George Osborne is set to announce The National Infrastructure Plan, a plan that will please many recruitment agencies by creating more jobs around the country.

The money for these projects will come from the British pension fund, as well as Chinese investment and £5bn will be from further public cuts. The total earmarked for this project is £30bn over the course of the next few years.

The aim will be to improve various roads and rail lines, build a Transpenine Express line between Leeds andManchester, a metro system inNewcastleplus many other projects. No doubt this will help the employment rate which is currently at its worst for 17 years.

The main aspect from this initiative is the fact the fund will mainly come from the British pension plan, previously this was considered locked funding and so unusable to the government but see other economies use this funding effectively has allowed our own government to analyse the potential of having access to this fund.

I see this initiative as a positive, it is obvious our economy needs an uplift and although this won’t have a huge impact on the bigger picture it is definitely in my eyes a step in the right direction.

A report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) would have made uncomfortable reading for many recruitment agencies, with the prediction of job market worsening as the global economy seems to be dipping again.

The report which is based on survey completed by 1,000 employers found that many were very unsure about what the future holds and so have adopted a `wait and see` policy. This implies an almost stagnate scenario where there are positives and negatives. The positives are simply less redundancies and less like to move outside the UK, the negatives are of course reduced recruitment and further rises in unemployment.

The government were asked to temporarily halt their public spending cuts as this was only further increasing the job cuts in this sector but there rebuttal to this was that they could not sway from there original plan as it would only cause more problems in the future and that according to the OBR forecast the number of jobs in the private sector would substantially outweigh the public sector cuts by 2015.

In my view I think the reports of this report was inevitable, we are in the midst of massive uncertainty. We have no idea which way the Euro will go, one day we have Greece claiming it will hold a referendum the next day it is not, then Italy’s turn of uncertainty. It is therefore just too difficult for companies to have a clear vision.

With much of the employment law changes recently, its no wonder many recruitment agencies are backing the Tory backbenches that have defied the Government by voting for a referendum on Europe. There intention is simple to give the UK government back its power.

The problem exists because EU social law is now costing the UK around £9 billion. This is due to all the cumbersome regulation that now exists these include things like working time directive, the agency workers directive and the fixed-term employees’ regulations. The Tory backbenches otherwise known as Open Europe believe that repatriate powers back to Westminster will in fact create a £15 billion boost to GDP and potentially create 140,000 jobs.

These estimates are quite astounding and it is when you hear that there argument is not that they do not agree with a single market, Open Europe in fact encourages this for British businesses but it is this one-size-fits-all approach in EU social law that they feel does not allow the government enough control in giving the British public the best opportunity in getting jobs and growing the economy.

My view is that I whole heartedly agree with Open Europe. I know many recruitment agencies have not appreciated the extra red tape and legislation that exist through AWD. It seems that whilst one social law might be right for one country it does not necessary make it right for the other, so for everyone to be shackled by these laws seems too restricting when trying to grow an economy. It seems to me as with many things the EU tries to do, that it is all very well when we are in a booming economy, we can do these changes and try to work more closely together but in the times we are in, it just seems ludicrous to insist on these employment law changes.