Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

I am pleased to say that the early evidence from auto-enrolment—firms are already choosing schemes —is that average charge levels are coming down very dramatically, compared with the stakeholder charge caps that used to be in force, for example, with a norm of around 0.5% for last firms, which is radically below the levels we have seen in the market in the past. However, we need to keep this under review and have reserve powers to cap charges if we think they are becoming a problem as auto-enrolment is rolled out.

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

In their efforts to get people back into work, will Ministers please make more of an effort to work with colleagues in the Treasury on tax credits? Constituents of mine are taking three-month contracts, ringing up to get the forms, which then take six or seven weeks to arrive, and when they are returned they are being refused the tax credit because there is only four weeks of the employment left. This is putting people off taking temporary work and really is—I use the word again—a shambles.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The hon. Lady knows that we are not yet responsible for tax credits, although under universal credit they will eventually come in. I will certainly relay her comments to the Treasury and ensure that that does not happen. I agree with her that everything we do to promote work, even part-time work, is very important.

Living Standards

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[David Miliband (South Shields) (Lab)]

This is a time of some gravity for our economy and our society. I shall address two aspects of today’s debate: first, the past 18 months and whether, if the Chancellor had made different decisions, we would be in a different position now; and secondly, the future—the prospects for growth and jobs for our constituents and, above all, whether we can avoid successive further downgrades, after the four that have already occurred, to the economic forecasts published since the general election.

The Prime Minister has introduced a bazooka test for the eurozone countries. My shorthand reading is that in Britain the bazooka marked “austerity” has been far too big and the bazooka marked “growth for the future” far too small. I shall explain that view in my speech today.

The Chancellor’s claim is very specific: that his plan of fiscal austerity is the best route to economic expansion. He uses four arguments to support his case. First, he says that the evidence of Canada in the 1990s shows that the seemingly impossible, a “contractionary expansion”, is proved possible by the Canadian experience. In fact, the Canadian squeeze took place at the same time as the Clinton boom in the United States—Canada’s primary export market. Yet the export of which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are the most proud is the export of their austerity message to the rest of Europe—our primary trading partners. That was seen at the Busan summit, within a few weeks of this Government coming to office. In the process, they are killing the markets on which we depend.

Secondly, the Chancellor has said that private sector growth was previously crowded out by the public sector, but in his speech yesterday he accepted that Government needed to support private enterprise, including through fiscal policy, although admittedly using the off-balance-sheet tactics that he denounced so forcefully during the last Parliament. Retrenchment in the public sector is no guarantee of renaissance in the private sector.

Thirdly—this, I think, is particularly important—the Chancellor says that international markets have voted with their feet in buying UK gilts and driving down yields over the last 18 months. However, the biggest buyer of gilts in recent years has been not the international markets but the Bank of England. I will not dwell on the fact that the Chancellor denounced quantitative easing when he was shadow Chancellor, but he surely knows that for this financial year the Bank of England will have bought no less than 42% of gilt issuance. The Bank now owns more than 30% of the total gilt stock, compared with zero in 2008, while the proportion of international market ownership has barely changed. Interest rates are low in this country because of Bank purchasing policy, not because of Government fiscal policy.

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I am no expert, but is my right hon. Friend saying that the Chancellor’s economic plan is a catastrophic failure?

[David Miliband]

My hon. Friend has demonstrated that it is harder to make a short speech than a long one, but she has summed up very well in a few words what I am trying to say in rather more.

Fourthly, the Chancellor says that without austerity we would be in the same position as Greece, but the maturity of British bonds is closer to 14 years than to the 14 weeks or 14 days that seem to afflict the Greeks; much more of our borrowing is covered by domestic savings; and above all—unlike countries including Italy, which the Secretary of State mentioned—we have our monetary sovereignty. Far from the Government’s having instilled confidence and stirred entrepreneurial spirits for the future, confidence has dropped further and faster in Britain than anywhere else in the last 18 months, and had done so well before the euro crisis. Moreover, the level of confidence is lower than it was when the Government came to office.

Pensions Bill [Lords]

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

The right hon. Gentleman is right that a draft report has been produced and reported in the press, but I can assure him that—as we once famously pointed out—2012 will definitely happen next year. In other words, we do not believe that this important programme should be delayed. Interestingly, the CBI does not believe in a delay, either. It recognises that the biggest firms, which will come in next year, are already planning. In many cases they have already chosen their providers. They are getting on with it, and the last thing we need is new uncertainty about the start of auto-enrolment. We will, therefore, be pressing ahead.

Waiting periods are clearly a trade-off, but today more than ever, we need to realise the impact of what we are doing on smaller firms and businesses more generally.

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I understand the Minister’s point and the benefits to a payroll department in a small firm, but does he accept that people who change jobs frequently throughout their careers could be disadvantaged? If people change jobs 11 times, they could end up losing about three years’ worth of benefits.

[Steve Webb]

The hon. Lady raises an important issue. That is one of the arguments against a six-month waiting period, but those things are a matter of judgment. She used an interesting phrase when she mentioned the payroll departments of small firms, but of course a typical small firm does not have a payroll department, and will struggle with those provisions. We are trying to ensure that the scheme has flexibility, so that we take small firms with us rather than have them resenting the scheme. The waiting period is important in that respect.

