Taking back control: What will Brexit mean for UK social policy? | Kitty Stewart

my name is mary daley and i'm a i have a chair in sociology and social policy uh in the department and at the university and i'll be chairing this session so our seminar series has run throughout the oxford term which means that week six now and um our overall topic is a new dawn for social policy question mark and we've had various kind of social policy considerations last week for example we had basic income we've also heard about health policy reform about fair work and today we thought it really really important to talk about brexit we need to turn back the focus on brexit it's been much less considered by in light of the kind of focus on the um uncovered but a brexit is arguably as important if not more important than covet for uk social policy so can i introduce our speaker who is professor kitty stewart and kitty is an associate professor at the london school of economics she is also associate director of the very famous case center which stands for the center for the analysis of social policy and um sorry actually social exclusion and she's deputy head of the department of social policy as well and kitty has spent most of her uh working career thus far at the llc but previously before she joined the lse she worked for another very famous and very important center the unicef innocent center research center in florence which works particularly on the well-being of children in its own right in the uk but also with a broader uh european comparative orientation most people will know kitty's work which she's done with other colleagues at the llc in tracking social policy developments under different governments in the uk for the last 20 years indeed there was a big event at the llc just this week on monday launching some of that work uh with a particular focus on the conservative government's um various conservative governments policies but kitty's specialist is a number of specialist interests on which she's done quite a lot of research and published widely and i think there are probably five fields of work from kitty that i know best one is on child poverty and children's outcomes more general more generally a subject which is also very close to the heart of this department as is kitty's second specialist area early years policies and even kitty's third specialist area social security poverty and inequality is also a core interest in this department other fields of which she's worked are employment and wage progression and brexit and it's brexit and social policy that we're going to hear about this evening and kitty is one of the leading authorities on the implications of brexit for uk social policy before i hand the microphone over to kitty can i just um say that we are recording this session but only the uh the lecture part of it um we will stop the recording after kitty has finished she will speak for uh between 50 and 55 minutes after which we'll have about 30 minutes before discussion and the discussion uh just to prepare you for the discussion we would prefer people use the raised hand function if possible please and depending on which version of zoom you have that is either in the old zoom under the participants uh banner or heading or it's now under in the new zoom under the reactions uh button so i you'll find it either way there's also a chat but the chat is more to communicate with the organizers who are myself lonnie from the uh division of social science social science division marik nasik from this department and also rosella sykia from this department so we're all we we all can monitor the chat so i'll hand it over to you kitty um you're very welcome we're delighted to have this session and thank you for taking us up on your on our invitation thank you very much mary and thank you for the invitation um now first hurdle is to share my screen um so here we are so this is a paper what about brexit and social policy it's um co-authored with uh colleagues from lse keris cooper and isabelle shoots and it was really written as part as mary said actually of this bigger program that we have that launched on monday social policies and distributional outcomes in a changing britain which uh tracked uh social policy and its impact on a wide range of outcomes over the period 2015 uh to 2020 and you could we've written it up as a rather long working paper and you can read a very nice abbreviated version in the journal of european social policy um now the aims um what we set out to do uh with the paper was really to kind of map to take a a broad approach to thinking about what the evidence tells us about what brexit might mean for social policy uh broadly understood so as under social policy there we're thinking of of living standards and poverty and inequality we're thinking of social and employment rights and social protection and of the provision and accessibility of public services um so it was sort of it it was a mapping of existing evidence and research and and i would say it's broad and not deep so there's lots of areas here on which i'm certainly not an expert um and i hope so in discussion we can we could there may there may well be things that you want to add and and i hope to learn as well from the session we wrote this paper originally in 2018 2019 of course against a backdrop of huge uncertainty um and i've revisited it for this presentation uh just updating it a bit in terms of what we what we already know about the way that things are progressing i also wanted to say that in doing the paper we've we we wanted to look for the opportunities and the positives as well as the challenges of brexit and maybe this is a point to say something about my own positionality here which is that i voted remain and i was devastated by the referendum results i did my phd in florence at the european university institute my husband is portuguese and my children are dual nationals and so and i felt very and feel very emotionally attached to uh eu membership so part of me coming to do this paper was a sort of almost a way of dealing with this um with the with my reaction to to brexit because i thought well there's got to be two sides to this story there always is um and surely there are some positives here as well so we were very much kind of on the lookout not just to be ramonas and point to all the challenges but also to try to find the positives and you can judge uh how effectively you think