Ken pledges London EMA: but does it stack up?

Ken Livingstone has pledged that if elected he will re-instate the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) for London’s young people. Speaking at Westminster College, Labour’s Mayoral candidate declared that he would introduce a 30 pounds a week benefit to all 16-19 year old Londoners in full-time education.

Certainly when the national government abolished the EMA, it sparked protests and riots. The EMA was designed to help keep young people in education. There is some evidence that its abolition has had a disproportionate impact on retaining the poorest students and ethnic minorities in particular.

However, giving roughly 85,000 eligible young people thirty pounds a week for 52 weeks a year would cost more than £130 million. That is a sizable fund for anyone to find without access to HM Treasury.

Labour’s team state that: “This will be done by bringing together existing funds in colleges, universities, and local authorities, and working with the Association of Colleges, London Higher and councils across London to deliver this.”

There’s a couple of things to note about this. First of all there’s no mention of London Assembly funds.

That’s just as well, because paying for this through the GLA would mean a significant, ongoing financial commitment (the equivalent of about twenty pounds per capita  in London a year – so a lot more for each council tax-payer).

Contrast that with the fact that when explaining why the Labour group was not going to vote against this year’s Conservative Assembly budget proposals, Len Duvall specifically cited that they did not wish to vote against the (modest) tax cut.

Labour will not argue for a rise in the precept, the money added to your local council tax for the GLA, nor will they suggest £130 million worth of cuts in public services to pay for this, and so have to find this money elsewhere.

The second thing to notice is that the bodies who are going to be expected to pay for this, college funds and local councils, are not under the direction of the Mayor. That means that hard-pressed councils who are already making significant cuts in services across London are unlikely to be persuaded to give out millions on an entirely new non-statutory project simply because the Mayor says so, when it would mean service closures and redundancies in their borough.

That leaves college funds. It’s extremely doubtful that there is anything like this sort of money going spare in various college funds, but even if there was and that these were diverted to replacing the EMA, we surely have to ask whether that is a good thing or not. This won’t be new money; it will be significant funds that are already going to provide an education service diverted into what amounts to a benefit payment for students.

Would this improve the education system in London or not?

Ken Livingstone said that “Londoners affected by the Tory cut to EMA have every right to protest at the ballot box on May 3rd – but with this policy we are offering a clear positive reason as well.”

While he has a point that the removal of the EMA was a real blow for young people, it is not entirely clear that he is making a promise that he can keep. If elected he may find that he has made a series of financial commitments on the EMA and fares in particular that he has no practicable way of fulfilling with the powers available to him.