Rebuilding after recession: a plan for jobs

Bring forward investment to create jobs

• Bring forward at least £85bn of infrastructure investment with the potential to create 1.24 million jobs
• Establish a new Just Transition Commission to oversee the transition to net-zero in a way that protects and creates jobs
• Use procurement to support UK jobs
• Set out an Olympics-style agreement on every new infrastructure project, working with trade unions and local authorities to show how it will create decent jobs.
• Rebuild the public sector workforce, including in social care and local government, to create jobs and repair vital services
• Invest in a public sector pay rise to restore years of pay freezes and help boost demand.

Design sectoral and business support packages to promote better jobs

• Bring together sectoral recovery panels of trade unions, government and business to set out sectoral route maps that look ahead to the likely scenario for each sector in three months, six months, a year and three years’ time and design packages of support
• Provide government support in the form of equity stakes of up to 30 per cent of a business, rather than loans
• Use government influence to support better business models, requiring companies that receive support to:
  • Set out a fair pay plan
  • Pay corporation tax in the UK
  • Promote decent jobs
  • Foster a long-term approach to decision-making focused on creating a fair and sustainable model of business success
• Extend a more limited furlough scheme beyond October for businesses that can demonstrate continued viability.

Support those who lose their jobs to find work as fast as possible

• Invest across the public sector to create jobs
• Introduce a funded Jobs Guarantee, with priority for young people
• Introduce a new right to retrain for everybody, backed up by funding and personal lifelong learning accounts.
• Offer an education and training guarantee for all school leavers and other young people aged 25 and under who wish to take up this option.
• Invest in rapid redundancy support for everyone at risk of losing their job, with companies required to notify regional recovery panels when they are consulting on redundancies.
• Protect incomes by re-booting social security:
  • raise the basic level of universal credit and legacy benefits to £260 per week
  • end the five-week wait for first payment of universal credit
  • remove the savings rules in universal credit to allow more people to access it
  • significantly increase child benefit payments and remove the two-child limit within universal credit and working tax credit
  • ensure no-one loses out on any increases in social security by removing the arbitrary benefit cap
  • introduce a wider package of support for households including a fully funded council tax freeze, an increase in the hardship fund and more support for renters
  • scrap the no-recourse-to-public-funds rules that deny working families access to social security.

Ensure that support measures promote equality

• · Continue with government plans to:
  • Make flexible working the default
  • Strengthen protections around sexual harassment at work
  • Review the impact of gender pay gap reporting regulations
  • Introduce ethnicity pay gap reporting measure
  • Address the disability employment and pay gaps
  • Set up a pregnancy and maternity taskforce
  • Reforming the Gender Recognition Act to ensure that trans people do not have to endure a lengthy, humiliating, and expensive process to change their gender, while maintaining the Equality Act 2010 as it stands.
  • Improve carers leave
  • Strengthen redundancy protections for new mothers
• Step up plans to tackle discrimination against BME workers by
• Setting out a funded action plan on race inequality, with clear targets and a timetable for delivery, setting out the steps that they will take to tackle the entrenched disadvantage and discrimination faced by BME people.
• Strengthening the role of the Race Disparity Unit.
• Tackling the insecure work that has a disproportionate impact on BME people, starting with banning zero hours contracts.
• Give an urgent cash injection to the childcare sector to prevent progress on gender equality going backwards
• Give all workers, regardless of their employment status, a day one right to 10 days paid parental leave –helping parents deal with localised lockdowns.
• Extend the furlough scheme beyond October for those who cannot work outside the home due to caring responsibilities or the need to shield.
• Fund a one-off boost to the Access to Work programme to enable more disabled people to work safely at home.
• Build equality into the design of employment support programmes, including tailored support and regular monitoring of outcomes to ensure fair and proportionate access.