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STV News
12-05-2025
- Business
- STV News
‘Year of service' would help young Scots gain skills - Gordon Brown's think tank
A 'year of service' programme should be introduced to help young Scots gain skills for the workforce, a report from Gordon Brown's think tank recommends. The report, commissioned by Our Scottish Future, also calls for a new Scottish careers service and reforms to employability programmes. It says that despite having Europe's most highly-educated population, Scotland still lags behind London and the South East for productivity. Too many Scots are 'underemployed', the report says, while 17% of the economically inactive population want to work. Authored by the Social Market Foundation, it recommends an overhaul of the 'fragmented' skills funding system, as well as a scheme similar to the UK 'year of service' pilot project which launched in 2022. It says: 'A Scottish service year would learn from these approaches. Young people aged 16 to 24 would be offered placements that have clear social benefit, lasting up to a year. 'Hours per week would be flexible, depending on the circumstances of the participant, but most would be full time, and paid at least at the national living wage.' Roles would be in areas of public need such as social care, home refitting and renewable energy. Jim Gallagher, chairman of Our Scottish Future, said: 'We've got great people, great ideas, and some industries that have massive potential for growth. 'Somehow, that is not yet leading to everyone being in a good job that makes the most of their talents. 'We need skills and employability policies that support industry and give people the best opportunities for success.' Jamie Gollings, an author of the report, said: 'Exciting new initiatives like a Scottish careers service, devolving welfare policy and introducing a Scottish year of service have the potential to make a real, tangible impact. 'Across the world, sluggish growth is the challenge of our time. 'By taking the practical measures this report proposes, and learning from best practice in both Westminster and Holyrood, Scotland has the potential to show the world how to achieve sustained long-term growth, and provide Scots with the good jobs and quality of life they deserve.' Our Scottish Future was set up by former prime minister Mr Brown, to push for 'positive and radical change in Scotland, accelerated by a reformed UK'. A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: 'The First Minister has been clear that one of his key priorities is to grow the economy and we have been taking the necessary steps to do this. 'Ministers are engaging industries and employers across the country, and will continue to do so as we reform the skills system and introduce a new skills planning approach, which will enable targeted action to address national and regional skills requirements. 'We are also reviewing and improving school-age and adult careers support, including better information on career choices, job prospects and earnings.' She continued: 'Ministers have already indicated that they will be working closely with the Career Services Collaborative, which brings together careers service providers and to improve coherence of the careers offer for users. 'Recognising the need to address current skills needs while reforming the system, we are providing £185 million this year to support apprenticeships – and looking at how we secure maximum benefit from this investment, including how public funding is utilised.' Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
The National
12-05-2025
- Business
- The National
Gordon Brown think tank calls for 'year of service' for young Scots
Our Scottish Future commissioned a report which suggested this would help Scots gain skills before entering the workforce. It also called for a new Scottish careers service and reforms to employability programmes. Authored by the Social Market Foundation, the report says that despite having Europe's most highly-educated population, Scotland still lags behind London and the South East for productivity. READ MORE: How are Scottish parties set for Holyrood election? John Curtice's view Too many Scots are 'underemployed', it says, while 17% of the economically inactive population want to work. Recommendations include an overhaul of the 'fragmented' skills funding system, as well as a scheme similar to the UK 'year of service' pilot project which launched in 2022. It says: 'A Scottish service year would learn from these approaches. Young people aged 16 to 24 would be offered placements that have clear social benefit, lasting up to a year. 'Hours per week would be flexible, depending on the circumstances of the participant, but most would be full time, and paid at least at the national living wage.' (Image: NQ) Roles would be in areas of public need such as social care, home refitting and renewable energy. It comes as the Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced the UK Government is going to close the care worker visa route for overseas recruitment. Jim Gallagher, chairman of Our Scottish Future, said: 'We've got great people, great ideas, and some industries that have massive potential for growth. 'Somehow, that is not yet leading to everyone being in a good job that makes the most of their talents. 'We need skills and employability policies that support industry and give people the best opportunities for success.' READ MORE: Pope Leo calls for Gaza ceasefire in first Sunday blessing Jamie Gollings, an author of the report, said: 'Exciting new initiatives like a Scottish careers service, devolving welfare policy and introducing a Scottish year of service have the potential to make a real, tangible impact. 'Across the world, sluggish growth is the challenge of our time. 'By taking the practical measures this report proposes, and learning from best practice in both Westminster and Holyrood, Scotland has the potential to show the world how to achieve sustained long-term growth, and provide Scots with the good jobs and quality of life they deserve.' READ MORE: Labour closing care recruitment from abroad will be 'devastating' Our Scottish Future was set up by former prime minister Brown, to push for 'positive and radical change in Scotland, accelerated by a reformed UK'. The think tank was previously one of the groups 'named and shamed' for their secrecy over who funds them. It also faced calls to reveal who was behind a mysterious quarter of a million pounds donation given in 2020-21. In 2021, Our Scottish Future was accused of 'baselessly undermining confidence' in Scotland's Covid testing programme. Then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon would later dispute the methodology the group used. A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: 'The First Minister has been clear that one of his key priorities is to grow the economy and we have been taking the necessary steps to do this. 'Ministers are engaging industries and employers across the country, and will continue to do so as we reform the skills system and introduce a new skills planning approach, which will enable targeted action to address national and regional skills requirements. READ MORE: Pro-Palestine activists protest against Israel at Eurovision opening ceremony 'We are also reviewing and improving school-age and adult careers support, including better information on career choices, job prospects and earnings.' She continued: 'Ministers have already indicated that they will be working closely with the Career Services Collaborative, which brings together careers service providers and to improve coherence of the careers offer for users. 'Recognising the need to address current skills needs while reforming the system, we are providing £185 million this year to support apprenticeships – and looking at how we secure maximum benefit from this investment, including how public funding is utilised.'
