As the economy stumbles its time for some REAL blue skies thinking from Downing Street

The sun is shining, the politicians have skipped town for the summer recess and the silly season is upon us, which must be why the latest wheeze from Steve Hilton, the Prime Ministers ‘blue skies’ advisor has received so much media coverage.

Steve Hilton is what you might call the ‘holy fool’ of the Cameron government, a trendy type given to wearing t-shirts to the office and, allegedly, going barefoot through the corridors of power. Anyway his big plan for kick starting our moribund economy is, drum roll if you please; scrapping maternity leave.

The thinking, such as it is, behind the plan is that businesses are put off hiring female workers because they might one day want to have time off the have a family. I’m sure this is true too; well it is if the businesses in question are trading in a 1970’s time warp. Its all very well your wanting to be CEO of ICI, but how are you going to have your hubby’s tea on the table when he gets home if you get the job, really my dear you haven’t thought this through at all.

Not thinking things through, it seems, is an experience with which Steve Hilton is all too familiar himself. As a government insider told the Financial Times this week ‘some of his ideas are great but a lot of time is spent at an official level trying to deconstruct his maddest ideas.’

Mr Hilton mad, surely not? Wanting the government to invest in technology to blow away the clouds and make the UK a sunnier and happier place is sanity incarnate. The road to madness surely lies in supporting the barmy ‘Big Society’ project, oh hang on a minute, turns out Steve Hilton does support it and really has got the t-shirt to prove it; maybe he is barking mad after all.

There is no doubt that the UK economy needs something to lift it out of the doldrums. This week the Office for National Statistics published figures showing that growth had slumped to just 0.2%, even taking into account the effects of the Japanese earthquake, the Royal Wedding and a wet summer things look pretty bad.

At least they do to everyone but the two men who matter most, David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne. The Prime Minister is reportedly worried by the poor performance of the economy; the Chancellor though seems able to see sunshine and flowers where the rest of us see only trouble and strife.

On Tuesday he told the press that ‘the positive news is that the British economy is continuing to grow.’ Well up to a point Chancellor, in roughly the same way that someone who has only gone down twice can claim to be still swimming rather than drowning.

The opposition has poured criticism over the government’s raising of VAT to 20% and the breakneck speed with which it is cutting public spending.

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls said that the Chancellor’s ‘rash decision to hike up VAT in January and to cut further and faster than any other major nation has caused confidence to fall and the economy to flatline since the autumn.’

Brendan Barber of the Trades Union Council said ‘A target of eliminating the deficit in just four years always looked as if it came from what others might call ‘right wing nutters’ than sensible economics.’ Making along the way a thinly veiled reference to Business Secretary Vince Cable’s accurate, if not exactly diplomatic, assessment of the Tea Party and their contribution to the debate over America’s own debt problems.

He went on to add that the UK economy needs a ‘Plan B based on growth and investment’ if we are to avoid another catastrophic recession.

None of this criticism seems to have reached the ivory tower inhabited by the Chancellor who believes despite all evidence to the contrary that ‘our economy is stable because the government has taken the difficult decision to get to grips with Britain’s debts.’

Could it be that Steve Hilton isn’t the most deluded man in Downing Street after all? The austerity sold to the British public as the only option to avoid the fate of Greece and Ireland turns out to be holding back the growth without which we cannot hope to clear our debts. Who’d have thought it eh? Not the Oxford educated man in charge of the country’s economy it seems.

The problems faced by the UK economy are real and require a radical solution; some real blue skies thinking if you like. They require us to address the long avoided question of which matters most, economic growth or the health of our society?

If it’s the former, fine cut away; but don’t call out for help if you fall ill, lose your job or become a victim of crime because there will be nobody there to help. If it’s the latter then we will all have to accept, in the short term at least, having fewer gadgets but a much stronger society.

John Maynard Keynes famously said that when the facts changed he changed his mind. The facts of the economic picture have changed, if inflexible ideology beats common sense and the ability to strike a compromise next week causing the world’s largest economy to sneeze the rest of us might just catch pneumonia.

A Downing Street advisor with the ability to think clearly, about blue skies or anything else, would be advising David Cameron to show some real leadership and order his Chancellor to follow Keynes’s example and change his mind about how to deal with the economy before it is too late.

Poor quality vocational courses risk betraying a generation of young people

The time was when the advice given to any young person wanting to make his or her way in the world was to learn a trade. Sadly as young people swell the ever growing ranks of the unemployed that no longer seems to be true.

According to a report written by Professor Alison Wolf hundreds of thousands of young people have been misled into taking vocational courses that are of little or no real value, this, the report claims, is largely due to the ‘perverse incentives’ that encourage colleges to steer students into taking multiple courses with no guarantee they are gaining skills that employers are looking for.

The Wolf Report recommends that funding should be provided to colleges on the number of students they enrol, rather than as now on how many qualifications each student achieves; it also calls for the majority of students to continue studying a syllabus based largely on academic subjects up to the age of sixteen.

Speaking to the BBC on the day the report was published Professor Wolf said ‘We’ve got more than half our fifteen and sixteen year olds failing to get good Maths and English at GCSE’ and called for greater emphasis to be placed on improving that basic skills that underpin both academic and vocational learning.

Responding to the report Education Secretary Michael Gove said that access to high quality vocational courses was ‘immensely valuable’ for many young people, however ‘millions of children have been misled into courses which offer little hope’ as result of the education policies of the Labour years.

The coalition government would, he said, ‘reform league tables (seen as driving colleges to grind out meaningless qualifications to boost their position), the funding system and regulation to give children honest information and access to the right courses.’

The government also plans to introduce University Technical Colleges at which students will be able to study vocational subjects from the age of fourteen and to encourage employers to work with colleges to develop apprenticeship programmes.

Providing a decent standard of vocational education is something the UK has to get right if we are to maintain our current position never mind compete effectively against the emerging Asian economies; and yet it is something we consistently get wrong. Largely due to an antiquated mindset in which vocational education is seen as ‘second division’ learning.

The real rot set in during the Thatcher years when the old manufacturing industries went to the wall and in the new services sector training was something management saw as a cost rather than an investment. Apprenticeships all but vanished and were replaced by the unloved and all but useless YTS scheme, an institution that seemed to those of us who went through it (and I did) to exist primarily to massage the figures for youth unemployment; whilst teaching the youths it employed for two years little more than how to sweep up and make the tea.

The Wolf Report should be welcomed for highlighting the need to make sure another generation doesn’t have its potential wasted in the same cavalier fashion, however they cynic in me suspects that it will be shelved by the government.

Michael Gove for all his seeming understanding of the situation is also, as his comments over recent months testify, also wedded to a vision of the education system that has more to do with bringing back mortar boards and double Latin prep than meeting the needs of young people.

By far the biggest stumbling block to the recommendations made by the Wolf report being implemented are the employers who stand to benefit most if they are. For years they have complained vociferously about the poor skills shown by school leavers whilst at the same time refusing to invest in training the next generation of workers.

In a couple of weeks time George Osborne will lay out his budget, it is rumoured that he will focus on encouraging growth above everything else, a reasonable enough tactic as the economy struggles out of recession. However if he plans to cut red tape and simplify the tax and planning laws to encourage businesses to invest shouldn’t business be expected to pay something back in return, aren’t we all in it together after all?

Surely the most appropriate thing to do would be to tie any changes to the tax system that favour business, for example, to how many training opportunities the private sector creates. That would have the long term benefit of creating the skilled workers the country needs to prosper and cutting the welfare bill in the only morally acceptable way; by giving work and wages to those young people who currently have neither.