you've done this and if we've missed any that's great i really am i'd be pleased to hear them um the paper itself looks at the political and economic consequences of the referendum results as well as of brexit itself because the referendum result of course had its own fallout in terms of a change of governments and that itself had social policy implications but i'm not going to talk about that today i'm going to focus on on brexit itself so this is um an overview of what i'll cover i'm going to start uh by thinking about the economic consequences of brexit and their uh broad implications for social policy because that sort of underlies a lot of a lot of the other effects um and then i'm going to go on and i'm going to use uh this idea of taking back control this the slogan of the vote leave uh campaign which was picked up by teresa may and by um by johnson of course as well taking back control of our money our borders and our laws so i'm using that as an organizing framework to think about the ways in which uh brexit may affect social policy and then at the end um there'll be some conclusions and looking looking forward i should have said new dawn uh question mark we can discuss okay so where are we today well we do have um a we do have a sort of skeleton of our future trading relationship now the trade and cooperation agreement was finally agreed i think on christmas eve of 2020 and it gives us a much harder brexit than many of us may have wanted or expected certainly much harder than the norway model and much harder than uh the chequers agreement which theresa may has had set out so a little bit better is better than no deal but um it is very much quite a distant relationship uh with the eu so you can see there we're not in the customs union not in the single market for goods or services no free movement of people we have agreed no tariffs or quotas with eu on any goods including all agricultural goods so that is pretty good as free trade arrangements go and is better than canada has and it's even better than the norway has but we have agreed very little in terms of that will reduce the non-tariff barriers to trade and economists agree that it's the non-tariff barriers that really present the larger um risks for uh the economy on the large the negative impact for the economy um so the trading cooperation agreement no tariffs are quotas as i said uh non-tariff barriers briefly to summarize them we're not in the customs union and that means a lot of extra paperwork uh to show the origin of all the bits that go into the different goods that we're importing into the eu that means paperwork in advance and it means checks on paperwork at borders and it's partly what causes the cues of lorries we also have to do a whole lot of declarations on the safety and the security of our goods and that also requires paperwork in advance paperwork and checks particularly on animal origin and plants at uh borders so border border back barriers at the borders and barriers also in terms of additional costs for for companies the other thing really to highlight is that there's not much in this agreement uh to preserve access for services and services are really important to the uk economy something like 80 of our economy and 50 of our exports the eu our services talks are on ongoing so we may expect some improvements for the financial sector and for legal services but broadly where things stand at the moment um levels of access both for financial services legal services and a whole range of other services much lower levels of access than we'd like just things like not automatically recognizing the qualifications of of um uk qualifications means just an extra barrier and an extra difficulty for people wanting to use services in the uk rather than in the eu um in the last few weeks since the 1st of january we've really started to see what this actually means in terms of real people's stories so i'm sure you will have seen in the news pictures of uh for example the fisherman who's whose um uh fish has been ended up rotting because their cues were two three days at borders and queues at borders also affect other businesses not just ones that have goods which can rot and we've also seen stories about the additional charges that that small businesses face this is a london-based fencing equipment specialist very highly specialized uh producer of fencing equipment and uh he points out the additional charges adding up to about 30 pounds per package that he's exporting out to customers in the eu just making his products far less competitive overnight than they were before and this seems to be is likely to lead to one thing it may lead to is is uh companies sort of setting up a warehouse in the eu so that they can kind of shift stuff over all at once um with you know job implications uh in itself um in terms of financial services the expectation is the sort of shift over the shift away out of london really towards um amsterdam paris frankfurt will take place slowly over the next few years as as banks and investment services make decisions about you know they don't pull out but immediately we'll see this uh happening over time but we did see a very dramatic shift uh just simply overnight in terms of where uh share trading is taking place you can see uh pretty much overnight huge shift away out of london and in to amsterdam which is shaping up to be the new kind of financial trading center for the eu so those are kind of examples of this happening in real this really playing out now it's no longer theoretical um and the current projections uh are very much in line with the projections economists have been making since the referendum uh the obr's latest figure is that gdp is now two percent smaller than it would have been if the referendum had gone the other way and looking ahead there they're saying a medium-term effect on our economy of five to eight percent of gdp which is very much in line with many of the estimates of course we've had the covered impact which in some ways put that puts that into the shades but we hope the coved impact will be relatively short-term um and this is a sort of long-term shift in in the economy now what does this mean for social policy well three types of effects i think um for social policy one is in on living standards uh one of the distributional effects as some regions some sectors will be affected more than others and thirdly the impact on public finances and what