Health and Disability Reform
Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts(7 months, 1 week ago)
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Dame Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)
I totally agree with the Secretary of State that everyone gets dignity from being in work, but he will be aware of the very high levels of unemployment experienced by those with learning disabilities and autism. Bearing in mind that able-bodied people over 50 struggle to find work, let alone those with a disability or long-term health condition, what does he propose doing to change the attitude of employers, so that they recognise that everyone has a skill and a role to play, and that everyone is an asset?
Mel Stride
I thank my hon. Friend for that really pertinent question. She will be familiar with the Buckland review, which has reported. I was very keen to pursue that review when it came across my desk, and I made my officials and the necessary infrastructure available to ensure that it was able to go ahead. It addresses many of the issues to which my hon. Friend rightly points, in terms of employers accommodating and benefiting from those who have autism and other conditions.
Budget Resolutions
Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts(9 months ago)
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Dame Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch). She was doing so well until she mentioned Thurrock.
Perhaps I could give some clarity on why Thurrock Council got in such bad financial trouble. Over the last decade, as some Members will know, Thurrock was the subject of very aggressive three-way politics, with the UK Independence party holding the balance of power between a Labour minority administration and a Conservative minority administration. Frankly, it was impossible to get a balanced budget passed, because sensible decisions would not be taken to either increase council tax or reduce spending. That led council officers to pursue a risky borrowing strategy in order to plug the gap. The lesson we should learn is not so much about the Government’s overall strategy on local government, but about the need for all of us, wherever we are in public life, to take sensible decisions based on positive outcomes for those we serve.
I listened very carefully to what the hon. Lady said about special educational needs, and she is absolutely right: it is an issue that we really need to get to grips with. The Budget is great for providing plenty of knockabout between the Front Benchers, but her speech reminds us that we really need to think in a more granular way about whether we are delivering the outcomes that we want for a mature, advanced society, and particularly about whether we are delivering the best outcomes for those who are most vulnerable and perhaps least able to speak for themselves.
We are witnessing some very real challenges for children with statements in our schools, for a whole host of reasons. One of them is that, for a while, there was a fashionable view in the educational establishment that children with special needs ought to be educated in a mainstream setting. That will work for many of them, but we will fail others, including others in the school, if we continue with this model. Overall, it has led to under-investment in special provision, which has resulted in so many schools having to manage more and more children with special needs. I have seen that at first hand in my constituency. We have reports of a massive post-pandemic increase in children with statements, not all of which are related to having been out of school; some of these things are genetic. There has been a massive increase in children presenting as non-verbal, and we have not really got to grips with why that is.
We need to acknowledge that the explosion in special needs is being absorbed by our school sector. Let us pay tribute to those working in the sector, who are doing their best. I have seen at first hand the real efforts being made in some of my schools to manage this issue, and to give the best possible education to all pupils. I recently visited Tudor Court Primary School in my constituency, where I was told that 13% of the school’s intake now have a statement. I was also told that the figure is low compared with that for other schools, which strikes me as a significant indication that this issue ought to become a top priority.
I come back to the fact that we must, first and foremost, look after those who need our help the most, not those who shout loudest. I often say that this place works best for the pointy-elbowed middle classes. We really need to make sure that we focus on those who need our help the most.
Karin Smyth
The hon. Lady makes an excellent point about special needs provision in most authorities across the country, regardless of the politics of a place. The situation is really damaging for young people. Bristol City Council has become part of the Government’s safety valve initiative, along with neighbouring Conservative- run councils and others. Does she agree that we need to take a serious look at this issue across the country to understand both demand and the provision that already exists, and that we need to work together for the benefit of children coming through the system and their families, who are so desperate for support?
Dame Jackie Doyle-Price
I agree, and we should embrace this outbreak of consensus. The hon. Lady is absolutely right, because we cannot tackle this in a silo. Ultimately, it is for the local authority to ensure that a statement of special educational needs is given, but equally, local authority budgets are under pressure. I went to my local education authority a few years ago to talk about the need to progress a free school application for special provision, and I received a clear message: “We don’t want to encourage that, because people will move here, and we would have to look after them until they are 25.” We need to look at this at a high level to make sure that we deliver the provision that is needed across the board.
