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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse): I have to inform the House that Madam Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.
7.16 pm
Mr. David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside): I beg to move,
- That this House believes that the Government has failed to offer all members of society the chance to participate in building future prosperity; further believes that the Government has failed to achieve the investment in skills the British people need; deplores the cuts that have been made to the budgets of training and enterprise councils and the abandonment of the community action programme; and calls on the Government to ensure the workforce is equipped with the skills and training necessary to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.
It gives me pleasure to move this motion at the beginning of the Year of Lifelong Learning. It is a great pity that the Government's major contribution to that year is to cut training and education budgets, thereby undermining the life chances of those for whom skilling and learning are crucial, because they provide them with the tools to be able to earn their living and to contribute to society. The Government's record of the past year has been shoddy: cuts and the closure of programmes. The budgets of training and enterprise councils were cut by £197 million, and the Government had the cheek to take part of that money, invest it elsewhere, and then claim that it represented an improvement in further education.
The November 1995 Budget announced a proposed cut in the departmental budget of 4 per cent., with £75 million taken from the training budget alone in the coming year. There was an interesting sleight of hand in the form of the announcement that there would be an increase in spending on training of £50 million over three years, but a one-year cut of £75 million. Three down and two up is the Government's usual cack-handed way of taking with one hand while pretending to give with the other.
In every single major area of Government training programmes there has been a reduction in funding, at a time when people who are unemployed and seeking work have been more desperate than ever for an improvement in the availability of the skills that they need. Seven hundred and thirty thousand young men and women between the ages of 16 and 25 have no job and no training and are not in any education place. Nearly 300,000 of them have been unemployed and without a place for more than six months.
Special needs training and education have been drastically affected. A recent report by the training and enterprise councils in the voluntary sector showed a general 10 per cent. cut in the number of starts for those with special needs in the past 12 months; in some parts of the country there have been cuts of a staggering 40 or 50 per cent.
The switch to outcome measures has provided an incentive not to get young people into work but to get them out of the dole queues and off the register, whatever the consequences in terms of failing to give them qualifications that would equip them with the portable knowledge and skills to be able to return, time and again, to the job market and take up paid places in work.
Mr. John Sykes (Scarborough):
Why should the Government or the Conservative party take any lectures
Mr. Blunkett:
I will tell the hon. Gentleman why they should take lectures. The Government have tripled the number of people who are unemployed, even on existing figures and by taking into account the 20 or 30 adjustments to the unemployment statistics and the way in which the Government have treated the training budget.
Mr. Sykes:
What about the social chapter?
Mr. Blunkett:
All we get is a very silly heckle of
"What about the social chapter?" Unfortunately, even if we had signed the social chapter, it would not have protected us from the cuts and closures that the Government are inflicting on those seeking training and wanting work. The Minister--I nearly said the shadow Minister, seeing as I have been described as the Minister. The Government are so used to putting themselves in the place of the Opposition and thinking of us as the Government that it is quite hard not to predict too soon the outcome of the next election.
Mr. Sykes:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Blunkett:
I will not give way again for the moment. I will make some progress.
I remind the House that on 7 January, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment was reported in a Sunday newspaper as having the cheek to say that getting a job made the unemployed happy. I thought that that showed the cheek of the devil for somebody who has been responsible in a Government who have accelerated unemployment over the years to the point where they can claim credit for a slight drop in the number registered as unemployed.
I return to the key issue of those with special needs who have been denied training and therefore the chance of a job because of cuts and closures. I return to the way in which the training and enterprise councils have been cut, the way in which the budget for training for the coming year has been reduced, and of course the way in which training has been switched to short-term rather than long-term provision to provide qualifications for life.
We need to debate a very serious issue. Are we a low-tech, low-wage, low added value economy that has short-term measures to get people off the dole queue, or are we a high-tech, high-wage and high-investment economy that skills people so that they are able to earn their living, add value at work to the amount that they are paid, contribute to society and, above all, have the knowledge-based skills to carry them through an ever insecure and uncertain jobs market?
The security that we can provide by equipping people with the ability to move from job to job and from workplace to workplace and to re-adapt several times in their working life is crucial to the future of Britain. That is why we are condemning the Government not only for the cuts that they have made but for the short-termism that underpins them.
If there is a reduction--the Government have reduced the budget for special needs training--in the long-term emphasis on gaining qualifications, people become equipped people only for further unemployment and
short-term relief. They end up being placed in a short-term, low-paid job only to find themselves back in the dole queue through a revolving door. That is obviously short-sighted and extremely unproductive for our needs as a nation.
Our emphasis on providing a stakeholder economy in a nation that pulls together--[Hon. Members: "Ah."] I hear some "Ahs" from Conservative Members. Our emphasis is on a stakeholder economy provided by the Labour party, rather than a Burger King economy provided by the Conservative party of fat cats and hot dogs instead of investment in long-term training and skills to enable people to do a job.
Comments that have been made on Grand Metropolitan remind me of the way in which the Government have undermined the careers service, which, as we have seen in south London, is crucial to training and employment.
Mr. Sykes:
On the subject of burgers, the hon. Gentleman will know that there is a large manufacturer in my constituency that supplies various food chains with a specific product. People in my constituency have been guaranteed jobs because that company could not afford to build a factory in France due to the costs of the social chapter and the minimum wage. What did the company do? It doubled the production line in Scarborough instead, thus guaranteeing the jobs of my constituents. How does he answer that?
Mr. Blunkett:
I do not need to answer it because it is patently obvious that companies which locate in France-- companies have moved from Scotland to France as well as from France to Britain--have seen the value in France, Germany and Italy, as they do in the Pacific rim, of investment in long-term skills. If the answer to the question of whether we should invest in a knowledge-based, long-term skills economy of the 21st century is a Conservative Member saying that the Government's solution is to make our wages as low as possible in order to attract people to re-locate in Scarborough, the division between the two parties is clear.
The division lies between a vision of Britain at the cutting edge of the world economy being able to compete with the Pacific rim countries, and a country that is determined to be on the fringe of Europe--a kind of offshore, floating low-wage zone in which Ministers do not seem to have grasped the fact that the biggest change in the past decade has been a drop in the demand for unskilled labour and an increase in the demand for those who could add value through their skills in a high-tech, information and communications era.
Information and communications technology, and not the ability to fill tubs with mince, has to be the way forward for this country. Low wages will not get Britain out of economic recession. Investment in skills will put us ahead of the Germans, the South Koreans, the Taiwanese and the Singaporeans.
One need only ask the Deputy Prime Minister that. He flew to Singapore to find out how they do it, but the Leader of the Opposition had already been. One need only ask the Deputy Prime Minister, since last year, over the head of the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, he started to undertake a skills audit. One need only talk to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who
made it absolutely clear on the Radio 4 programme
"UKplc" at the end of 1995 that there had been years and years of under-investment in skills for the future of this country.
I suggest that Conservative Members listen to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer before yah-booing such future needs and skilling. Why has the Deputy Prime Minister undertaken a skills audit? Why is there universal acceptance that there is a major problem in the skills available in this country? Why did the survey, "Skill Needs in Britain", published in December, acknowledge that there had been a jump of 75 per cent. since 1994 in the number of companies in this country that perceive a skills gap?
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