that means for public spending so first of all let's think about living standards uh the estimates for um again from the ovr the office of budget responsibility estimates that that fall in growth uh equates to around 870 pounds per household per year um and there's a very similar impact uh to date uh from the inflationary impact which have also hit standards so the result of currency depreciation after the referendum uh has led to higher prices for things that we are importing and that showed very clearly in this little figure here you can see the inflation as it has affected uk goods imported goods to the uk uh and much higher than than any other uk goods which which don't import a high share of production uh and that's had already cost average households 870 pounds per year i don't think that's a typo i think that really is just the same amount um inflation can fall very differently across parts of the distribution and brian lickettal who've done this analysis uh suggests that there's not actually that if it falls pretty evenly across different uh parts of the distribution um for various reasons because of because of the type of goods that have been affected um but this we can expect that this had a worse impact on those in receipts of working age cash benefits simply because we have had a political decision to freeze those benefits from 2015 to 2020. um looking for pluses the bank of england had projected a big drop in house prices which could have a kind of offsetting effect in terms of people's living standards of house prices dropped by a lot uh the the level of uh fall that they projected doesn't seem to have played out and in fact house prices were up by 14 since the referendum though not that's not true in uh very central parts of london there has been some reductions in rents and i'm going to come back to that a little bit later now the we can expect so that we're going to be poorer overall but of course the effects are not going to be felt evenly by everybody in the economy by any means um and there are various ways of thinking about the distributional effects one is to look at how these will affect different regions and there's a reasonable amount of consensus that areas that trade more that have a higher share of trade with the eu in their local economies will be worse affected and that ought to mean that london and the southeast are relatively protected they tend to trade more globally even though services are important financial services are important in the london london economy um and areas such as the northwest the midlands uh will be hardest hit northern ireland uh these areas uh are areas that are poorer to start with so this is kind of deepening the levels of regional inequality not everybody agrees with this so there are some projections that actually london and the southeast are likely to be very exposed because of our greater trading services also the southeast has the advantage of geographical proximity to the european union so other parts other ports other areas may benefit from dispersion of trade we have seen a bit more trade going around into other ports as there have been queues for example at dover um recently however uh dingaret al who've done this analysis also do point out that even a a shock which is actually smaller in size may have a bigger effect and be felt more keenly in a poorer part of the country and it's also the case that london and the southeast are a bit more resilient in terms of um perhaps being able to diversify into other areas more quickly london and the southeast were hardest hit by the recession by the by the big financial crisis in 2007 but they bounced back much more quickly than some other parts of the country we can also think of distributional effects in terms of who which which sectors and groups of workers will be affected um the sectors with the greatest exposure to eu trades include clothing and textiles transport including car manufacturing chemicals and pharmaceuticals and uh and level and killer of the ifs have looked at uh this data and the types of people who work then they conclude that men are more exposed than women um and that lower educateds men are most exposed of all and interestingly what they point to is the fact that these are what's at risk here are good jobs for people with who are skilled manual labor who don't have other qualifications which would make it easy for them to switch into other skilled work um and that and who are relatively high paid middle to higher income um and certainly high paid for their education group and so the implications of that are actually that inequality could fall including gender inequality so if the if the men with the well-paid jobs lose their lose those jobs maybe having to shift into much lower paid um work or no work at all um that could have some positive implica positive implications in terms of inequalities kind of leveling down um effects but obviously this is worrying in terms of the risk for for men working in those uh sectors and sort of echoes what we've seen in the past in terms of de-industrialization closures of of mines and so on one might think well at least so there may be um these negative effects for these facing these workers in terms of jobs available but on the other hand there must be less competition because if migrants are less likely to be coming in uh there might be a sort of counter balancing effect and in fact the evidence suggests that we can't be optimistic about that at all so research on the impact of uh that's looked at the impact of eu migration since we opened up in 2000 and four show that uh there really don't seem to be any negative effects on employment it's almost the fact the case that one extra migrant coming in creates an extra job um because of because they then use services they buy things and so on and so the counter of that is that we wouldn't expect to see if increases in jobs available as migrants uh withdrawal um there may be very small effects on on wages for low-skilled workers so less competition from low-skilled migrants could mean uh positive effects on wages but these are really tiny in the estimates and in fact have been already wiped out by the effects of inflation since 2016. so once again on the hunt for positives and as someone who's always sort of thought is it good is it a good thing that our economy is so dominated by financial services and by the city of london um and that that has a series of