Turning to the substance of the Budget, I welcome the decision on national insurance, which is clearly no longer the contributory levy that it once was. The idea was that people bought credits towards their pension and out-of-work benefit entitlements, which have become much more universal, so national insurance makes no sense as a separate tax. That raises a philosophical debate about whether there ought to be a contributory principle for some services. In particular, we still await a long-term solution to funding social care.
Although I welcome the aspiration to remove national insurance, we still need to sort out social care funding. There is still uncertainty about how we fund social care, and local authorities are again left to pick up the pressure. It has been very convenient to give local authorities that responsibility, but we need to do our bit. Ultimately, everything has to be paid for. If we are to have mature and sensible long-term decisions at central Government level, we need to give local authorities the same space. While there is still uncertainty about how the cost of social care will be met, local authorities cannot make sensible decisions, and the disasters that the hon. Member for Halifax described will only become more common.
We need to look again at how to ensure that local authorities make mature and sensible decisions about their budgeting. The Audit Commission has been replaced by audit firms, and the frank advice that ought to be given has simply not been given. We used to have the surcharge, which was a very blunt instrument, to ensure that councillors made mature and sensible financial decisions, but now councillors have no stake.
We often say in this place that we have great champions for local communities, but we have to show leadership and maturity in making sensible decisions. When it comes to local councils, we have the same situation on speed. They have great local ward champions who view themselves as street-by-street spokespeople for every problem, but they perhaps do not properly recognise their corporate responsibility for making sensible judgments. Councils are multimillion-pound businesses that are there to deliver outcomes for the whole local authority area, not just individual wards.
As well as looking holistically, we need to make sure that, where local authorities get things wrong, there is an element of accountability outside the ballot box, especially because local election turnouts are so poor. That is all our fault. We are all politicians, and it is our job to motivate people to vote for us. I am often frustrated by the knockabout of political debate, which is a big turn off—it is sometimes a big turn off to sit here on a Wednesday lunch time. For people who are not engaged with politics, it is an even bigger turn off. The result is that, particularly in local politics, people zone out and switch off.
Even after the biggest failure in local government finance, the turnout in my local election in Thurrock was less than 20% in some wards. Is that not shocking? It tells us that the public are thinking, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t matter who I vote for. Nothing will change.” We should all think about that as the general election approaches, because I detect the same mood out there.
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
The hon. Lady is never a turn off for me. She is making some excellent points, not least in respect of SEND children and kinship carers. The needs of those individuals and groups should be addressed.
On local government finance, my local authority is a coalition of Conservatives, independents and Lib Dems. Heaven knows I have criticised it an awful lot, quite justifiably, but we should recognise that all local authorities, including mine and Thurrock, have had to deal with huge cuts over the past 10 or 14 years. My local authority has had to cut £260 million from its revenue spend. I was looking at some figures, and would it not be more sensible to change council tax—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. We have quite a lot of time this afternoon, but that is an incredibly long intervention. I am looking forward to the hon. Gentleman’s speech in due course.
Dame Jackie Doyle-Price
I acknowledge that there have been cuts to local authority budgets, but the root of this is that so much local authority funding comes from the centre. Where is the accountability? As far as local electors are concerned, the council can spend only what it is given. Given the cuts, it is incumbent on councils to make sensible decisions. They cannot have their cake and eat it. They have to live within their means.
Given the rainbow coalition that the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) has just described, I suspect that there is an awful lot of playing to the gallery. We expect our councillors to be more mature.
Sir Christopher Chope
Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the problems is that we gave local authorities a power of general competence, and that we should have concentrated their mind on the things that they really have to do?
Dame Jackie Doyle-Price
Yes, I agree. With hindsight, that was a big mistake. It was done with the best of intentions. Given that local authorities were in a new set of circumstances, there was a desire to give them freedom to be more relevant and to have fewer constraints, but it has given licence to risky behaviour. We will see further consequences of that in due course.
