals either examples of more liberty and less equality or of more equality and less liberty? Are there no countries with more equality and more liberty? Have there been no times when Britons have had more of both?

The questions practically answer themselves – and the answers mean that contemporary political programmes do not have to choose between equality and liberty – it is possible to promote the two at the same time.

There is a more important answer to this argument, and that is that the either/or approach to liberty and equality leads to an impoverished view of both. Politics is about helping people to flourish within communities. Individuals who are ‘liberated’ from any obligations to their neighbours will not flourish; societies that deny liberty will destroy the savour of everything worth having equally.

In the democratic socialist tradition, people usually emphasise positive freedom and prefer it to liberty as merely the absence of constraint. I certainly hold to that, but I still think (all other things being equal) that eliminating constraints on individuals is a good idea and creating them a bad one. The liberals I want to work with are those who believe that liberties are only made real in a living community and the best communities are more equal than those we have at present. It may be that the future will force us away from those who think that isn’t possible and either liberty or equality must be abandoned.

The final report of the National Equalities Panel (NEP), “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK” is out today – you can download the full thing or exec summary from the Government Equalities Office website. It’s an exceptional piece of work, describing in graphic detail just how unfair and unequal our society has become thanks to ‘market knows best’ policies.

This sad story began in the 1980s when inequality really took hold, but even in recent years the best that can be said is that it hasn’t got any worse. We have now tested to destruction the theory that wealth trickles down – it doesn’t. Instead growing inequality destabilises the wider economy, leaves a substantial proportion living in real poverty and undermines the social cohesion that provides a large part of what makes for a good fulfilling life.

It cannot be right that as we look to rebuild our economy, a non-English name can still count against someone on their CV and that the only group of women to have any career progression in wages when they reach their 30s are highly qualified public sector workers.

The super-rich and powerful have a vested interest in closing down any debate about inequality by talking of the ‘politics of envy’ or ‘core vote strategies’. But inequality damages the economy and society for the vast majority of the population. Politicians of every party must now meet the challenge set by this devastating analysis.

Regular readers will be following my occasional series looking at the differences between public and private sector pay, prompted by the regular attacks on the public sector by the small state right. Most of this has been a bit dull and geeky as I want to be more careful with the stats than our critics often are, though it has got quite lively. But what about gender?

So far we have established that median pay in the public sector is higher than in the private sector but:

• There is nothing new about this, it goes back to at least 1984.
• It does not mean that someone doing the same job in the public sector will get more pay than if they were doing the same job in the private sector as the two sectors are made up of different jobs.
• The pay gap is mainly due to the public sector employing a greater proportion of skilled people than the private sector …
• … and this trend has accentuated over time as the public sector employs an even greater proportion  of graduates today than it did even in the recent past.
• Graduates in the public sector earn less than graduates in the private sector while those with an educational level lower than A-levels are paid more in the public sector than in the private sector.

In other words the differentials in the public sector are lower – the gap between the lowest paid and the highest paid is smaller than in the private sector. From my point of view, this means the public sector has fairer pay than the private sector, though this may not be the point of view of a top public sector professional looking at private sector boardroom pay.

And that’s the end of the ‘new readers begin here’ bit. If you want to read earlier episodes they are here and here.

But what about the gap between men and women? If my view that pay is fairer in the public sector then you would expect the gender pay gap to be smaller in the public sector. So I thought I would have another look at the ASHE statistics that have been the main source for this exciting series.

Given recent rows, I need to be careful to compare like with like as much as possible and to be very clear about what it is that we are measuring.

So the figures that follow are all drawn from table 13.6a of the 2009 ASHE which looks at hourly pay, excluding overtime. It breaks this down for men and women; and by full and part time working. I have calculated pay gaps by expressing the difference as a percentage of the larger figure. In other words the gender pay gap is the difference between men and women expressed as a percentage of male pay. This is the same methodology used by ONS in their statistical bulletin – that does not mean there might not be other useful measures, but this is the one used in official statistics. (So argue with them – not me – if you don’t like this approach.)

This is what we find:

As we can see the gender pay gap is smaller in the public sector than the private sector across the workforce as a whole, and for full-timers.

I think the most relevant measure here is for full timers, as these will have the least compositional effects. The full time male workforce will still be made up of a different balance of jobs than than those done by full-time women, but they will be more alike than the workforce as a whole  – where the lower pay of part-time jobs – mainly done by women – will have a huge impact. (Full-time women sounds like the title of a country song, but you know what I mean.)

The gender pay-gap is worse in the public sector for part-time workers, but I suspect this is due to the atypical nature of men who work part-time. My hunch would be that because the public sector has more flexible working there are men who work part-time in different parts of the workforce, while in the private sector they are concentrated in low-paid service sector jobs – largely done by students, and more recently perhaps by those getting off the dole queue.

Another way of cutting these figures is to compare the public/private sector gap by gender:

I’ve put all the figures in for completeness, but again the interesting figures are for full time workers and part-time women as the compositional affects for part-time men will be extreme. There is again a clear difference. The gap between women in the public and private sectors is greater than for full time men.