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Areas receiving levelling-up funds show smaller Reform UK vote share, study finds
Areas that received money from the last government's much-criticised levelling up fund tended to have lower votes for Reform UK in the general election, a study has found, indicating that projects delivering quick results may hold back support for populism. The study by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank, billed as the first to examine a mass of data factors linked to support for Reform at the level of individual seats, identified a series of factors likely to make voters more likely to back Nigel Farage's party. Some were common to studies about populism in other countries, for example a correlation between a lower number of local voters having degrees and above-average support for Reform. The party also tended to do well in places with a large white population, along with areas where this was becoming proportionally lower due to newer arrivals. Higher levels of crime were also closely associated with Farage's party doing well. More surprising was that an older population did not seem to point to a greater likelihood of Reform success, and modelling showed that seats that received levelling up funding tended to have smaller Reform vote shares than would be otherwise expected given their demographics. Jamie Gollings, the research director at the SMF, said there were caveats about having to distinguish between correlation and causation, and that levelling up money might have gone mainly 'to places that were more inclined towards the mainstream parties for other reasons – they weren't necessarily giving money to places which were always going to be Reform'. There could nonetheless be lessons for Keir Starmer's government, he said: 'This could be interesting for Labour. With their big infrastructure projects and planning reforms, these are things which might pay off only in decades. 'If they want to get credit in the more immediate term, they might need to try other mechanisms, whether making sure some of the construction jobs go to local people, or just making the area feel better, whether helping the local high street or sorting out potholes.' Another notable finding was the way local political cultures seemingly play a role in whether Reform did well. Seat-by-seat-charts showed the party under-performing around Liverpool and in the south-west of England, potentially due to the Liberal Democrats' traditional presence there. The study also found that, while faltering economic growth is regularly linked to support for populism, the effect can be more complex. Gollings noted the example of Clacton, in Essex, a seat won by Farage at the last election, which has had rapid growth in skilled jobs in the green economy, but ones that may not necessarily help many local people. 'Labour is really focusing on growth, and on the dashboards in the Treasury they might see new jobs or factories or investment coming here and there. And so things might look great from Whitehall, but the question is what are people actually experiencing on the ground?' he said. 'In some cases it may correspond, and income data may be a reliable prediction of how people actually feel about their economic circumstances. But it can be slightly more indirect.' When it came to particular seats, more specific elements came into play. For example, the constituencies won by Reform at the election tended to produce a better result for the party than the demographics would suggest, an effect seemingly created by relatively high-profile candidates, such as Farage and the former Conservative MP Lee Anderson. Similarly, Reform did less well than expected in some seats when the Conservatives fielded someone with a strong record on issues such as Brexit. Gollings said the constituency-level research, which gathered more than 70 pieces of data for each seat, covering demographics, economics, public services and health, allowed for greater nuances to be uncovered, for example the surprising finding that a large white population alone was not enough to prompt support for Reform. 'Although we can see from polling that white people are more likely to vote for Reform, it doesn't really say anything about what's happening in the area,' he said. 'Whereas this kind of seat-level analysis shows that if there are people in places where there has been a moderate fall in the proportion of white people, they are more likely to vote for Reform.' Despite the political effectiveness of levelling up funding, a separate report by the thinktank Labour Together shows successive governments have spent more on stimulating economic growth in the south-east than the rest of the country, with the imbalance at its worst under Boris Johnson. The analysis of government spending figures shows that over the past 16 years ministers have spent nearly 15% more on housing, education and infrastructure projects in the south-east than elsewhere. The gap was at its widest from 2019 until 2024, when it was 19% on average. Labour Together calculated that over the 16-year period from 2008 to 2024, the south-ast benefited from a total of £100bn extra in growth spending as a result.