negative effects in terms of pushing up house prices in london the kind of very ostentation inequalities that we have um in the city um and also uh there's an argument that it you know it leads to a higher it pushes our currency up i mean and that makes goods less competitive being manufacturing goods less competitive so could we say that's you know a reduction in the size of london could end up having positive effects that offset some of the problems for trade um we have to remember that's going to bring with it a loss of lots of supporting jobs um and we've we've seen this risk for manufacturing so there's a question there about how far rebalancing can go we might conclude that we will be poorer uh but more equal possibly overall but certainly the evidence pointing towards us being poorer seems much more certain uh than evidence which supports the the evidence on whether we'll be more equal or not remains i think much less less certain the final um consequence of a smaller economy is that we have less tax revenue so the treasury projected increased borrowing because of um brexit of between 20 billion pounds and 80 billion pounds depending on what scenario we ended up with and we're closer to no deal i think than to the the norway model again these numbers really fade into insignificance compared to what we're spending currently on covid but that doesn't reduce the problem in the sense it kind of compounds the problem that we are going to be facing this smaller economy while we're also um when we've also increased borrowing a lot because of covet and a smaller economy less less reduction in tax revenue uh runs through and affects uh has implications for many of the other social policy consequences of brexit uh some of which i think if we had lots of money and we were prepared to spend it we could address uh in ways which might end up being quite positive so let's go on and think about um taking that control and what this means taking that control being quite possibly the most effective uh slogan um in history potentially um and we're going to look at taking back control of our well let's start by looking at taking taking back control of our money which we've almost sort of answered already so one of the arguments for taking back control is that we give a lot of money to the eu this bus which gives a very full sum um will be familiar to any of you who are here at the time of the referendum uh the argument that we give the eu a lot of money in um dues and sort of membership payments and the net contribution was about eight billion pounds uh a year so if we can get all this money back we can give it to the nhs that doesn't equate to 350 million it equates to a lot less but still in principle if that was the case that we're going to get this net eight billion pounds we could we would have more money to spend um in fact first of all the divorce bill that we agreed with the eu as part of the withdrawal settlement was 39 billion so that rules out savings until 2023 after that we have this eight billion that we're no longer sending to the eu but a reduction in gdp of one percent is a bit more than eight billion uh in tax revenue so and we've just seen that we're expecting a fall in gdp of more like five to eight percent so this uh net contribution is actually a fraction um you know maybe 15 maybe 20 max of uh what we can expect to lose as a result of um a weak and trade relationship so there's no sort of brexit dividend so taking back control of money is is is a slogan but it doesn't correspond to to any money actually it's the opposite we're we're gonna i guess take back control of having less money debt um what about taking back control of our borders again this was a really important part of the kind of rhetoric in the referendum that people like this idea what it mean what does it mean in practice well of course one thing that it means which is we could think of as a social policy implication in the sense that this affects all of us our the quality of our lives um uk citizens have lost the right to live and study and work in 27 eu member states and new ee migrants we now know we now have have had this confirmed will be subject to the exact same immigration controls as non-e a migrants and what we've got is a points-based system and essentially this will allow in skilled workers who can speak english who have at least a-levels who work for approved employers and have a job offer at at least 25 600 pounds um a bit less if you're a young worker you're coming into a shortage occupation or you hold a stem phd or a postdoc and there's going to be there's some um also you can come in if you are on a list of highly skilled scientists and researchers you can come in without a job offer you're particularly sought after and you can come in if you've got a lot of money and are prepared to invest and create uh some jobs so what does this mean well on the one hand there are implications here clearly for people who fall into this category now so for for new eea migrants there are obvious implications for their social rights they now like non-eea migrants they will face annual health charges to access the nhs they will be subject to a condition of no recourse to public funds for the first five years that they're here they will be able to access contributory benefits when they are when they've made contributions but they won't have access to means tested or universal benefits such as child benefit semi-universal um there are also risks to ee so eea migrants who are already here who have arrived before the 31st of december 2020 um will can apply for settled status and that actually would give them probably better access to uh social rights and provisions than they might otherwise have been entitled to given the way things were were moving and kind of tight tightening up of of access to certain rights but there's a risk here i think about um making sure that everybody does this there's a there's a cut off a time point after which um people won't be able to do this anymore and we've all we've seen the effects of the the wind rush uh scandal where people lived here uh for decades before um being told that they hadn't filled in the right paperwork 30 years ago and had rights removed so i think that's something we need to be alert to uh looking ahead it's likely to be more vulnerable um uh people uh who maybe don't go through that and there may be children also who who won't do it because it