Again we need to be aware of compositional affects, and I hope in a future post to be breaking these figures down by educational level as probably the best way of comparing like with like.  That requires some more complicated excavation of the Labour Force Survey as the figures are not easily available online.

But the analysis so far suggests that there is an argument that one further reason that median pay is higher in the public sector than the private sector is that women are treated better in the public sector than in the private sector.

The gender pay gap for full-timers has got worse in both sectors since 1998. As the statistical bulletin says:

For full-time employees the gender pay comparison increased from 11.2 per cent in 2008 to 11.6 per cent in 2009 in the public sector, compared to an increase of 0.9 percentage points in the private sector to 20.8 per cent from 19.9 per cent.

But I think the change in the public sector (still very small)  may well be due to the inclusion for the first time of the nationalised banks in the public sector workforce. I have asked ONS about this, and will update.

UPDATE: The very helpful people at ONS have told me (though I’d rather not be “dear customer”):

Between 2008 and 2009 Lloyds Banking Group, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and HBOS PLC were reclassified from the private sector to the public sector. Interpretation of public / private sector movements is therefore more difficult between 2008 (when they are were the private sector ) and 2009 (now in the public sector).

AND ANOTHER UPDATE:

 I wanted to clarify whether ASHE 2009 contained bank staff before doing a historical comparison. As this distorts the 2009 figures I’ve therefore had a look at the 2008 and 1999 figures. This conveniently gives us a decade, although 1999 is the earliest year in which these figures are easily available on-line.

The figures show that the lower gender pay gap in the public sector is not new – and while it’s got a bit better in both there hasn’t been a huge change. The public sector has the slight edge on improvement, but I wouldn’t make anything of 0.1 per cent. As before this is based on hourly pay for full timers excluding overtime.

We’re glad to see the Court of Appeal today uphold an Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling that a council registrar could not refuse to conduct same-sex civil partnerships for religious reasons.

Lillian Ladele had taken the case to the court after controversial rulings at the original Employment Tribunal and first appeal. In dismissing the appeal, Lord Neuberger said:

“It appears to me that, however much sympathy one may have with someone such as Ms Ladele, who is faced with choosing between giving up a post she plainly appreciates or officiating at events which she considers to be contrary to her religious beliefs, the legislature has decided that the requirements of a modern liberal democracy, such as the United Kingdom, include outlawing discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on grounds of sexual orientation, subject only to very limited exceptions.”

This ruling is very good news for everyone who believes in equality. Lesbian and gay people are entitled to be treated as equals. No one is allowed to pick and choose whether to provide a service to someone because of their race or gender – so why should they be allowed to do so on the grounds of sexuality?

Had Ms Ladele won her case, it would have created the perverse position that the more prejudiced you are against lesbian and gay people because of your religion, the more the law permits you to discriminate against them.

We’re now hoping to see the existing religious exemptions from equality law tightened up and clarified in the Equality Bill going through the House of Lords at the moment.

This year’s World AIDS Day theme focuses on the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS. And rightly so. In our view, the rights of the people living with HIV/AIDS have not yet received the attention they deserve. According to the ILO, there are over 33 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the world. Over 30 million of them are of working age. Most of them are in developing countries, in Africa in particular, and over half of them are women.

For us in the trade union movement, HIV/AIDS is not just a health issue, although it is indeed a very serious public health problem. It is also a question of human rights. It is a social issue, an economic issue, and a very serious impediment to development.  Our role is to help combat stigma and discrimination, and also to help protect and promote the rights and entitlements of workers, their families and communities affected by the disease.

The ILO has recognized the importance and effectiveness of workplace action on HIV/AIDS, and in the union movement we have a contribution to make through workplace initiatives. The TUC were among the first to react to the outbreak of the disease in the UK in the early eighties. In collaboration with the CBI and ACAS we played a leading role in co-ordinating workplace response to HIV/AIDS. We helped develop workplace policies, practices and strategies through partnership with employers, and two years ago we produced a new workplace guide on HIV/AIDS in collaboration with the National AIDS Trust.

In many parts of the world, trade unionists have joined hands with employers to form a common front against the disease, for instance with training programmes for health and safety representatives as well as providing information and counselling in workplaces. For example, the TUC are working with local unions and funding organisations to deliver assistance right now to workers in Africa.

In Ghana, working with the Timber and Woodworkers’ Union there, our voluntary counselling and testing initiative is designed to prevent the spread of the disease without stigmatising potential sufferers. And in Uganda and Nigeria, we have been collaborating with local unions on education and information campaigns with workers. There’s also a focus on collaboration and collective bargaining with employers on workplace policies on HIV/AIDS that protect workers’ rights.

These projects all cost money, of course, and we’re grateful to Bill Morris for the donation he made when he retired from the TGWU to establish the Bill Morris Fund that we launched this time last year. We’re also very grateful to the Department for International Development for the Programme Partnership Arrangement, which funds our Nigerian project.

The rest of the money we are spending comes from donations to our own charity TUC Aid, and you can find out more about the charity (and of course donate online!) at the TUC site.