| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Forth: I am provoked to rise to my feet by the hon. Gentleman's passing and ritualistic reference--it was not a casual reference, as nothing about the hon. Gentleman is casual--to scrapheaps and to people being cast aside. The hon. Gentleman must visit jobcentres, as I do, and talk to the very dedicated staff. He must know that everyone who has the misfortune of losing his or her job is treated as an individual by caring jobcentre officers and officials and offered a wide range of possibilities. How does he square that reality with his reference to scrapheaps and to people being cast aside?
Mr. Field: I invite the Minister to join my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) and me on a visit to Birkenhead jobcentre. If the Minister looks at the jobs
advertised there, he will see that most employers are so ashamed of the wages that they can get away with offering that they do not state those wages--if there are wages attached to the job, as many of the positions are on a commission basis only. We must draw a distinction between the dedication of the jobcentre staff--to whom we pay proper tribute--and the Government who believe that they cannot do anything, beyond the measures that they currently employ, to expand the job base.
The debate is about whether there is a set number of jobs and how those jobs are determined. It raises the big issues of our time. Does training by itself represent an adequate response to the problem and will it enable Britain to go up market and reach a position of full employment? Should we be more active in the labour market--given the fact that the market cannot adjust itself--in using people's skills and in matching them to the work that must be done? My hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk has been raising that issue for the 30 years that I have known him, and it is what the Bill is about. He gently pressed the Government to recognise how their response to the measures that he proposed will appear to people outside: casual and lacking in concern.
Mr. Ian McCartney (Makerfield):
I was in Yorkshire last week and had passed on to me, anonymously, the concerns of staff members of the Employment Service about the jobs that they are forced to offer. From the list of jobs that I was shown, one was for a warehouse assistant, full-time--£10 plus benefits. Another was for a full-time agent working in the local community--commission only.
Mr. Field:
On the first job that my hon. Friend mentioned, it is probably illegal to offer work under those conditions, given the requirements for income support. We shall leave that aside. That is not a reflection on the dedication or the concern of the staff of the Employment Service. It just shows how the labour market will adjust to the circumstances. All of us have witnessed the rise in unemployment in our constituencies and the fall in real wages. Most employers, knowing what they can get away with, use the jobcentres and do not even say what the wage will be.
My second meeting with my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk was when he wrote a pamphlet for the Low Pay Unit, an organisation that I worked for, on the unemployment trap. In the days before we were as dependent on means-tested benefits as we are today, he was a prophet calling attention to the way in which ordinary people have to make rational decisions about their well-being and that of their family, and how for a growing number of people then--now a huge number--the trade-off, if there is any, between working and not working is small.
That is the background to my association with my hon. Friend and thus my willingness to sponsor with him the Right to Work Bill, not because we agreed on every proposal after we had discussed it, but because we both believed that it was an opportunity that the Government could seize to show that they were serious about dealing with the issue. We did not think that it would be the great panacea or that it would be achieved in the timetable that we had set in the Bill. We included the timetable because we were anxious to show our constituents that we had a sense of urgency about the issue, because many of them had been without work for many years.
I am here to support my hon. Friend in his request for two things: first, for the Government to get an independent and serious costing of the proposals. Given the way in which they have handed out contracts--I shall not say "to their friends"--the Government believe in job creation. They have handed out contracts to inquire into this and that, and to report on this and that, for which I am grateful, as that is, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk knows, what job creation is about. We now ask, as a sign of the Government's true faith, that they consider seriously every proposal given to them, as a means of tackling the evil of unemployment.
The second request is for a real costing of unemployment. Let us leave aside whether the total is 2 million or 4 million. Let us leave aside the number of workers who will come into the labour market who are not registered as unemployed but who would be there if jobs were available. There are armies of workers who, because they do not receive benefit, do not register as unemployed, but that does not mean that they do not want work and would not work if it was available. The Minister turns his nose up at these proposals, but anybody who wanted to indulge in rational debate and was confident of his position would have commissioned both of these studies a long time ago. Not to do so would suggest to the House and, more importantly, our constituents, that the Government do not want to know the information, because it would make their position less tenable.
I am pleased to be able to speak in the debate. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Leicester, West. I pay tribute to the way in which he chaired the Select Committee on Employment and the way in which he encouraged a thousand ideas to blossom in it. He did not feel it necessary to take a Stalinist line on what the truth is, or to say that every report must come down on the small area of agreed truth. I think that the report will be considered as a landmark, because it will show that we have moved away from the heady days of the 1980s, when we believed that markets could solve everything. No one is saying that we do not believe in markets. The House is saying that we want markets to work where they can work. Where they cannot work, where millions of people want to work but cannot, we have a duty to try to find ways of extending work opportunities to them which are useful and beneficial, raise their status and add to the national well-being.
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey):
I support many of the comments that have been made today. It is important that we have been given the chance to debate the extremely interesting and thoughtful report from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner), who chaired the Select Committee on Employment, on which I had the honour to serve.
The report contains certain recommendations, but the Committee considered in detail some of the things that we thought that the Government should consider given the persistence of mass unemployment in this country. When we considered mass unemployment, one thing of which we were well aware was that it includes an increasing number of the long-term unemployed. Many of the policy prescriptions that we considered were not aimed at people who go through a short period of unemployment and then move back into the labour market. They clearly do not need the same support and help as those who become long-term unemployed, in a labour market in which the pace of change accelerates ever more rapidly, when the skills that they may have had become obsolete when they have been away from the labour market for a long time and lost much of their confidence.
The evidence that we took suggested that employers regard the long-term unemployed with suspicion, because they know that they have been away from the labour market. They are increasingly reluctant to hire such people, to whom our report paid particular attention. The Right to Work Bill--so ably supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) and the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Sir R. Howell)--is one way of dealing with the problem, and many other ways are suggested in the report. One suggestion is the intermediate labour market--a halfway house mixing education with training in work experience. The Wise group in Edinburgh gave us some impressive evidence about that. It is a practical way of reattaching people who have become detached from the labour market, giving them back their confidence and reskilling them.
As the report points out, there are no panaceas, certainly on the supply side. There is only so much that we can do to return our labour market to its full capacity. Training and work combinations of the kind suggested by the Wise group are not cheap, but we believe that in the end they are very effective in getting rid of persistent long-term mass unemployment.
When taking evidence, we were struck by the Government's extraordinary reluctance to give us a basic statistic. We wanted to know the cost of keeping more than 2 million people--at some points in the past few years, the figure has risen to 3 million--permanently or semi-permanently on the dole. When we took evidence from the then Secretary of State for Employment, she told us that the cost was approximately £9,000 per head. Appendix 1 of the report gives our best estimate of the cost of mass unemployment--£8,400 per claimant--and we calculate that the total cost to the Exchequer is £24,000,315,000. That is a good deal of money, which is currently being wasted on passive support.
We must be able to do something more active and innovative--something that is more likely to return people to the labour market. The Government should not simply condemn the thousands of long-term unemployed in Wallasey--some of those whom I have met have been unemployed for 15 years, and have little chance of returning to the labour market as things stand--to continuing unemployment. Nor should the Government blame them for their predicament. That has been the Government's other main response: they have made benefit more conditional, telling people that they must do more in order to qualify, such as sending out CVs for jobs that do not exist.
Of course it is important to teach people how to write CVs; of course it is right to try to motivate them to search for jobs. But it is also important to make them employable--to equip them so that they have a reasonable chance of finding work, rather than forcing them to send out endless streams of CVs with no hope of ever succeeding. Having to deal with that kind of rejection is even worse than simply being stuck on the dole.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |