News & Insight

Work and business: Fixing Universal Credit

2 May 2014

Many like to depict universal credit (UC) as the great British cock-up – a wasteful white elephant that is over-budget, over-time and over-sold by the current government on every occasion. But beyond its many management failures so carefully documented last...

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Work and Business: Healthy competition

2 May 2014

Pollsters scored Ed Miliband’s promise to freeze energy prices as the hit of the 2013 conference season, and the intervention did his personal ratings no harm at all. It signalled both Labour’s newfound muscularity over corporate interests and a welcome...

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Work and Business: My life below the minimum wage

1 May 2014

My name is Sarah and I have been working on and off as a waitress for almost 10 years. I have worked in nine restaurants in Scotland: two in Glasgow, four in Dundee, and three in the Scottish highlands (one...

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Work and Business: Give agency workers a break

1 May 2014

It can be a miserable being an agency worker. As a temporary teaching assistant in inner London schools, I would traipse halfway across London on my way to a job before finding that my booking had been cancelled last minute,...

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Work and Business: The low pay crisis

1 May 2014

The sections on ‘Better workplaces’ and ‘Improving employment rights’ in the Your Britain policy consultation on Work & Business, now in their third iteration, remain extraordinarily weak and woolly. To be doorstep ready, they must become more radical, and more...

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Work and Business: A targeted industrial strategy

30 April 2014

Industrial strategy is no longer the stuff of theoretical debate in the UK. After a decade of looking enviously at other countries - and at least one aborted attempt at getting something similar off the ground towards the end of...

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