Clearly, we would all like to be in a much better place with regard to the strength and growth rate of our economy and the state of our public finances, but we need to reflect that the last 15 years have been challenging. We have had three significant shocks that have cumulatively made us poorer than we would like to be—that is just a fact. The 2008 financial crisis had to be managed, and we have had the consequences of the pandemic; one way or another, we locked down our economy for the best part of two years, which has clearly had a massive impact on growth. The billions that we spent on keeping people in their jobs still have to be paid for. There is also Ukraine. Not only do we need to support the people of Ukraine, but we need to address the consequences for energy prices.
Returning to the need for responsible leadership, we should level with the public about what these things mean. The public are not stupid, and they are not deceived by spin and rhetoric. They know that these shocks have consequences. If we do not treat people with the respect that they deserve by levelling with them, they will show us the same lack of respect. They understand that this all needs to be paid for. If we do not face up to that, we will end up compounding the challenges created by those political choices.
I return to the financial crisis. Clearly, there was a need for a massive intervention to prevent the whole banking system collapsing, but we got addicted to quantitative easing. The correction that should have taken place following that financial crisis never happened, because, guess what, we do not want middle-class people who vote to have a reduction in the value of their property. By sticking with that policy, we ended up with interest rates that were artificially low for a very long time, which completely distorted asset class prices. That meant that everyone put all their investments into property, which has contributed to massive inter- generational unfairness, because people cannot now afford to buy a house. Does that not just show the short-termism and the failure to get real, explain things to the public and make long-term financial decisions that will do the most to grow this country? We all bemoan the lack of growth in our economy but if we have generated a system where there is more profit to be made by investing in housing than in business and wealth creation, this is where we end up. We all need to make a determined effort to be more long-term in our decision making and not just pursue the retail benefits of going up a few percentage points in the opinion polls.
We spent billions during lockdown to keep people in their jobs, but, again, that has to be repaid by the taxpayer. People do understand that; they know that nothing can be made for free. We also need to address the wider consequences of what we did in lockdown, because there is a longer-term impact on our nation’s productivity. We were all psychologically damaged by being taken out of social circulation for two years, and we have ended up with work practices that are not always the most efficient. Worst of all, we have an expectation that the state will deal with every problem. Again, we need to get back to having the leadership that says, “We’ve all, collectively, got to fix this problem.” Fighting covid is the equivalent of fighting a war. After the second world war, everyone knew that there was going to be a massive effort to get our country back together again. We have pretended, never more so than on public services, that the situation is easier than it is.
I hear over and over again about underfunding, but what does that mean? If there is not enough money to deliver what people are expecting, we have to be honest about that and cut our cloth; we have to recognise that nothing can be delivered without being paid for, so we must either increase taxes or look at what we are delivering. We all want to get to a position where we are much richer and can pay for a lot more, but concessions will have to be made before we get to that place after the shock we have had to deal with.
We also need to have a much more honest debate about what we should be spending our money on. The situation in Ukraine clearly illustrates the need to spend more on defence. Since 1989, we have taken our eye off the ball, but we now face a more challenging and unstable world. To keep our energy prices low and stable, the best measure is to invest in defence at an increased rate.
The two biggest challenges that face us are perhaps not the focus of mature debate or leadership by this place. First, there is no doubt that the public think we have too much immigration, on which we have become dependent as a source of cheap labour. From 2006, the UK’s openness to immigration from eastern Europe had a very positive effect on growth, but it was “growth” as in the overall quantum. The impact on individual productivity, earnings and GDP per capita was poor, because earnings were depressed. Overall, the resentment towards immigration comes from a lot of those people who found their earnings diminished as a consequence. We think about the “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” generation of builders and labourers who earned lots of money by going overseas. Post-2006, they found that their earnings were depleted because people here were choosing to employ Lithuanians and Poles, because that was cheaper labour. Naturally, they will have a clear view that immigration has reduced their earnings.
