Recommendations:
The following is a snapshot of just some of the recommendations contained in the #OurOtherNationalDebt report:
1) To involve and inspire our communities, establish a national commission to explore how to ensure a fair recovery from the pandemic.
2) To deliver a step-change in race equality, renew the UK’s Race Disparity Audit as an action plan and ensure the NHS recommits to acting on race equality by setting out a road-map over this decade for how NHS leadership can fully reflect the NHS workforce’s diversity.
3) To help close the attainment gap, explore creating a free national summer programme of structured learning and play for pre-school children, with a particular focus on getting the poorest children onto the programme.
4) To recognise the contribution of migrants, provide all migrant workers with recourse to public funds so that nobody is forced to work when it’s too dangerous to do so and decriminalise work and strengthen worker protections so that undocumented workers are not at risk of exploitation and trafficking.
5) To thank our indispensable working class, ensure working class people have a permanent seat around the country’s top tables, starting with specific youth assemblies as part of the national commission proposed above.
6) To uphold the rights of disabled people, undertake an immediate review of the Coronavirus Act 2020 and all policymaking in response to the crisis to ensure compliance with the Government’s duties under the Equality Act 2010 and commitments to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (and legislate to make the latter directly enforceable in UK law).
7) To strengthen our communities, convert the now-defunct Department for Leaving the European Union into a Department for Connection, with the same £100 million budget and create a Neighbour Day as they have in Australia.
8) To deliver decent housing, enable Housing Associations and local authorities to acquire land as quickly and cheaply as possible, and to buy new homes that can’t sell on the open market at vastly reduced rates and let them to people who need them most.
9) To support our voluntary sector, explore new models of funding that, while respecting and maintaining charities’ independence, stop forcing them to rely for basic funding on charity events and to survive on their reserves.
10) To improve life online, legislate to make administrators of social media groups vicariously liable for any illegal content if they refuse to remove it and rethink the way social media giants are treated in the tax system, with the aim of ensuring parity with the offline economy and compensation for harm.
11) To make our economy fairer, consider abolishing the tax-free personal allowance on savings income and explore options for green taxation, including taking advantage of government control of the railways and a weakened airline sector to make a policy choice to subsidise the former by taxing the latter and accelerating the transition to cleaner vehicles by increasing tax on old, dirtier car models and subsidising scrappage schemes that pay out in vouchers towards new UK-built electric vehicles.
12) To strengthen our safety net, start a national conversation about whether to keep in place unemployment insurance with 80% replacement ratios for the first few months after losing a job (as currently offered by the furlough scheme) and, if so, how to pay for it through higher national insurance contributions.
13) To support British science and research, invest in and reform our universities with a new national strategy around higher education’s contribution to wider societal goals, including research, innovation, public debate, economic benefit, teaching, skills-building, supporting the levelling-up agenda, driving economic growth and enhancing their local economies.
14) To change the world of work, institute a Real Living Wage, secure our data rights at work and institute a new social partnership between government, employers and unions.
15) To fix the social care crisis, transform the way in which care is funded to end the disparity between our collectivised approach to care from illnesses (through the NHS) and our individualised approach to funding social care – and make the latter available free at the point of delivery (as in Scotland).
16) To protect and improve our NHS, grant all foreign national NHS workers leave to remain and ensure a unified employment structure by granting all NHS staff, whether employed directly or contracted out, a Real Living Wage.
17) To be a truly Global Britain, support international scientific collaboration and health cooperation, maintain the UK’s commitment to spending 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance, develop and publish a cross-Government ‘Protection of Civilians’ strategy, and tackle financial transparency, accountability, environmental protection and barriers to fair trade.
You can read the essays from which these recommendations were drawn here and some responses to the collection here. Please note most of these recommendations are UK-wide but some would require action by the devolved administrations.