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Let's not leave the baby-making debate to Musk and Vance – the left has a stake in this too
Roses are red, violets are blue. Rightwing politicians around the world want women to have more babies, and if you find this idea the opposite of romantic – well, me too. Pronatalism's cause is not exactly helped by having as its best-known figureheads JD 'childless cat lady' Vance and Elon Musk, seemingly on a personal mission to reverse what he calls the 'underpopulation crisis'. Even Nigel Farage, a twice-divorced father of four who takes the firmly libertarian view that private lives are no business of the state, squirmed when tackled on the subject this week, before eventually venturing that the west had 'kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture' and that 'of course, we need higher birthrates, but we're not going to get higher birthrates in this country until we can get some sense of optimism'. But do progressives, who are after all supposed to be in the optimism business, have a stake in the baby-making debate too? A new collection of essays published this week by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank argues that they should. The children of Britain's last baby boom, my own son among them, are now pretty much grown up. Though it didn't always feel that way at the time, as their parents we had it relatively easy: the 00s were in retrospect the golden years of a Labour government seeking to lift families out of poverty, extend maternity leave and take work-life balance seriously. It wasn't men preaching traditional values, but working mothers in parliament determined to make life easier for others coming up behind them that unexpectedly helped send the birthrate in England and Wales shooting up from an average of 1.64 children for every woman in 2001 to 1.97 at its pre-recession, 2008 peak. But by 2023 it had plummeted to 1.44, and the SMF calculates it will be under 1.4 by the mid-2030s. Though some of that fall involves people happily choosing to be child-free, that seems unlikely to be the whole story, given the SMF notes that the big fall happened during the austerity years and it was sharpest in more deprived neighbourhoods. Who could have guessed that if you offer would-be parents stagnant wages, galloping rents and some of the most expensive childcare in Europe, while limiting some child benefits to the first two children only, they end up having fewer children? Not five avowedly pro-family Conservative prime ministers in a row, apparently. The problem for Labour now, as the SMF points out, is that fewer babies equals an ageing population. This means a tax base shrinking at such a rate that the rate of productivity growth would need to more than double (a challenge that has famously defeated the government's predecessors) for us just to enjoy the same mediocre growth in living standards we have been complaining about for years. Yet there remains an instinctive 'ick' factor to politicians trying to engineer more babies, inextricably associated as that has become with dangerously reactionary attitudes to women's bodies, or efforts to reduce the need for immigration. More pragmatically, even if we could get past that, it's far from obvious how governments actually make it happen. Hungary's rightwing pronatalist government poured 5% of GDP into tax cuts and bribes for parents, yet birthrates are now falling again after a temporary surge. Even the Swedes and Finns, with their enviably cheap nurseries and egalitarian workplaces, are struggling. And that's where the SMF's essays come in. Co-editor Phoebe Arslanagić-Little, who runs the pro-parenthood campaign Boom, argues there's nothing innately conservative about helping people live the lives they actually want, and that for most – though very much not all – that includes parenthood. More than half of British 32-year-olds already have children and half of the rest would like to, according to research from the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, while about 12% of those without children are sure they don't want to be parents. Yet only a quarter of those who knew they wanted either to start or add to a family were actively trying for a baby. Money worries, concerns about the impact on careers, not feeling ready and not having the right partner were the most common hurdles. Though there is little the state can do about the last two, it definitely has a role in the others. Many of the ideas in this book are easy ones for progressives to get behind, from tackling Britain's woefully stingy statutory paternity leave or funding NHS fertility treatment properly, to transferring wealth from old to young. The family-friendly parts of Angela Rayner's employment rights bill may well be pro-baby too, given flexible working keeps the show on the road for many parents. What's unclear is whether any of this is enough to sway young couples contemplating bringing children into a world now seemingly on fire. Gen Z and their serious-minded younger siblings, gen Alpha, are already showing signs of being more socially conservative than millennials, which suggests their attitudes to parenthood may yet surprise us. According to YouGov, they are more pro-marriage, and less likely to say one-night stands are common in their peer group. There is a distinct yearning for the cosy and domestic among those who grew up in lockdown and seemingly love nothing better than staying in, snuggled up under a blanket. (Though admittedly that creates its own problems, with Finland's demographic rapporteur Anna Rotkirch arguing in her SMF essay not just for financial help, such as student loan reductions for younger parents, but more help with social skills to help teenagers form relationships.) Watching the new Bridget Jones film in a cinema full of nostalgic mothers and teenage daughters, I thought the girls might be bored by an unashamedly middle-aged film with parenthood past, present and future unexpectedly at its heart. But something about Bridget clearly touches a gen Z chord, though her setup – splintered by widowhood but cushioned by the perfect nanny who just falls into her lap, a boss thrilled for her to resume her old career whenever she's ready, and a huge house on the edge of Hampstead Heath – is miles from what most will experience. Still, it's a reminder that what ultimately makes people feel ready to have children is security, economic and emotional: the intangible feeling that everything is where it should be in life, love and work, so now you can relax and settle down. Having children is the ultimate gesture of confidence in the future, but that confidence has understandably drained away over the last decade and a half in response to more brittle and precarious circumstances. Fix that, and politicians may find the baby business looks after itself. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
