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Mr. Derek Foster: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Ms Atherton: Yes, if my right hon. Friend is brief.
Mr. Foster: I congratulate my hon. Friend on the way in which she has campaigned to achieve objective 1 status. We failed to achieve it in the county of Durham, but I am delighted that she has succeeded, as are many people in my county.
Ms Atherton: I thank my right hon. Friend. We await the final signature on the dotted line, but we hope to achieve objective 1 status for the county of Cornwall.
I want to tell hon. Members about a new dealer aged 24 who had no qualifications, only six months' work experience and literacy and numeracy problems. He completely lacked confidence, but his personal adviser guided him towards the environmental task force. He gained work experience, a reference, a fork-lift truck certificate and units towards a general national vocational qualification. He found permanent employment within a
month of completing the option. How do we put a price on that? We should compute the benefits that he and a future family might have required for generations, and think of the social benefits of that young man presenting a role model to his family and tackling his educational problems.
Last month, Opposition Members claimed that the new deal was failing, but clearly for many thousands of young people it has offered opportunities that were previously undreamed of. More than 38,500 young people who previously had no job now have one. We all know that anyone can play around with figures--the Tories did it frequently with the unemployment figures--but seeing young people happy and settled in long-term jobs, and in many cases careers, has been a real achievement for the Government. If one does not deduct payments made by employed people, one ends up with a totally spurious figure, as the Tories did last month. Given that so many of their former colleagues now qualify for the new deal, one would have thought that they would be willing it to succeed.
This week, I opened a training centre in Camborne. It operates from a former derelict site in the town centre, so we benefit from a refurbished town centre site and a new training centre. Behind the quiet, restrained exterior was a positive blooming of skills: young men training for building and other skills in a quiet and studious atmosphere. As the Eden project is being built in Cornwall--probably the biggest greenhouse in the world--we shall need many brickies, not to mention glaziers. New-dealers are working for the project, so it all goes round in circles.
May I sound a cautionary note? Some further education colleges do not believe that the training funding is sufficient. Other providers, however, have told me that it is more than sufficient, which just goes to show that one cannot please all the people all the time.
Ms Abbott:
The point that my hon. Friend has made about training colleges is important. The Government must look again at the level of funding in areas with problems of literacy and basic skills.
Ms Atherton:
I am quite prepared to accept that. I was implying that training providers outside further education colleges, which, let us face it, also receive funding, said that they were not getting enough money, yet training organisations said that their funding was sufficient. Perhaps we do need to look again at funding; I accept what my hon. Friend says about numeracy and literacy.
We must also ensure that bureaucracy does not deter business, particularly small businesses. Red tape could be the devil of the scheme. Although I am aware that the Committee demands ever more statistics from the Department, those statistics must be sensitively collected.
Another interesting fact that the new deal has brought to light is that colleges and training providers are finding that a new group is becoming involved in the new deal--young people from areas that are so rural that they have little or no access to public or any other form of transport. As a result, in the past they have opted out of the educational and training system. The new deal has flushed them out. Some inspired leadership has had to be shown
in devising a means of getting such people to work by training providers, the transport broker appointed by Cornwall county, and by the Employment Service.
One interesting new dealer travels to work on his skateboard. He was just about to leave Cornwall and head off to another part of the country to get away from what he called "the economic blackspot known as Cornwall" when he entered the new deal in January. He had no transport other than his skateboard, which he used to look for vacancies. He was prepared to take on any job that was offered to him. A local company was looking for a new production trainee. It gave him the job, and he offered to take on all extra duties and to work through holidays when other members of staff were away. So impressed was the employer that he was taken on full time at the end of the six months. He still travels to work on his skateboard.
May I sound another note of caution? In its travels the Committee found that other schemes, such as Working Nation in Australia, have tended to restrict opportunities and flexibility due to the inevitable adverse comment that journalists just love to make. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to take courage and retain flexibility so that personal advisers can respond in the most appropriate manner to a person's needs. Do not make people fit the programme; let the programme be flexible enough to fit the individual.
Yvette Cooper (Pontefract and Castleford):
I, too, welcome the debate on the new deal. It is an extremely important area of Government policy. Rather than repeat many of the points ably made by my colleagues on the Committee, I shall concentrate my remarks on the second of the two reports we are considering, which is on the new deal for lone parents.
We should not underestimate how revolutionary the new deal for lone parents is, because it helps a group of ople who have been ignored by the Employment Service and by the state for a very long time. They have been abandoned as the passive recipients of benefits. The underlying assumption that mothers are at home looking after children, that if they want to work they can manage that themselves without any assistance, and that they probably stay at home anyway, is out of date. Some women will choose to stay at home and look after their children, particularly young children. The Committee has made it clear in its report that individuals should be left to make that choice. The Committee felt that it was not a matter on which we should make recommendations.
Those choices are more available to some than to others. It is a striking fact that 62 per cent. of mothers are in work, whereas only 42 per cent. of single mothers are in work. Single mothers do not have the same range of choices as mothers with a partner who helps them bring up the children. I make no apology for concentrating my remarks on single mothers. It is true that many of the points we have made in our report are equally applicable
to lone fathers who are at home bringing up children. However, as the majority of lone parents are single mothers, and as women in the labour market face particular additional problems, I have chosen to concentrate my remarks primarily on them.
It is easy to understand why single mothers face more obstacles getting into work. If there is someone else at home, there is someone else to juggle the child care responsibilities, so that child care or the lack of it is less of an obstacle. There are also two wage packets to share the cost of child care, which increases the chances of going out to work. If mothers are on their own, the sheer work load of looking after the children makes it harder for them to keep their skills up to date and to keep in touch with the world of work.
For the first time, the Government are facing up to those problems. The Employment Service contacts lone parents saying, "We're interested in you. We care about you." Lone parent new deal advisers provide women with information about jobs, child care and, most important of all, the benefits system and the impact of in-work benefits, which are incomprehensible to most people, even if they have begun to work out the details of the system.
Mr. Healey:
One of the experiences from the pilots of the new deal for lone parents is that new deal advisers build up a special relationship with customers, and that has not happened before. On Monday, a new deal adviser for lone parents told me that her colleagues do not know whether it is a personal call or a customer on the line, because they all ask for Lorraine.
Yvette Cooper:
We should not underestimate the support that personal advisers can give. I have a letter that was sent to the new deal lone parent adviser in my local employment service by a woman who has now got a job through the new deal for lone parents in my area. She wrote:
"I am overwhelmed with tears as I cannot believe that all of you should take so much time and effort in helping me in the way you have done. Without your compassion, expertise and backup I know I would have given up and been back at stage one on income support."
Personal relationships such as that give people the confidence that enables them to go out and try things that they would not have tried before--to take the step into work that they might not otherwise have had the strength to take.
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