Peter Grant
The hon. Lady’s account is completely inaccurate. Often UK employers have employed workers from the European Union because the labour has not been available here. That is why, for example, we now have a crisis in recruitment to social care professions; we have stopped the Europeans coming in and there is nobody in the UK who is able to do the work.
Dame Jackie Doyle-Price
On social care, the hon. Gentleman has a fair point, but I do not think that what he says is true as regards HGV drivers, builders, labourers or anyone else in the construction industry. It is true that we have relied on cheap migrant labour to deliver social care, but that is largely because we have not valued social care as a profession. While we have had that abundance of cheap labour in the sector, we have also been able to kick the can down the road about how we fund social care and our later stage of life, so the impact has been not just on earnings but on allowing policymakers to be lazy about grappling with these difficult issues.
Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an important speech, with the authentic voice of common-sense Conservatism, which we need to hear much more of. The point she makes about the depressive effect on wages of the high immigration so far this century is incredibly important and relevant to the debate we are having about the workforce. Does she agree that at least our party has a plan to reduce legal migration substantially in the years ahead, which is more than we hear from any Opposition party?
Dame Jackie Doyle-Price
I do agree that we have a plan, but I say to my hon. Friend that it has to be more than words—it has to be delivered on. I am sure he would agree on that. He will have heard, as many of us have, about how many industries have lobbied us to ensure that such and such a profession is added to the skilled workforce list. Those employers do not want to pay those higher wages and we, as politicians, need to be robust about that and say, “You know what, we genuinely want to deliver a high-wage, high-skilled economy. If you want to employ HGV drivers, you are going to have to pay them the money they deserve.”. That is how we will reward aspiration and hard work by the people of this country, and, overall, we will have better growth. It is not going to be painless getting there, because some employers will have to start paying higher wages and that will filter through to higher prices. But that is how we correct our economy and become the great world leader that we should be. We should be the powerhouse of the G7; given the skills and abilities within our country, we should be leading the world. We have allowed ourselves to become impoverished by quick fixes, to be brutally frank.
I come to my final issue. I have said for a long time that the biggest challenge facing this country is the lack of affordable housing and the failure to build enough new homes. I welcome the continued emphasis by the Government on this issue, but we are still failing to deliver. Yesterday, the Chancellor mentioned new investment to facilitate new housing in Barking and Canary Wharf. If we are to learn from what can go wrong, I encourage him to travel a few miles east to my constituency, to Purfleet. It sits on the River Thames and it has a railway station that can take people to Fenchurch Street in the City of London in 45 minutes. We have been talking about building 3,500 homes in Purfleet since 2008. If they were constructed on the River Thames, 45 minutes from central London, these homes would have sold themselves. Purfleet Centre Regeneration Limited, a public-private partnership, was developed to deliver these homes. It had £70 million-worth of public land gifted to it. It was granted £5 million in 2015 to kickstart the works, and it subsequently received £70 million in housing infrastructure funding. The first house was promised to be constructed by 2018. We are now in 2024, and we do not have a single new home after all that public money.
I want the Government to register that while it is great to see capital funding being made available, with all these wonderful brochures with nice plans for new homes, nothing is being delivered. I wonder whether there is something wrong with how we approach these things. From where I am sitting, I can see consultants who have managed to earn a pretty penny over the past eight years out of Purfleet, but we have achieved nothing except the disappointment of the public. The public have supported and got behind these proposals, but have found their hopes and ambitions dashed. They deserve better. They have been seriously misled by a number of people. It is not for me to apologise to the people of Purfleet—I have done my best to call out the fact that the emperor had no clothes for a very long time—but the public gets very disillusioned when promises given by politicians come to nothing. If we really are to deliver more new homes, then we need to look at why we have not realised the ambitions from such projects in the past.
Rachel Maclean
I thank my hon. Friend for that observation. I hesitate to agree with him definitively, because I just do not have the evidence, but I strongly agree with the basic point that we should not reach straight for the chemical solution. We should look at other solutions that are clinically much better for people, including the social prescribing to which he refers.
