Government should apply conditions to employment programmes, says Dodds

Anneliese Dodds has said that the government should apply conditions for its investment in employment programmes to make sure that they result in “good quality jobs” and provide positive local benefits.

Appearing at an online ‘in conversation with’ event hosted by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) this afternoon, the Shadow Chancellor discussed the UK’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and Labour’s plan for the economy.

Dodds argued that the UK government must think about the local impact of its plan to invest in infrastructure projects unveiled earlier this year as part of Boris Johnson’s ‘new deal‘ and commitment to “build, build, build”.

Commenting on the planned spending in the virtual event today, she said: “We need to make sure that, while we’re focused particularly on the kinds of investment that are necessary, that it actually builds into good quality jobs.

“I’ve said that with the government’s investment programme… there should be conditions there around local employment, around up-skilling, making sure that young people and others in different areas can actually benefit…

“We haven’t had that kind of conditionality applied. You know, we could end up with a situation where we have major contractors drafted in to do contracts, not developing the local workforce, not having that impact locally.”

Dodds added: “Once the project is finished, they just go away again. Well that’s not going to lead to the sustainable economic development – upskilling, involvement of young people etc – that we need.”

The comments from the Shadow Chancellor follow her speech to conference earlier today, in which she set out a three-step plan for the economy that she argued will “recover jobs, retrain workers and rebuild business”.

The plan from Labour includes a “national retraining strategy to help people whose hours have been cut to increase their skills or to retrain in a new area, and to enable people who have lost their jobs to transition into new work”.

Dodds also proposed a ‘job recovery scheme’ to enable businesses in certain sectors to bring back more staff on reduced hours, with the government subsidising a proportion of wages for the rest of the working week.

This would be similar to the German ‘Kurzarbeit‘ programme, whereby employers can reduce workers’ hours without laying them off with the state providing income replacement of up to 60%.

Trade union leaders today issued a challenge to Labour by telling the party to “be bold and embrace” its 2017 and 2019 manifesto policies, advocate for a pay rise for key workers and be “much more vocal” on Covid support for workers.

Presented as a Roosevelt-style deal earlier this year, the £5bn spending plan outlined by the Prime Minister amounts to just 0.2% of GDP compared to the estimated 40% of US national income spent in the 1920s stimulus.

Labour and the TUC at the time criticised the proposal set out by Johnson, declaring that it is “not enough” and represented only “rehashed old promises” from the Conservative manifesto in the 2019 general election.

The event today formed part of Labour’s online ‘Connected‘ conference. The usual conference was cancelled this year due to Covid. The virtual replacement is running events for Labour members over the next few days through to September 22nd.