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10.24 am
Ms Roseanna Cunningham (Perth and Kinross): The Scottish National party welcomes many elements of the report. We especially welcome its emphasis on the long-term unemployed, to which a number of hon. Members have referred. Most of us agree that that is where the biggest difficulty arises, in terms of the lives of such people and the need to return them to work.
While I accept that the workstart programme has had some beneficial effects, I note that the Employment Committee was equally clear about the fact that it has not created many new jobs. Ultimately, it is the creation of new jobs that will solve the problem; workstart is only a partial solution. The Committee stresses the importance of training in employment, and the Scottish National party supports the idea of a national apprenticeship scheme, which would go some way towards achieving such a system.
We also support the Committee's second main recommendation. It calls for a full financial report on the effects of workstart, and for a much wider assessment that would include figures relating to the number of people who have remained in employment after the one-year workstart period. That ought to be the measure of long-term success.
We believe, however, that the key recommendation is the rather more controversial suggestion of a pilot scheme to try out the right to work-workfare principle, based on the Right to Work Bill. I shall say more about my party's views shortly, but let me say at once that the SNP is opposed to workfare in principle. We should need to look closely at any suggested pilot scheme. Words can be used to mean very different things, and I am concerned about some of the language in the report. There is talk of the pilot scheme being based on the 1995 Bill, but I am not sure what that will mean in practice.
For example, a crucial part of the Bill was the removal of any real choice. Those who refused a job would be entitled to only a quarter of the payments available to a person who was making himself available for work. I am not sure how that squares with the Committee's insistence that compulsion will not be necessary. It is, I think, agreed that most of the evidence suggests that compulsion is not a good idea.
Sir Ralph Howell:
Surely we have reached a point at which we must choose between the right to be unemployed and the right to work. The hon. Lady and her party will have to make up their minds about what they want. I believe that, while the right to work would constitute a big step forward, defending the right to be unemployed is unacceptable.
Ms Cunningham:
It is not a question of a right to unemployment. Of course everyone has a right to work, but the balance is changed considerably when an element of compulsion is introduced. In its evidence to the Committee, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations opposed any compulsive element in workfare, which it considered would ultimately have a detrimental effect on the whole attitude of the unemployed, especially their motivation and approach to learning and training. It might also have a detrimental effect on the labour market: employers might not be keen to take on reluctant workers, feeling that people were not there because they wanted to be there. Ultimately, it would encourage job substitution.
The 1995 Bill defined useful employment, which could not be refused without severe financial penalty, as caring, environmental or minor infrastructure work. Will that definition be the basis of the pilot scheme? If so, what sort of jobs will be covered? If they are associated with work that ought to be done anyway, they should be available not just in connection with the pilot scheme. The 1995 Bill also sought to abolish the right to income support and unemployment benefit after an initial three-year period, with persons not in employment having to register at a work centre. That gives rise to the issue of payment at £3 per hour, which effectively becomes the minimum wage. My party supports the minimum wage but, unlike Labour, we are not prepared to duck how much it should be. We do not regard £3 per hour as civilised and would not support a measure based on that amount. We approve the figure proposed by the Scottish Trades Union Congress and the TUC for England and Wales, which is in the region of £4.10 per hour.
The 1995 Bill made an inadequate attempt to provide for parents, as it covered only parents of children under five years of age and a gross income of no more than £120 a week--not conditions to which we should agree, as they would cause great hardship.
Any success with workstart appears to be limited to the short term. Real employment must take the form of new, long-term jobs. The Wise group's intermediate labour market is welcome but will require sustained, consistent and prolonged Government investment--and that has not been forthcoming. A policy of full employment should not be discarded as being unattainable. If that objective is taken together with job creation, one could devise a
fundamentally different approach to unemployment that would contrast sharply with present Government policy--which, in many cases, merely creates unemployment.
Mr. Forth:
Will the hon. Lady tell the House what she means by full employment?
Ms Cunningham:
There will always be structural unemployment, when a person chooses to leave a job to go to another and may be unemployed for a few weeks in between. There is no reason for the high number of unemployed people and lengthy unemployment that exist today.
As a first step, the transfer of housing capital debt to central Government and the release of funding for house building and renovation would immediately create work in the construction industry. Government policies that produce unemployment include privatisation, as with job losses in the gas industry, market testing and local government reorganisation. The abolition of wages councils should have led, by the Government's own logic, to employers taking on more workers, but that has not happened.
The emotive language used when debating the right to work-workfare is misleading, with constant references to the unemployed being paid to remain idle and the underlying assumption that most of them do not want to work. That is not my experience. The majority of unemployed people want to work but there are no jobs for them. It is significant that the Government decided last year to scrap the separate Department of Employment and to merge it with the Department for Education. Nowhere in the right to work-workfare proposals is there an assessment of the short-term and long-term needs of commerce and industry in respect of employee skills.
Mr. Ernie Ross (Dundee, West):
As I know that my colleague on the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley (Mr. Eastham), wants to speak, I will be brief.
I suppose that in the preamble to his speech on the constitution tonight, the Prime Minister will indicate changes to parliamentary procedures that may give right hon. and hon. Members more time to consider measures before they come before the House, which would be welcome. All members of the new Education and Employment Select Committee were shocked that we managed to convince the Government to debate workfare. Other Select Committees will be keen to ensure that the hard work that they put into their reports will be recognised by the Government as a useful part of the democratic process and will be the subject of debates in the Chamber.
Although I do not know what will be the Minister's response to the debate, judging by his interventions we can guess that it will be negative. The Government reject not only the report's proposals but consistently criticise the performance of existing programmes that they initiated, such as workstart and the Wise project. The then
Employment Select Committee was denied information by the Government, who denigrate schemes but offer no analysis as evidence to support the claim that workfare would not work. I refer not only to answering the famous question, "Is the cost of an unemployed person £8,000 or £9,000?" At one stage, the Secretary of State argued that a price could not be put on keeping someone unemployed because one would have to know the value of the job to which the individual could go. The Government were saying, "Social security scroungers do not want work but just benefits. They are a burden on the nation. Not only are they responsible for being in that position because they are unskilled and untrained, but we do not even class them as people. We do not know whether there are jobs for them to go to, so we cannot estimate the cost in respect of the individual and his family." The Government would be more believable if the Minister could provide an analysis of the workstart and Wise projects, which we failed to elicit from the Government's evidence to the Committee.
The hon. Member for Perth and Kinross (Ms Cunningham) said that the Scottish National party would view with concern any attempt to introduce workfare. Members of the Committee followed in the footsteps of the Secretary of State and went to the United States, which is the home of workfare. Despite the fact that the Committee split into small groups and scoured America, at least for the few days that we were there, we could find no evidence of workfare. Even the most Republican-minded right-wing states that tried to get people back to work discovered first, that people actually wanted to work, and secondly, that it cost money. Many of the unemployed in America, as in Britain, are women, so child care facilities were needed.
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