The Cornerstone Group

This week I have consistently tried to highlight some of the Prime Minister’s schemes enacted as Chancellor.

But one of the most disastrous has been his signature policy - the Tax Credits scheme. Figures for the last year are still to be published but nearly £6bn has already been overpaid to families in the three short years prior to that.

The Treasury assures us these credits help families out of poverty and back into work. They don’t tell us that clawing the money back has the opposite effect. I do not recall any other issue, with the exception of pensions, that has plagued the Chancellor so much. And for good reason.

I meet many families at my surgeries who have been driven to distraction by the problems tax credits have caused and I have received many letters from others facing the same problems.

At the very worst, families have been left distraught and dismayed. At best they are left with a huge headache, increased stress and financial insecurity as they wonder if their payments are correct or if indeed they will be forced into making repayments they cannot afford.

And yet the Government states that the situation is getting better. They must be joking.

Official Government figures claim that 56,000 fewer families were overpaid in 2005/2006 than in the previous year. However, as a percentage that amounts is less than a 3% improvement, despite assurances that the problem would be solved. By my calculations it would take a further 17 years and £13.5bn of overpayments, with all the misery clawback causes, before the problem is dealt with.

The truth is that overpayments most hurt those the system is said to be designed to help. Yet the former Chancellor continues to deny the heartache he has caused.

An apology should be forthcoming but sadly he isn’t big enough to make one. Does that mean he is not big enough to be Prime Minister?

Brian Binley MP

As Gordon Brown basks in the glow of a bright honey-coloured moon, no doubt occasionally reflecting on the very generous pension which will one day come his way, I wonder whether he compares his own good fortune with that of the many pensioners who have fallen victim to his ineptitude.

The ex-Chancellor’s pension’s stealth tax has helped to destroy one of the world’s best pension systems.

Over £100 billion has been wiped off the value of pension funds, over 60,000 occupational pension schemes are in the process of, or have been, wound up since the Labour Government took office in 1997 and only a third of final salary pension schemes are still open to new members.

But we have to be fair. He did set up the Financial Assistance Scheme, which so far has cost more than £8.8 million to administer whilst paying out just £3.3million to disaffected pensioners. What a Chancellor. What an Administrator.

However the real gall of the man lies in the fact that he was told of the likely outcome at the time but clearly thought he knew better.

Such arrogance and poor judgement bode ill now that he has steered himself into the top job. Yet he suggests that it somehow wasn’t his fault but that of his predecessor and that he will embark on a spin free Labour restart to save us from such pitfalls in the future.

Doesn’t add up does it. But that’s what we have come to expect from a Chancellor come Prime Minister with a record of failure in so many areas.

Brian Binley MP

The Lost Generation

This year the Learning and Skills Council will receive £11 billion pounds of public money, more than the Royal Navy, yet the Government is failing to improve the nation’s skills. Today there are 1.25 million young people aged 16-24 not in education, training or employment up 15% since 1997. While we waste a lost generation’s potential, we add to their number – 45,000 16-year-olds leave school each year functionally illiterate and/or innumerate.

Participation in further education, adult and community learning and work-based learning are all in decline. This week NIACE reported that there are half a million fewer adults in learning than a year ago. The proportion of adults currently learning or having done so in the last three years has fallen to just 41%.

No wonder the Government is failing when so much public money lost in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. One study identified 9 layers of administration that a pound of public expenditure must pass through on its way from Whitehall to the learners themselves.

So concerned are the Government at their failure to tackle the skills crisis that they commissioned two high-level reviews into the sector. Sir Andrew Foster was asked to look at Further Education. His report recognised that FE colleges are stifled by regulation and strangled by red tape.  He recommended radical change for colleges and ‘less centralisation and moves to greater self-regulation’. Lord Sandy Leitch was asked to look at skills. Lord Leitch, like Sir Andrew Forster, recommended radical reform and an end to central planning which he argues has ‘a poor track record’.

Yet none of these recommendations are included in the FE and Training Bill which received its Second Reading in the Commons yesterday. It is bizarre, even by the standards of this Government, to ask for detailed studies and simultaneously introduce a Bill which pays no attention whatsoever to their reports.

At best the Bill is a wasted opportunity, at worst a regressive step, tightening bureaucrats’ suffocating grip on FE. Why on earth does the Government think that the Learning and Skills Council should be given sweeping new powers to sack college Principals, Governors and senior managers?

Britain’s future depends on a skills base built on the fulfilled potential of a new generation of craftsmen. That generation’s future is being jeopardised by the obstinate inaction of Ministers who should know better.

John Hayes is Co-Chairman of The Cornerstone Group