should be their parents that do it for them what i want to focus on though more here is um the implications of the end to free movement for everybody else in the uk and what we are gaining or losing from uh telling a lot of people discouraging a lot of people in the european union from moving here and here you can see that there have been very large effects already on the numbers of eu citizens coming to the uk just as soon as the referendum took place we see a a big drop in immigration from the european union for reasons so what will this mean and then kind of two possible things here that might to weigh against each other on the one hand um it could mean reductions in pressure on our public services on the other hand it could mean an impact on the delivery of our public services because some of these workers are working in services in health in social care and so on so i'm just going to look at three areas briefly tax benefits health and social care and social housing so benefits first of all and again i think you know this is this is has been a really important part of the rhetoric that is behind the referendum result itself here's one article by uh preeti patel who's now um home office minister um writing in the express back in 2013 and this is just if you look through these newspapers this is just one of you know dozens and dozens hundreds of articles uh putting forward this picture we can't afford benefit tourists a destructive failure of the last labor government it let all these people in from eastern europe um and implication that they benefit tourists and implication completely without justification that these people in this picture are benefit tourists so uh no free movement means we can finally stop these benefit tourists from coming and surely that will have good effects on um our our fiscal position well of course in fact this whole thing about benefit tourism was pretty invented so first of all it's eu citizens could only ever come if they had if they were workers or self-employed um or looking for work you couldn't just show up and claim benefits and actually the weight of evidence and i'll show you some in a minute suggests that eea migrants including the east european uh migrants the a8 group who came after 2004 um pay more in taxes than uk born residents and they pay more than they receive in benefits or social provision and that's partly because um migrants tend to be younger and more likely to be in work than the uk population and therefore a reduction in migration is unlikely to have positive effects and may well have negative effects on public finances so let's look at a little bit of evidence now these estimates it's quite difficult uh to do this particularly in relation to public services because we don't really keep data uh on uh public service use you know use of health services by immigration status so these calculations involve fair bit of assumptions but they give you a fairly consistent picture uk government data looks at just at the tax benefits which is much easier to do what people pay in what they receive in benefits and they show that eea migrants make a net fiscal contribution although there is variation by country i suddenly occurred to me that maybe i should have explained what eea is so that's the european economic area which includes the european union countries and a few other additional countries such as norway iceland and so on so that's what we're talking about when i when i say eea migrants they're migrants from from the european economic area sorry about that um so eea migrants on average pay more than uk born adults um when we include services as i say it gets a bit more complicated uh but again we get um a positive story so dussman and fratinis is a very well-known paper which estimates that um across that decade 2001 to 2011 they look at eu immigrants specifically and they say they made a net contribution of 15 billion pounds over that decade meanwhile the uk born residents cost almost 617 billion that's remember a time where there was a big financial crisis and recession but eu migrants were making a little bit of doing a bit to help the overall fiscal position and then dustin and fratinia face various um challenges over the assumptions that they make there in terms of who how they share out certain services i think they don't give they don't charge so to speak the eu immigrants anything for certain public goods which is perhaps not right so ralph thorne kind of addresses some of those but ralthan also concludes that uh either there's a marvelous fiscal surplus here or at least migrants paid their way when we look at the overall picture now these are all kind of static in the sense that they just look at what's happening while the migrants are here and a better estimate would take a kind of life course approach and [Music] there have been attempts to do this and we'd expect that taking a life course approach would give a more favorable picture for the migrants partly because they bring with them a whole lot of human capital that that their home country has invested in um they've been to school and been trained somewhere else um and then partly because they often will go home in retirement uh so again lower costs so the migration the migration advisory committee do a dynamic model where they try to take account of this and they estimate um a net contribution over a lifetime of 78 000 pounds for migrants so in conclusion um not having all these migrants from the eea one would expect would have a negative uh effect if anything and it points towards a negative effect on our fiscal position uh not a positive effect um that that may be true overall and yet there's still be particular pressures on particular services uh so i want to look um just at health and social care and then at housing in terms of the evidence here and i'll try to be brief on this uh so when we look at eu immigrants use of healthcare we find they're less likely to have hospital admissions in the general population accept maternity benefits they're more likely to have children than the general population and having more migrants in a local area reduces waiting times has no effect on gp satisfaction on the other hand there is some evidence uh and this is really sort of not scraping the barrel but really looking for evidence that there may be negative effects so the waiting times effect is largest in the least deprived areas and a short run negative effect in