Express & Star

Divide the power, but join up the thinking

Devolution of power so it isn't concentrated all in one place seems to be high on the politicians' agenda, but is it too much to ask for a little joined up thinking?

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Take the NHS, for example.

Mr Burnham says he'll sort this out if he gets into the Department of Health in May.

Whether Labour's so-called 'mansion tax' and a promise to pump billions more into the NHS will solve it is another matter entirely. So is the Tory pledge to put the £8bn a year in that's said to be needed to keep things going.

It makes absolutely no sense to deny the opportunity of a rewarding career in nursing to a young person for want of funding, only for another arm of the NHS to use public money to bring someone in from overseas. That's absolutely no criticism of the foreign nurses, by the way. Someone has to look after the patients while whichever party or parties are in government try to sort this out.

At the moment they're falling over themselves to promise devolution to the English regions - something that might well be a very necessary sweetener if we are indeed sold short in order to give Scotland what it wanted in exchange for not breaking up the United Kingdom last year.

One of the possible power hand overs from Whitehall to the West Midlands could be around the issue of skills.

There's an argument that under the coalition the oversight of education was concentrated too much in London. Is it going to be any better handing over skills to local areas without the rest of education, which goes hand in hand with them, coming too?

The Black Country Chamber of Commerce was less than impressed by Labour's planned crackdown on employing migrant workers on low pay.

Ninder Johal thinks the party is using 'anti-employer' rhetoric while failing to tackle what he considers to be a far bigger issue, namely that education isn't up to scratch.

The chamber says 'our schools, colleges and universities continue to produce young people who are unemployable', people who 'cannot read and write, add up or work with others'.

Ed Miliband is adamant that good employers have nothing to fear.

But it does expose a couple of holes in Labour's 'guarantee' of an apprenticeship for every young person who makes the grade.

Firstly, how do you guarantee a job when it requires employers to create the apprenticeship in the first place?

Secondly, what do you do about the ones who don't make the grade? It can't fall to their potential employers to pick up the slack and teach them the basics that they didn't get in school.

Mr Miliband says Labour will help those who don't make the grade too. So that's all right then.

Have we heard this before?

Thousands of jobs, hundreds of thousands of apprenticeships and hundreds of thousands of people getting the right to buy their homes; the Tory economic plan for the West Midlands is stat-tastic.

George Osborne's big announcement in the West Midlands would have been impressive were it not essentially exactly the same policies we've been hearing for the past few weeks, just divided up by the number of people living in the region.

And if I hear the phrase 'long term economic plan' one more time I am going to scream.

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