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Mr. Murphy: My hon. Friend is right. The vast majority of small businesses--the honest, hard-working
ones--are eager to compete on an equal footing and to pay quality wages to quality staff. There is no future for those businesses, or for our country, in paying £1.50 an hour to people with families who cannot survive on such wages.
At the hustings in two years' time, I will say that the national minimum wage has been a great success and it has benefited many thousands of people in Scotland and in my constituency. However, I still do not know what my Conservative opponent will say. I will ask the question repeatedly throughout the campaign, but perhaps the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton can give us the answer now. He was asked repeatedly today, and we have asked the Conservatives repeatedly in the past year, what their position now is on the national minimum wage. It is not good enough for the hon. Gentleman to say that he supports the Conservative policy on the issue when no one knows what that is. I invite him to intervene to give us an inkling about that policy. It is not a hard question--would the Conservatives keep the national minimum wage or abolish it?
We have heard much criticism of the national minimum wage because, it was claimed, it would lead to wage inflation and unemployment. I do not know whether Conservative Members have had time to reflect on those predictions of doom and gloom, but we still have low levels of inflation and of unemployment. I accept that unemployment levels are still too high, but we are working to bring them down, and they are at a 20-year low. Will the Conservatives now admit that their gloomy predictions about the national minimum wage were wrong?
The Conservatives also predicted that the new deal would not work and would cause economic disaster, but we heard only this week that 100,000 young people have benefited from it. Youth unemployment has been halved. We had a five-year plan to reduce youth unemployment and to achieve it in two years is a better performance than that of any Government in history. The Government should be given the respect and credit they deserve for that.
Mr. Gareth R. Thomas:
My hon. Friend is right to say that the new deal is helping to combat youth unemployment. He will also be aware that it is beginning to combat the huge skills gap that hinders enterprise and innovation. We need to continue to focus effort on that skills gap, because the 1998 London employer survey revealed that some 83,000 people are considered by their employers to lack skills, especially in computer literacy.
Mr. Murphy:
My hon. Friend's point illustrates the difficulties that the Government inherited 100 or so short weeks ago. We are trying to meet the challenge of upskilling and the new deal is achieving that for those who have been vulnerable and neglected in the past. A generation was forgotten and ignored. Many hon. Members have experienced unemployment, and, when I was a teenager, I was unemployed for two years. What was offered to me was a very poor relation--if it was a relation at all--of the new deal. Young people felt alienated from what the Conservative party was offering them as an opportunity. It was not a pathway to a skill to get them out of unemployment.
I know that from first-hand experience. I went to college as a mature student with many people who had been unemployed and they took that route because the
schemes offered by the Conservative Government--unlike the new deal--were not worth the investment of their time and energy. Many young people went to college to gain the formal qualifications that they were not able to get the first time. Social justice is the partner of enterprise and innovation, although Conservative Members seem to think that it is their competitor.
I am delighted that the working families tax credit--another aspect of our social justice policy--will benefit 1.5 million working families throughout the UK, increasing the income and support available to 3 million children. Add that to the record increase in child benefit, and we can see how much has been done to help working families.
I do not want to be too party political, but it is incumbent on the Opposition to say whether they will abolish WFTC or whether they will, when they meet working families in their constituencies who used to receive a poor deal, remind those constituents of Conservative opposition to WFTC, which gives an average £24 more to every working family. Will they tell their constituents that they voted against that, and that they think that it a bad idea? I shall certainly remind mine of Labour's view.
Social justice is a cornerstone of domestic enterprise, but our social justice agenda can also help international innovation and enterprise, particularly by helping to write off more than £100 billion of international debt through the G8. We can help to free countries to provide opportunity and to benefit from innovation and enterprise.
I have spoken about the great Scots inventions of the past. We all know, however, that invention is not always as creative or as helpful as it might be. In some cases, Governments or enterprises may even be too supportive of inventors. Governments must support science and innovation, but they must be careful. Some unusual grants have been handed out, and we have all read that the Institute of Food Science and Technology received £200,000--£100,000 of it public money--to investigate why cornflakes become soggy when milk is poured on them. I am not interested in that, even when I am having breakfast, and the grant was perhaps not absolutely sensible.
In comparison with some international examples, however, that project equates in importance to Einstein's theory of relativity. A Scandinavian research grant was given to scientists examining the impact of wet underwear on thermo-regulatory responses and thermal comfort in the cold. Perhaps the Minister can tell me what that was all about. I mean no slight to our Scandinavian counterparts in saying that we should not become involved in aiding such research. The university of Minnesota was given funding to investigate patient preferences for waxed or unwaxed dental floss, another debate that excites me not at all.
Many challenges face enterprise, and much necessary research can be done. We must provide finance and seedcorn support if we are to remain at the cutting edge of world invention. We should learn from international experience. We should seek to turn today's school children and students into the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Some 50,000 young people set up in business every year, although the proportion of women who run small businesses is lower than it should be, perhaps because support has not existed in the past.
Analysis of the attitudes of young people is revealing. More than 40 per cent. are willing to work 60 hours a week, undercutting oft-quoted criticism of the youth of today. Many felt that they were not taken seriously because of age discrimination and the view that young people should work at junior jobs in business rather than owning one.
I pay tribute to the Prince's Youth Business Trust, which provides seedcorn finance and professional support for those aged 18 to 25. In Renfrewshire, more than 300 young people have established businesses with that support. Nor have those businesses proved short-term operations: 83 per cent. of them remain in business after a year, and more than half are still in business after more than three years. The PYBT enables young people to put down lasting roots in the business community. The average age of the people involved in my constituency is 23, and just over a third of them are women. Many people may just have left university at that age, and it is remarkable that they are in successful business.
Before those people received the support of the PYBT, 80 per cent. of them were unemployed. It has provided them with a pathway out of poverty and unemployment into work, but, far more, a pathway towards ownership of their own businesses. Some 20 per cent. of those people had no formal school qualifications, but they have set up and run their own businesses.
The Government are providing, I think, £50 million in matching funding for the Prince's Trust over the next five years to support 30,000 young people who are setting up their own businesses. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Employment, Welfare to Work and Equal Opportunities has said that the Prince's Trust is remarkable in providing support for people who had not previously had economic breaks, perhaps coming from families with lower income backgrounds. The Government have undertaken several initiatives in Renfrewshire. Renfrewshire Enterprise is supporting families from poor backgrounds, particularly in Barrhead, a town famous principally for one business--Shanks and Co., the world-renowned producer of toilets. Indeed, when I first mentioned that business in the House, I almost prompted an unprecedented intervention in a maiden speech. Unfortunately, Shanks no longer produces toilets, but we are trying to reignite the entrepreneurial spirit in that industrial town.
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