in some of the more deprived areas was identified following a 2004 eu enlargement so it is possible that in some deprived areas in which particularly uh in a context in which uh we have seen big uh well we've seen spending on health care not keep up with needs uh having more migrants in your area may be felt at least to be having a negative effect on your experience and and leading helping to increase increasing your likelihood of waiting so you can sort of understand why people might think that even though the evidence is really not strong on the other hand what we do know is that eu migrants are making a big contribution in terms of delivering health care so we know that there's lots of roles unfulfilled in healthcare and in social care and that nhs uh sorry eu workers make up quite a large uh share of both the nhs and the social care workforce um so 10 of doctors in the in nhs england are much higher in some specialisms and seven percent of the total workforce in social care or eu nationals 13 in london uh so big project big short we've already got shortages and these shortages are expected to increase as a result of having lower migration from the eea what are the answers here well one is to have an easier immigration route for shortage staff and we are doing that so medical practitioners and nurses are on the shortage occupation list um of course they may just not want to come anymore it's all very well so in some senses this is like taking that control we don't any what we don't let anyone in but we kind of let in the people that we really need but it may not be as easy to do that as we would like given that um by creating an atmosphere where we make it uncertain more uncertain and less welcoming we put people off coming the other thing we can do is train our own workers and i'll come back to that uh right at the end that seems certainly a sensible thing to be doing um to invest more in training nurses and doctors in um who in the uk and improving paying conditions in social care to make those jobs attractive to young people here of course those things both cost money so the constraints on money are an issue here now i need to speed up so i'm just going to say that for social housing this the picture is sort of quite um similar in the sense that there's evidence of people feeling of white britons feeling that they are discriminated against in relation to other ethnic groups certainly and in fact there's no evidence actually that migrants are given priority but some groups of migrants may have characteristics that confer priority for social housing such as having larger families so that could feed misperceptions and as with health i think the really important thing here is again if uh spending on this has not been keeping up and that's very true for housing there has not been investment in the supply of housing so that means there are very long waiting lists um and some of this is go some of the housing is going to eea migrants and there has been an increase a slight increase over time in the share going to ea migrants so that that does that clearly does have some impact on uh uk born tenants will have to wait for longer but the real issue here is the lack of supply rather than um the eea migrants themselves and again as for health we have an issue here which is a lot of the workforce come from um these countries 50 of the building workforce in london comes from an eea country that's big so again solution well maybe we need to be training our own young people better to do these jobs and fill the gaps um there have been evidence in terms of private words that i that there i was talking about social housing uh which is tends to be better quality and lower cost than private housing and therefore is very sought after there have been implications in terms of reductions in private rents um uh as as the number of eu nationals have left um the country so in some ways that has must have had a positive effect for some groups there are interesting and complex implications of that for for long-term affordability so housing associations which provides tried to provide affordable housing with a mix of private rents and social rents have actually been really hit by that um because they're no longer able they no longer have have as many people paying the kind of higher private rents and that has knock-on effects on their ability to to provide for the for their um for to absorb rental ears for example and to invest in new simply bui on fewer people is not a solution so we need to think much more broadly uh in terms of how to address these housing problems in terms of increased public investment in affordable housing and possibly looking at things like uh rent controls okay um moving on to taking back controls of our the problem here is something keeps getting in the way of what i can see taking back control of our laws um and i'm going to talk briefly about two ways in which we're taking back control of our laws and the first one is in terms of social and employment uh rights now here we have another quote from a tabloid newspaper with boris johnson here making up a complete invented uh figure that the that 60 of the laws going through westminster are generated in the eu so this idea of taking back our laws is really going to give sovereignty to back to the uk and this is hugely exaggerated and very hard to see where he gets that figure from um but there are ways with particular relevance for our areas of social policy in which brexit uh will allow the uk to withdraw from certain aspects of european legislation and there are implications there for workers rights and for citizens rights um so after brexit now we are no longer um subject to the charter of fundamental rights which brings together all the civil and political social and economic rights gained at different times and is enforced by the court of justice of the european union so we are out of that and the government has been very clear that they refuse to continue to be subject to the cje now there are still there is still important rights legislation um in britain we've got the equalities acts but those were passed by our government but they're not constitutionally protected so those things could be unpicked and undone we are still part of the european convention on human rights which is enforced by the european court of human rights but that focuses on civil and political rights rather than social and economic rights um