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10.40 am
Mr. Ken Eastham (Manchester, Blackley): When we embarked on our study, which lasted 14 months, many members of the Select Committee already understood many of the factors involved, so there are no shocks in many of our conclusions.
I want to nail the folly that is evident in this Chamber almost every week, when members of the Government boast about low pay as though that is good for the workers and good for the nation. People know, in their heart of
hearts, that that is not true. If people do not have purchasing power, they do not buy clothes, furniture or houses; there is a general rundown as a result of those poverty payments.
As was pointed out to me some years ago, when there was slavery in America at least the slaves were fed. Today, some working people in Britain receive such poor pay that they are denied a decent diet. Doctors talk about the malnutrition among the very poor in our society. [Interruption.] I wish that, on occasions, the Minister would be a little more serious when dealing with unemployment matters. He seems to think that it is a gala day and he just sits on the Bench laughing. He does not take seriously the misery of the unemployed. Oh, the hon. Gentleman suddenly looks up with great concern, but it is rare that he looks serious when we are discussing a serious matter.
I want to raise a point about jobcentres. Perhaps the Minister would stop grinning for a moment. I want him to raise some of our concerns with the managers of jobcentres. I wish that this debate was televised so that 20 million people could see how the Minister is behaving; then he would get his ticket at the next general election.
During the past fortnight, I heard of the case of a man who had been out of work for months and was desperate to find a job. He went to a jobcentre, took a card advertising a vacancy and went to see the firm involved. He worked for it for two weeks, but never received any pay. He went back to the jobcentre but was told, "We gave you a card and you got a job." He is now on crisis loans because he cannot even get back on to benefits. He is living hand to mouth. I wrote to the manager of the jobcentre, but was told that his job was only to put a card on the wall and that he was not responsible for what happened. Somebody must take some responsibility. I believe that both the Government and jobcentre managers have responsibility.
Bogus jobs are being advertised. I can tell the Minister that I will be giving this case some publicity--[Interruption.] The Minister is a bit of a clown, sitting there puffing and blowing. It is an absolute disgrace that, although he is the Minister with responsibility for employment, he is scathing and casual about a serious matter that the House is debating for just an hour and a half.
It is a great myth that people do not work. People have been saying that for years, but over that time it has been shown quite conclusively that people desperately want to work. Being unemployed causes great misery. The workstart project referred to by the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Sir R. Howell) has some merit and we have seen one or two such schemes. It has certainly led to new thinking about what the Government could do. It is interesting to note that even the Confederation of British Industry said that employers could help to improve the skills match through work experience. That is commendable. No one could say that the CBI is a supporter of the Labour party; basically, it supports the Conservative party. However, it is singing the same tune as the Labour party and the hon. Member for North Norfolk.
Mr. Ian McCartney (Makerfield):
On behalf of the Opposition, I welcome the report "The Right to Work/Workfare". I give a commitment that if, after the next general election, I am the Minister responsible for employment, I will take the report out of the bucket, dust it down and give a rather more adequate response to its recommendations.
Time does not allow us to deal appropriately with all the issues raised both in the report and by the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Sir R. Howell) in his Right to Work Bill. However, despite the inadequate time, it is important to set out clearly a range of issues on which the Labour party has given commitments. The nation's most important capital asset is its people--their knowledge, skills, endeavours and commitments. Under this Government, over a decade and more, a mass of talent has gone to waste. Since November 1990, when the Prime Minister took office, 11 million people have been unemployed at least once. Since the last general election, 8.7 million have been unemployed at least once. In my region, the north-west of England, 1 million people have been unemployed at least once since the last general election.
The numbers of long-term unemployed do not move down consistently or dramatically. Once a male becomes unemployed, he usually becomes long-term unemployed. Under this Government's training packages, it is almost impossible for him to return to a meaningful job. Of those who do manage to return, 50 per cent. are out of work again within a year. Last year, more than 400,000 of our fellow citizens who became unemployed but found another job were unemployed again by January this year.
It is not just a matter of losing a job; having lost it, it is almost impossible to find another one. When people do find jobs, they are usually short-term, insecure and part-time. Nine out of 10 new jobs created in the economy fall into that category. About 1 million full-time jobs have been lost since the start of the recession. Those jobs, in the main, have been replaced by part-time, insecure and low-paid work. It is no wonder that the country feels insecure when people have a one in three chance of losing their jobs. In the first quarter of this year, more than 50,000 jobs in manufacturing and in the key sectors of the construction industry were lost and there will be further losses between now and the end of the year. Yet despite those statistics, the Government say that the recession is over. The truth is that no one's job is secure; no one has the certainty of continuing employment.
The Government's deregulation policies have failed dramatically. They have failed in respect of our European competitors as we lag behind them in investment, training and competitiveness. We lag behind them also in our ability to develop our economy. There is a lack of capital investment in key sectors of the economy.
Let us take the construction industry as an example. It is incredible that, at a time of the highest level of homelessness for 30 years, more than 250,000 building workers are languishing on the dole. Capital assets worth £6 billion are locked in local authority bank accounts, yet the Government will not allow their phased release so that construction and infrastructure projects can go ahead, the construction industry can get back to work and public and private sector incentives to restructure the economy and our capital infrastructure can be provided. It is simple
common sense to bring together those capital assets with people who are unemployed to create the types of jobs that we need in the construction industry. That is just one practical example of the significant steps that could be taken.
The Government have staggered from despair to counter-despair in trying to massage unemployment figures and the withdrawal of resources from training budgets. We are spending more than £1 billion less on training than we were at the start of the recession and 600,000 young people are in neither full-time education, nor training, nor employment. They are on the margins of society. Yet what do the Government offer? They offer pilot project work--not for 600,000 or 30,000 people, but for a mere 6,000. Eight weeks after the scheme was supposed to start, the Government still cannot tell us about contracts in relation to trainers: who is training, what type of work is it, and what access is there to pilot job opportunities?
In setting the contracts for the scheme, it seems that the Government are reducing the resources. In doing so, they are refusing access to training as a component of the pilot projects. The Minister smiles, but I hope that he will jump up in a moment to give me the answer that he has been unable to supply for the past eight weeks. If he does, it would be better late than never and I would congratulate him on doing so. The pilot project is supposed to be at the heart of the Government's drive to give people access to the labour market. Yet, in the contracts, which are to be announced, there is no training element. That is a complete nonsense. The work provided is skivvy labour, and there is no intention of promoting and developing real jobs.
We should consider the plight of young people. They are living in communities scarred by unemployment, where one in five non-pensioner households have no working member. Their self-esteem has been destroyed, they are living on the margins of society, and there is involvement in crime, drug and alcohol abuse and sexual exploitation. That should not be our young people's experience as we approach the millennium. They should be part of society, not forced to its margins. There should be community and peer support, a sense of belonging, access to social facilities, vocational guidance and support, training and jobsearch, meaningful links with responsible employers, work experience, job opportunities and the ability to move in the wider labour market to seek out better job prospects.
My hon. Friends the Members for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown) and for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) recently proposed a comprehensive set of fiscal incentives to help the long-term unemployed and young people, which I commend to the House. They are priorities for an incoming Labour Government.
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