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5.51 pm
Mr. Hartley Booth (Finchley): The speech of the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) brought to mind the whole purpose of debates in this place. He and I last sat together in this Chamber agreeing about the need to deal with a particular group of handicapped children, and I am aware of his concern in that matter, but I know, and he knows perfectly well, that, politically, we disagree vehemently. I hope that the Gentleman will be fair and tell his local authority that, if it wants to help the unemployed and the homeless, it should deal with the 1,000 or more empty properties in the borough. Also, if he wishes to be fair about the minimum wage, he should accept that the freedom we have to pay the going market rate is a safety net in itself.
I can give the hon. Gentlemen a local example from north-east London. In 1983, a group of 18 people from Bangladesh were employed in Hackney, where I had the privilege of being a candidate. The case was well known to me at that time. These 18 people from Bangladesh had had an income there of 5 rupees a day, but were being paid in Hackney what the local Labour council believed to be derisory wages. Those 18 people were thrilled to have wages that were 10 times greater than those that they received in Bangladesh. However, they were all put out of work by local regulations which were the basis of the thoughts of the hon. Member for Islington, North. I hope that he will reflect on that--although he will not perhaps agree with me in the end.
On the first day I came to this place, I was told that the worst thing I could do was to think. I have to say that, during the speech of the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms Harman), I was thinking deeply about her extraordinary rapier thrust early on, that one in five of our people were unemployed. As one knows that there are 23 million were employed people in this country, she has taken the figure of 4 million to be the total number unemployed. She has used the labour force survey figures--not the Government's claimant count or the International Labour Organisation figures, which are slightly higher.
If one believes that more than 4 million people are unemployed, several questions arise which have social security implications and which need answers. If Labour comes to power, will it immediately say that twice the supposed number of people are unemployed? Would it admit that its rhetoric during debates before the election was true? Would it say that 4 million people were unemployed? Would it pay the 2 million people who do not receive unemployment benefit, and who do not receive any of the £8.6 billion spent on unemployment benefit last year? Will that figure be added to the unemployment bill? During the election campaign, we
should say loudly that the figures used by the hon. Lady include the sick, prisoners and others who are not available for work but who, of course, would like to have work. That figure is bogus and should not be used.
Mr. Henry McLeish (Fife, Central):
I was reluctant to rise, but I feel I must defend my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms Harman). She said that one in five non-pensioner households had no one working in that household. She did not talk about 4 million, and the hon. Gentleman cannot deduce that figure from her comments. I raise this simply by way of clarification, so that, if he extends his remarks, he can start from the right premise.
Mr. Booth:
I am grateful for that, but my point is made. Labour Members frequently refer to "4 million unemployed"--that is Labour's official stance. There are cost implications attached to such a statement and they cannot just make it.
I came here not to cross swords with either the hon. Member for Islington, North or the hon. Member for Peckham, but to think more widely about social security. I happen to believe that social security is based on a generalisation and, like all generalisations, it is part mythical. The generalisation is that the money to buy social services and to pay benefits is the source itself of social security. That is the handout mythology. Yes, we pay a lot of money and I hope to develop my argument to show how the amount has increased since 1948-49.
I wish to advance today an alternative principle--that we should have not a handout, but a hand-up philosophy. [Hon. Members: "Ah!"] If Labour Front Benchers are in accord with this view, so be it. It may well be that there are like minds across the Chamber, but we do not need a handout society any more.
Labour Members often criticise and berate our views on individualism, saying that the individualism that we hold to be an important lever is nothing but selfishness. The Labour party may now share many of our Front-Bench principles, but if it were ever in government--God help us--and tried to implement our policies and, as the weeks went by, had to face the daily problems of government, it would fall back on its original principles. It would not respect the individual because it rejects that view. It believes in state solutions--the sort of solutions that are based on planning and entirely reject the individual contribution. Our social security system should be based on the individual and his dignity. It should also be based on the belief that an individual is responsible to his neighbour--the second commandment.