and we also have we're also part of the european social charter enforced by the council of europe which does have social uh rights in it but there's absolutely no enforcement no judicial enforcement there so the concerns looking forwards are firstly about gaps in rights legislation so there are certain things the free-standing right to non-discrimination the rights of the child the right to dignity that are not covered and protected um once we are out of the charter there are also weaker remedial mechanisms uh so much harder for people to to if if they feel their their right is not being upheld they have fewer places to go it's harder for them to get justice um we've uh there's also a risk of kind of being left behind as the eu law continues to progress and a potential erosion of existing rights particularly employment rights um and uk history on this is not uh very encouraging certainly i mean there are some ways in which we've we've led certainly in terms of uh disability discrimination um discrimination on race as well but there are other ways particularly things that affect more vulnerable workers so things like the working time start time directive uh support for parts protections for part-time workers for agency workers for precarious workers those have all been kind of enforced on us against our will by the european union [Music] and there may well be pressure to sort of relax some of those regulations not least because we want to attract investment to a britain that is less attractive now that we are outside the european union so the kind of risk that we go for being a low regulation kind of economy to attract uh people in um now sure enough this is january 2021 and um the government confirms that they are doing a review of uk employment law and uh it seems as though the sorts of things that are under consideration here are kind of um [Music] things that may seem relatively minor rules around us rest breaks uh including overtime and calculating holiday entitlements also scrapping the 48-hour working week is under discussion uh but these are the these are the kind of bits of legislation that really provide additional protect protections for some of some workers who are otherwise very vulnerable um this is more recently last week ian duncan smith saying you know of course we're not going to just bonfire all the rules slash and burn of eu rules ruled out uh post brexit uh and i like this story because it sounded like downing street was going to businesses and saying come on you need to give us lots of things that lots of bits of red tape and regulations that we need to burn and get rid of and the businesses are kind of saying actually it's all working quite it's fine it's working fine the red tape we really don't want is the red tape at the borders with the the lorries and all of that um now i guess there's a serious point here which is that if that's what if there's a point about democracy i mean if we don't want these what we've been doing really is relying on the european union to to protect us from ourselves in a way and to protect us from we elect governments which um want to which aren't so protective of of workers rights and then we've had the european union sort of ensuring that we don't have to live with the consequences of our what our elected governments would like to do so this is democracy you know this is taking back control i guess uh and if taking back control means we get to we get to decide now and what we're going to decide is we're going to elect governments that want to weaken workers rights then that's that's democracy um i guess that certainly wasn't one of the things that was put very clearly to people in the referendum i think that taking back control meant we want to we can work as rights i didn't see that being put forward very loudly but it is a serious there is a serious question i think here okay um finally uh mary do i just have a how many minutes do i have um you have a good five minutes kitty if you can cover it in that but we can go you know six minutes okay um so very briefly i just wanted to say something about state aid and state intervention in the in the economy um because this is somewhere that i looked for kind of positives in a sense so i'll cover it very briefly we could come back in in discussion but um state aid laws are there's a whole lot of eu regulations which restrict governments from intervening in the economy um and and they're aimed at kind of promoting competition and making sure that one country can't really subsidize a domestic business and so that it does it can out compete a company in another member states and they're also uh aimed at stopping uh big companies multinationals from going around looking for special treatment and subsidies so so they've protected um they've been rulings against apple in ireland against amazon in luxembourg um and this is sometimes sometimes called the the lexit the left-wing case for brexits is that this would prevent uh a really interventionist government from doing a whole lot of interventionist activity so if we had a government that really wanted to intervene and wanted to do things like intervene to protect an industry that was at risk of going under to protect jobs in a certain local area these rules would be would get in the way and this is this this uh this discussion about state aid rules actually was in very much in the news at the end of last year uh because it became it was one of the things along with fish that seemed to be the last thing to be decided um the eu wanted us to stick to the state aid rules in the interests of the level playing field the uk did not want to not i think because they have big plans to intervene in the economy but because they did not want to be subject to the court of justice of the european union and in the end we've got a result which is a little bit of a halfway house and we're going to be continuing to be subject to these to these rules with a few sort of um caveats so we don't we won't need to get prior approval from the european commission commission as is currently the case if we want to to to intervene and there's a few more examples where we can as with the eu rules we will only be able to intervene to remedy a market failure but we can also do so to address an equity um rationale and that seems to give a bit more discretion than current eu rules and there's going to be no cj e you um but i think the the point that we make in the