Nye Cominetti

Looking forward to this event on Thursday. Creating a collective bargaining institution in social care from scratch is a big deal - nothing similar in the UK on this scale since wages councils dismantled 30 years ago.

ps I now look older & more tired than in the photo below aka more chair-worthy

Soft boiled eggs on buttery toast, either with Gochujang on the toast, or the Jamaican hot sauce you get in corner shops on the eggs (or both!). I think I could eat that every day for the rest of my life.

Not contradicting your point but just emphasising that if this is true it really is a nominal prices problem and not an affordability problem (for average earners at least). Fast wage growth in recent years means wages and food prices have pretty much increased by the same amount since 2019.

Pushing the coffee machine button before getting a mug out of the cupboard. It feels good to be alive

Just send in your application directly, no need for the radio tour

That new Rolex you were sporting last Thursday was looking great btw

Maybe .. but a lot of people sound like they've had enough day after budget

Politicians won't be delighted at this new concept of resigning to take responsibility for something having gone wrong.

Glad RF were among those offering support.

It does. Presumably not a journalist !

Weird that someone was speculatively pinging the OBR url all morning

Didn't love this one, I think I prefer my narrators to be reliable. Good ending though

Agree with the point, but we've all got used to the idea that inflation worry is partly about the price level, might that be true of immigration too? ('level' here maybe meaning something like number of recent-ish migrants, cumulative net migration over past 5 years, say)

Glad Govt have made this change. 2 yrs to 6 months is still a HUGE improvement (6m workers will benefit). But this strikes a better balance btw protecting workers and encouraging hiring. It's how most rich countries operate

Argued in favour of this here
www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications...

a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a wall with framed pictures on it ALT: a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a wall with framed pictures on it

Most important fiscal transfer news of the week: RF are losing @adamcorlett.bsky.social to DWP for a year. Wish him well but also:

March will be odd - OBR will publish a forecast but won't assess fiscal rules. Leaving RF / IFS / others to calculate A - B? We can be blunter than the OBR about the various fictions/risks, so probably good there's more headroom ..

Net migration is back at normal levels. ~200k in the year to June 25.

And that's without the additional rule changes Labour have already brought in (which are reducing visa numbers but not yet in this data) or plan to bring in.
ukandeu.ac.uk/the-coming-c...

Widely predicted but still striking.

Yes x3

Was going to post something about how that Economist article surely overstated the 'revolution' on the evidence re minimum wage effects but Andrea does the job very well here

Even after the mansion tax is applied, the owner of a £5m home in Westminster will pay proportionately less in property tax than the owner of a £210k Band B property in Sunderland.

Working paper on options for reform of non-compete clauses in employment contracts

ICYMI given today's focus on the budget: the UK government has today also published a working paper on options for reform of non-compete agreements.

Responses to the specific options set out therein (statutory limits, size cutoffs and an outright ban), can be submitted until 18 February.

1/2

It also surely doesn't 'incentivise' having children. Child-related benefits don't cover all the costs of having children!

😍 There's literally an organisation giving awards for think tank report titles now - just think what you could have achieved

No country for old productivity assumptions

Feeling very sorry for everyone at OBR. What a miserable thing to happen after months of work

Take a budget break and enjoy one of my favourite ever photos: of my twined aunt and uncle. (Wales ~1960).

The 2026 minimum wage rates have been announced:

NLW: £12.21➡️£12.71. (+4.1%)

18-20-yo rate: £10➡️£10.85. (+8.5%)

16-17-yo rate: £7.55➡️£8.00. (+6%)

Some context & thoughts on those uprating decisions:

Options for lowering the age of entitlement to the NLW to 18

Overall, I worry that min wage policy isn't being implemented flexibly enough. 18-20 uprating is on a path plotted by LPC back in May, but conditions have changed since then. Flexibility is especially important when rates are higher & evidence necessarily more uncertain www.gov.uk/government/c...

8.5% is lower than the big increases made to the 18-20-yo rate in recent years. But it's still significant. No alarm bells on youth employment yet, but the NEET rate has been rising, and overall hiring is weak. So personally I think should have leant more on the 'watch out' bit of the remit.

The bigger decision was on the youth rates. Govt's policy is that they are 'discriminatory', and explicitly to get rid of the 18-20-yo rate. Govt/LPC decision is to do this by converging on NLW, and the plan (based on pace of uprating) appears to be to achieve this within the parliament.