UK employment figures reach 19-year high

[AP]

The number of people in work hit a record level in the second quarter of the year, official figures showed on Wednesday.
...

The ONS said the number of people seeking work but unable to find it ... was down 42,000 to 1.46m in the three months to June, compared with the preceding three months...

The number of people claiming unemployment benefit in July fell to 939,200...

Average earnings in the three months to June were up 3.1 per cent on the year ... Public sector earnings growth rose slightly to 5.1 per cent...

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059478966699&p=1012571727201

[SoCalDem]

1. BUT... in the UK, if you are out of work

you still have health care....unlike here..:(

[AP]

2. Everyone has a job AND health care then. You go, Tony.

Good on you, Labour.

[T_i_B]

3. Health care? Not if PFI has anything to do with it

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2002-03-09&id=1646

Because the private finance initiative mobilises private capital, ministers have argued, it allows the government to start more schemes than it would otherwise be able to commission. Private companies provide the money for public infrastructure the state can’t afford, and the government pays it back over a number of years. Because the private sector is more efficient, they insist, PFI schemes offer better value for money than public funding. And because private companies, rather than the government, provide the capital, the money spent on new projects does not contribute to the public sector borrowing requirement.

The reality is that PFI, or ‘public private partnership’ as the government now prefers to call it, is a scam. It works for neither socialists nor free marketeers, as it offers neither effective public provision nor business efficiencies. Far from introducing market disciplines, it has become an official licence to fleece the taxpayer. Far from reducing the public sector borrowing requirement, PFI is, as the Accounting Standards Board has noted, simply ‘an off-balance sheet fiddle’. Most alarmingly, the ministers I have spoken to simply do not understand how it works.

The initiative was a Conservative experiment. In opposition, Labour fiercely contested it. But, as soon as the party came to power, it resolved that PFI would become the means by which most of our new public infrastructure would be built. By the time it became obvious that the experiment was failing, Labour had waded in too far. Awestruck by its glittering new friends in business, but baffled by the complexities of the scheme it supports, it has been consistently outwitted and outmanoeuvred.

The first of the problems Labour has failed to grasp is the process by which the private investors are chosen. The government announces a new scheme, companies make their bids, and the government selects the bid which appears to offer best value for money. The chosen consortium is named the ‘preferred bidder’, and the government starts to negotiate the contract.

The consortium then has the government over a barrel. In theory, the contract is still open to competition. In practice, preferred bidders have been deselected only, as far as I can discover, in two of the hundreds of PFI schemes the government has launched. Once the consortium has its foot in the door, it can raise its price and reduce its services. Costs which weren’t envisaged before will emerge. The likely inflation of labour and materials will be priced as generously as possible. In some cases, I have found, companies have simply slipped extra figures into the spreadsheets.

[AP]

4. You think that if public servants were doing all these jobs

that are getting farmed out in PFIs (like building hospitals) the public servants wouldn't be taking the taxpayer for a ride? Now, I don't like private monopolies of public services, but one of the facts of PFIs is that the bidding processes in the UK are relatively fair (especially with the Labour Party in charge) and these projects create a nice cycling of money which used to just circulate among the very wealthy and which now circulates down to working class construction workers, and middle class lawyers, accountants, architects, etc., and, it's creating lots of jobs and getting lots of socially valuable activity done. It's not the best situation, but it's far from the worst situation. (And it's lottery taxes which are going into many of these projects anyway, so it's tainted money which the government is trying to send right back out to the working and middle class as soon as possible while doing some good work).

[T_i_B]

5. I suggest you go back and read up about PFI

As your description of this scam has little or no basis in fact. There is far less incentive for PFI contractors to do the job well then either the private or the public sector. In both private & public sector there is a degree of accountability many, many times larger than in PFI. The bidding proccess is in no way fair and "new" labour, awestruck by it's corporate freinds tends to end up stuck over a barrell, as the article explains.

PFI only creates pen pushing jobs which are a large part of why 1 in 4 NHS empl;oyees is now a beurocrat. This only serves to draw vital resources away from the NHS's task of healing the sick. Now I'm guessing you haven't spoken to any NHS doctors or nurses recently but the main complaint they have about the current situation is toomany cheifs and not enough indians. PFI is as much to blame for this as the tory reforms. I must also add a personal note here. When I left Uni I did notice a large number of pen pusher jobs advertised in the NHS, more than for nurses in fact. I could have taken up a number of these but I am glad to have found employment elsewhere.

And it is not lottery taxes that get wasted in PFI projects, it is ALL taxes. PFI is a large part of the reason why so many people gripe that they are paying taxes with little in return. This is a disturbing situation for any progressive but thanks to PFI, we are not seeing the improvements in the NHS that we should be seeing.

Oh, did I mention that PFI is actually CUTTING servces? From the article;

There is only one means of meeting the outrageous costs of PFI, and that is by cutting public services. A study by a consultancy company which works for the Department of Health shows that every £200 million spent on privately financed hospitals will result in the loss of 1,000 doctors and nurses. The first PFI hospitals contain some 28 per cent fewer beds than the ones they replaced. Alan Milburn has promised that future schemes will not result in bed reductions, but he can keep this promise only by increasing their costs still further.

And as if this is not scandalous enough, there is the matter of Foundation hosptials. I'll leave it to frank Dobson, Blair's former health secretary to explain those.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,913914,00.html