I could highlight many issues in the Budget that I know would be welcomed in Redditch. I have campaigned long and hard for the Alex hospital and the Conservatives have delivered an £18.8 million operating complex, now open, ensuring that we are making progress in cutting the waiting lists. People can get operations closer to home and can get home quicker, and they can have more lifesaving surgery closer to their homes. I was glad to see the emphasis yesterday on productivity gains in the NHS, as well as pouring in money. Constituents know that healthcare is expensive and valuable. Staff time and public resources must be properly stewarded and not wasted.
Yesterday, there was an unexpected but welcome announcement—a delightful one—by the Chancellor: £5 million to spend in Redditch on cultural projects. That will be massively welcomed in our area, where the arts play a huge part in our local life. I will talk to local and community groups about how we can best use that. We have plenty of potential destinations, including the Palace theatre, Arts in Redditch, our new library complex—also boosted by Government levelling-up funding—and many more.
I am particularly proud of the record of my local council, which is led by Councillor Matt Dormer, who instigated a council house building programme that has delivered 19 council houses. I always appreciate the fact that we need to go further, but that is a significant move because they are the first true council houses built in Redditch for 29 years. For all the years that it was in control, Labour did not build a single council house, even though they are much needed.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)
It is a pleasure to participate in the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton). I have to say that I like her style: I like people who can bring subjects to life and talk with real empathy about the experience of their constituents. I look forward to hearing more of her speeches, but I suspect that we will have a few more ding-dongs than the spirit in which I am addressing her now suggests.
That brings me to the speech from my former hon. Friend, the hon. Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford). He paints a rather Dickensian picture, but that view is not widely shared—certainly not by my constituents, who are not without hope. They recognise that we are going through a challenging period and that it is incumbent on all of us as a nation to put our shoulders to the wheel and get on with it.
The hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), who is no longer in his place, talked about the level of earnings and economic growth today compared with 2007. In 2008, we went through a massive financial crisis that required significant taxpayer intervention, which reminds us that when the taxpayer has to intervene, it does not come for free—there are consequences for the wider economy and everybody in it. Just as having to deal with that financial crisis made us poorer in the long run, so too does fighting a fatal disease and defending freedom against the actions of a dictator.
All those things that we collectively decide to take action on cost the taxpayer—every taxpayer in this nation—and have an impact on our economy, but those are the choices that we make, because they are the responsible and right thing to do. Nothing comes for free; everything has to be paid for by taxpayers. The more tax we take from them, the more we limit their ability to contribute to the economy.
Every Budget is a balance of decisions about how best to support those who need it, of course, and how best to fund our public services, as well as how best to generate the revenue to pay for them. Sometimes, those policies pull in different directions, but we should never forget that all the money that we take from taxpayers is theirs. When we make a change to the pension tax regime, therefore, we are not giving money away to the rich; we are letting them keep more of what they earn, which is the right thing to do. The virtue of that is not only that they keep more of what they earn, but that we incentivise doctors to work for longer and address that capacity within the health service, and we incentivise everyone to work more and contribute to the economic life of the country.
Collectively, we in this place spend an awful lot of time—I say this as somebody who spent their whole career in the public sector, which makes me somewhat unusual on the Conservative Benches—debating public services and how much we should pay public sector workers, because that is what we decide to fund from here. I often think, however, that we take for granted the private sector’s ability to generate the wealth that pays for those services.
That is why yesterday’s Budget was important. Opposition Members can find ways to criticise it, but it focused on the need to tackle inflation, which we all know impoverishes people and kills jobs, so it is right to nip it in the bud. We also know that inflationary pressures are made not here but by global factors, which is why we need to ensure that we are not too short-termist in addressing some of those demands. If we agree to high wage demands for public sector workers, they will fall through to the private sector. Last week, I met a local employer who employs 200 people and, frankly, his business cannot sustain the wage demands he is facing from his employees without making job cuts. That is the reality of the situation. So the more we can do to combat inflation, the more we can restrict the damage it will do to our economy in the long run.