paper and that still remains the case is that this this story about the state edwards is seems really exaggerated so there's lots of exemptions that uh eu countries can do already within the rules um and it is also the case that countries use these exemptions far more extensively than the uk currently does so you can see say germany spends four times what we spend in state eight so if this you know it seems to be a kind of has been an issue of principle that certainly for our government that it wanted not to be subject to these rules um for a future for a future government that wanted to do a lot more intervention there would still be a lot that can be done uh within the rules so it's not obvious that uh brexit has really changed would change the game here even if we were no longer subject to the rules at all all right finally just three other brief positives that i've um come across um first of all we on first of january 2021 we were able to abolish the tax on sanitary products again something you might have seen very much in the news at last we were freed from eu vat rules which meant a minimum of five percent on sanitary products and our freedom has meant we've abolished them and that's great women are going to save an estimated 40 pounds across a lifetime so that's a good thing but not not huge perhaps in the general scheme of things similarly people have argued that we have more room for maneuver with alcohol taxes we haven't done anything about that yet but there's these there are some kind of small areas in which uh freedom can mean perhaps doing things uh less doing things as we want to do finally i guess the big story over the last few months has been the vaccine uh roll out the uk is way ahead of the vaccine roll out this is the headline in the germa a german newspaper yesterday dear britain we envy you they envy us are the speed of our rollouts um and i suppose this is being one little country that's able to do things on its own has given a lot more flexibility i think we would have been able to do that even within the eu but it might be politically much more difficult to say we're just going to go our own way we're not going to coordinate with you what the eu has been doing is trying to a good thing trying to coordinate across 27 different countries and make sure smaller countries aren't left behind and everybody can be as part of the vaccine rollout but the result of that has been that they have been slow so we can see i guess the eu i mean the eu is like a big sort of compromise in essence um and if you opt out of the big compromise there are these there are a few ways in which you can there can be gains how we weigh those up against the um losses i guess it's all pretty it doesn't really matter how we weigh them up now because we are where we are um but here's first of all a sort of summary um so we've taken back control of money borders and laws uh and that seems to have meant that we're going to end up with less money lower living standards and a smaller fiscal envelope the economic impacts and how they fall across different areas and groups are uncertain still but likely to be substantial disruption falling on some industries and businesses and people disproportionately more than others in terms of borders we have lost our rights to live work and travel in 27 countries i've tried to put the positives in green and i've you know for me having less cultural change and fewer eu immigrants in britain is a major negative but i know that for some people that is that is a real positive i think we need to be you know honest about that so i put that in green on behalf of people for whom who feel who haven't felt happy about the way things have changed perhaps um there are new restrictions on social rights for eu a migrants and i focus more here on what lower migration means in terms of increasing challenges for delivering public services and not much effects in terms of relieving pressures uh finally in terms of laws more control over social and employment rights means more democracy really but potentially it means worse outcomes and those worse outcomes i think will fall on more vulnerable workers we've got a bit more control over state aid but to a limited extent and in fact we have never used the powers that we already had so it's not obvious that will really make a difference and we've got a bit more control over a few other decisions from the at rates to uh the speed and to which vaccines we want to purchase so where do we go from here a new dawn for britain question mark um i guess there seem to be two really important things i think that we need to to do when you look at the risks that brexit is throwing up and one is a really active industrial strategy which uh provides vigorous compensatory investment to regions and areas uh within say aid laws that will be affected by trade disruptions and thinking about a strategy that really thinks about how we replace the high quality jobs that it looks like we may not we may lose uh and how we want to shape our economy going forward in ways that protects those areas and provides new jobs for those workers and the second thing is a really serious strategy of investment in training and in pay to try to fill the gaps in health in social care in construction and give our own young people opportunities to do those jobs uh which means training and it also means pay because at the moment uh social care is not well paid the conditions are not good and it's not attractive to young to many young people and the challenge here is obvious uh its political will first of all but it's also resources um and we've kind of in this bind on the one hand brexit leaves us in a position where we really need to do these things and on the other hand it leaves us in a position where we have less money to do them so that is the challenge i think that faces us thank you for listening thank you very much kitty um i mean i appreciate so much and i think everybody does appreciate very much the breadth of the presentation but also the clarity and the and the attempt you made to be even-handed even if it did result in very few green very little green text in that penultimate side so huge thanks for us um i've we've stopped recording now

Channel: Department of Social Policy and Intervention Oxford

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Id: 4P6GK-6UcN0

Length: 63min 3sec (3783 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021