There is a great need for new ideas. I was moved by a visit to Halifax when I was researching urban regeneration policies. I met a man who told me, "I came from the poorest house I knew of in Lancashire during my childhood. My parents were never employed and we were so poor that we only had a skylight in one room of the accommodation and there was no carpet on the floor. We were grindingly poor, but I did not go out and steal and my parents did not teach me to go to the social security, because there was none at the time. They taught me to see life in terms of honest opportunities." Having made a fortune, he was giving it back. He had bought the derelict Crossley mill and split it up into several hundred units for young, start-up businesses.
At the mill, I met a 22-year-old man who had just bought his second printer. He had a little printing works and was employing his father, who had been unemployed
for years, and was taking on his grandfather, who had been unemployed for a generation, that very week. The one thing that he had--it was not money, although he had been able to borrow the money for the machine, but he did not have social security benefits--was that self-same idea. He saw life in terms of opportunity. He was a man changed from within. My argument is that our social security system is not just about handing out money blindly, but about getting ideas to motivate people.
Another person who is seminal to my argument was a 28-year-old lady I met in Bristol, who, on the quotient of disabilities, had every kind of problem. She was from an ethnic background, coming from the Caribbean, a single mother and slightly disabled, and had been unemployed for eight years, but she had had an idea. Her one skill was cleaning and she thought that she could get a contract to clean buildings. She went to Full Employ--incidentally, I hope that that organisation will regenerate itself--which taught her how to start a small business. I met her eight months later, when she was employing two people and cleaning two tower blocks. That is the sort of regeneration of the individual from inside--outside the social security system--that I want. I hope that those two examples make my point adequately.
How do we progress? It is no use the Government preaching, and it is no use talking. We need action in the form of legislation. Legislation cannot tell people what ideas to think, but laws can promote conduct, and conduct can change culture and with that comes the flow of ideas. I shall give another example to prove the point that laws and the changes of laws dramatically affect culture.
I had the privilege of speaking at the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Hanover not so long ago, where I met the Prime Minister of Saxony. He told me that there had been a huge flow of his cousins--using the term broadly to mean people from east Germany--into Saxony in the preceding year and that they had been poverty-stricken. He had told his burgermeisters, "We have to help these people." They did. They poured out money for people from east Germany--jobs, money, homes and all the rest.
He said that now those same burgermeisters are waiting outside his room saying, "Look, we cannot use these cousins from the east"--the same race and group, the Germans. They were saying, "They have a problem. They come to work late in the morning, go home early in the afternoon and ask for twice or three times the welfare benefits." We have to look for radical reform in the next generation inside the individual and inside the dependency culture that is created by too many handouts.
I gave an example from abroad, but what about at home? In the past months, unemployment figures have fallen. The Department for Education and Employment has been advised that a large number of people--we do not know how many--who are no longer claiming benefit are being flushed out of the system because it has been discovered that they were claiming wrongly. In other words, fraud is being revealed. That is perhaps an example--we hope so--of a sensible reform introduced by the Government here, which is changing the culture of those people for the better. It is so much better to be doing real work than to be doing fraudulent work or diddling the system.
I said that I would return to the figures, and I shall do so briefly. I have not brought as many figures to the Chamber as did my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts), but they are fascinating. In 1948-49,
£0.6 billion was spent on social security, or 5 per cent. of gross domestic product. By 1979, that figure had grown to £16.9 billion, or nearly double the percentage of GDP at 9.7 per cent. By this year, it had grown to £93.3 billion, which is 13.2 per cent. of GDP. There has been a huge rise in the past 20 years: both Front-Bench spokesmen have agreed on that. Several policy thrusts must result from all this. We must target what we spend.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) is present and may well intervene. In his 1987 reforms, he produced an excellent policy initiative of targeting those in most need. However, we also have to encourage individual dignity as a policy principle and we also need to spend less. We cannot afford to spend so much.
How do we do all that? We have to limit some of the demand-led amounts. We have to tell people that they are entitled to benefit, but that there is a limit. We have to help them by giving them ideas and training, even though that idea has been rejected, or at least, qualified. Training, education and new schools are important. We have to ensure that the sort of benefits that we give people fit what we can afford.
In some areas, benefits should be extended, for example for those with special needs. We get people through to the age of 18, but then they often fall off the end of the cliff. We need to attend to the adult employment of those people who, sadly, cannot enter the mainstream of employment. In that area, we must help voluntary organisations much more proactively.
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