Finally, on amendments 19 and 20 and the earnings trigger, which the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) mentioned, the Bill originally proposed that we auto-enrol at around about the national insurance floor, which is a bit more than £5,000, uprated in today’s prices. There were two problems with that. First, there was no de minimis provision, so employers would have auto-enrolled people for pennies a week. If the floor were £5,000 and a person earned £100 a week—£5,200 a year—they would be enrolled on the £200 above the £5,000. Under the legislation that we inherited, the contribution at the start would be 1%—£2 a year, or 4p a week. There might have been the odd adverse newspaper story had we required small firms to enrol people for 4p a week, so we took the view that we had to put the threshold up.

The obvious threshold to use—common thresholds are attractive to employers—is the PAYE threshold. Although we will look at the prevailing situation and make a judgment each year, the broad idea behind aligning with the PAYE threshold is that if businesses have to run PAYE for somebody, auto-enrolment will be a reasonable duty. Below that level, it is inappropriate.

Jobs and the Unemployed

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heald]

I think the hon. Gentleman is wrong, because the headline figure shows an increase of 5% over the past six months, but he is right about the differences between sectors and regions. He makes an important point, which we should not ignore, and I shall return to it later in my remarks. However, Sir John Rose’s point was also well made. On the question of what needs to happen in this country, the role of apprenticeships should not be ignored, and 50,000 more apprenticeships are welcome, particularly given the good quality of education that they provide in technical areas.

In the latest CIPD survey, there is a lot of criticism of the abilities and work-readiness of our graduates, and there is a lot to be said for schemes such as internships, which get people ready for work so that they can do a good job as soon as they enter employment. I represent North East Hertfordshire, and a good thing about Hertfordshire is that we, as a county, have a series of institutions that are business-facing but educational. Our colleges are business-facing, and our university is well known as business-facing, which means that the county asks businesses what skills they need and our university provides the skilled workers. In terms of the employment service in Hertfordshire, if a graduate who is placed with a Hertfordshire company needs an extra skill, our university will teach them it, and our colleges all feed into that. It is no coincidence that we have the lowest number of NEETs in the country.

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

Teesside university, the university of the year, is basing itself in my constituency, and I am quite interested in the hon. Gentleman’s idea about graduates not being prepared for the workplace. Will he please identify exactly when in the history of university education employers said, “All our graduates are prepared for the workplace”? When was that golden age of preparedness?

[Mr Heald]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point, which is that we are not good enough as a country at preparing people for work. If we look at why we have so many workless families, and why employers are dissatisfied, it goes right back to the beginning—to school. The fact is that 40,000 young people leave school every year in this country who cannot read, write and add up properly. It is not good enough that we do not have the technical people we need in business coming through. This is a failure of the whole system that needs to be addressed. [Interruption.] The hon. Lady chunters, but Sir John Rose is probably one of the most eminent chief executive officers in the country, he is running a company that is a great success story, and he is right to highlight the need to do better on technical education and skills.

Over the years, we have had a range of employment programmes that have not succeeded as well as we would have hoped. A few years ago, the Work and Pensions Committee looked into what contractors can achieve. We did a major report on how the Department for Work and Pensions commissions employment programmes and the role of prime contractors. We were encouraged by the international examples. We looked at what had happened in Australia and visited the Netherlands to look at what was being done there. That seemed to show that contractors were able to provide programmes more cheaply, but also to get better results. Professor Finn, who was advising the Committee, found that Australia was achieving, through “contractorisation”, an improvement of about 10% in job readiness and people’s ability to find placements. In the Netherlands, we were told very strongly that the people who ran these contractor companies were able to specialise provided that they were given enough flexibility in respect of the barriers to employment that there have been and still are.

Looking at the picture overall, I have reached the view that as soon as a person is not working, and we are aware of that, they must be interviewed to find out what the barriers to employment are that they face and start to tackle them. If somebody has basic skills problems, we need to get on to that at an early stage and tackle it—and equally, if somebody needs child care or has a problem with addiction. These are all areas where action is required. In relation to the work capability assessment for incapacity benefit, a lot of people have not been seen for many years, and the on-flow that has been examined so far seems to suggest that many of them are capable of doing some kinds of work, but not necessarily all kinds. Those people need considerable help.

If we are to help people who have the classic problems suffered by those on incapacity benefit—musculoskeletal problems such as back injuries, and mental health problems such as stress, and worse—it is very important to get in with an early intervention. More can be done by employers, the NHS and the system as a whole—including, perhaps, the companies that provide insurance for people who are unable to work—in getting together to see whether they can do more to get this help in quickly. It is not acceptable that somebody of working age who has a back injury and needs physiotherapy has to wait 10 weeks for an appointment whereas if they were seen quickly they could get back to work. I ask the Minister whether it is possible to have liaison and discussion with the NHS, employers and insurance companies to try to do better in getting involved more quickly and stopping some of these conditions becoming chronic in the first place. With back problems, that means physiotherapy; with mental health problems, it may mean talking therapies as well as the drug treatments for depression of the sort that are available these days.

Yesterday, I talked to people at the National Ankylosing Spondylitis Society, who said that all too often they have to wait a long time for the treatment they need to deal with their condition. For people of working age, we need to prioritise their health and have something amounting to a national occupational health approach so that we do not end up with a lot of people who become chronically ill. It is well known that someone who has been out of work with a disability for two years is very unlikely to work again.

I welcome the Work programme. The criticisms that have been made of it are a little unfair, if I may say so. The fact is that the economy has been put into a terrible situation by the previous Government. The future jobs fund is a scheme that has only just started, and it is not as though it is not being replaced by something that is probably better—namely, more apprenticeships. It is a bit disingenuous to describe it as a jobs fund, as though these are permanent jobs, when they are really job placements for six months.