As I said earlier, we really need to champion our private companies and make sure that we are providing the best possible conditions for them to flourish. I want to highlight a few success stories, because I am very proud of the businesses I represent in my constituency, and some of them are great British brands. Not many Members will know that the mayonnaise in their sandwich will have been made in Purfleet in my constituency. If they go to the opera, everything they see on stage will have been made in Thurrock. Every newspaper they buy has come through the port of Tilbury. These are the businesses that really keep our life going. We are looking to the future, too. We have a new investment in Tevva trucks in Tilbury, which is bringing the manufacture of hydrogen-powered trucks to this country.
There is plenty to be hopeful about and plenty to be ambitious about. What we need to do is make sure that we are creating the best possible conditions for our businesses to flourish, to provide high-paid jobs and to generate the wealth of this country. That is what we are going to do on the Government Benches, and everybody will be better off if we succeed.
Income Tax (Charge)
Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Dr Coffey
The clear intention is that this is an extension of six months, because that will take this well beyond the aspect of the national lockdown. I was particularly making the point about monthly payments because I have always been clear that this is about UC continuing on a monthly, rather than one-off, basis, and that would be the preferred approach. I am pleased that the Chancellor has agreed with me on that and on making sure we keep that regular payment uplift for the next six months.
Secondly, we have self-employed people on UC, and in addition to the further help through our self-employment income support scheme we will suspend the minimum income floor for a further three months. That means that hundreds of thousands of people will continue to receive financial support based on their current actual earnings, rather than on the assumed amounts we would normally undertake through the gainfully self-employed test.
Thirdly, the further extensions of the furlough scheme to the end of September represent a huge investment in people, keeping them connected to their current jobs and employers. I urge employers and employees to take full advantage of this additional time of furlough to get ready to return to work, and do the training and refresher courses, so they are ready to hit the ground running as their business fully reopens. Taken together, I believe that these temporary extensions will provide essential support as we move along the road map, restart the economy and transition to our full recovery.
Thanks partly to the extension of the furlough scheme, the OBR is now expecting a better jobs outlook than it was in its November forecast, with unemployment now expected to peak at 6.5% at the end of this year, instead of 7.5%, which was its previous forecast. Although that represents a third of a million fewer people than the OBR previously forecast, I fully recognise that the OBR is still predicting that, sadly, unemployment will rise by a further half a million people compared with now. As we have always said, we cannot, sadly, save every existing job, but my right hon. Friend the Chancellor set out yesterday extraordinary measures of support to help businesses stay in business and to create new jobs. The supercharged super-deduction on capital investment is exactly the kind of initiative that can stimulate businesses to invest here in Britain, leading to brand new jobs.
I am very conscious of what the hon. Member for Oxford East said, which is why we have undertaken significant work across government on our labour market sector plans in working through the opportunities we can create, not only by resurrecting some businesses and sectors that have been temporarily affected by the lockdowns but to bring in new jobs. I particularly commend initiatives such as the freeports, which we know will be creating tens of thousands of extra jobs right around the country. I was delighted that Freeport East was successful, as it covers the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich, one of which is in my constituency. It was a great pleasure to work with businesses across Essex and Suffolk to make that happen, particularly with the creation of a green hydrogen energy hub. That is really important investment that will be coming now thanks to the freeport initiative, and I know that the same will be happening right across the country. I can see people in this Chamber, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price), whose constituents will benefit from her ports coming together to be a freeport.
Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)
Perhaps I could advise the House that this affects not only the ports in my constituency; it is also a partnership with the Ford plant in Dagenham. My right hon. Friend will be aware that there are employment challenges in that borough—it has a very high unemployment rate compared with the rest of London—and the freeport initiative opens up the opportunity for Ford to breathe life back into that site, given the redundant diesel technology that it currently produces. That will attract new investment from a global player. Should that not be welcome?
Dr Coffey
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I know how much of a champion she has been for the people of Thurrock and the surrounding areas in making sure that they have that opportunity. Indeed, there are opportunities right around the country. We will hear contributions later from Members for the north-east, who will be championing, and are delighted by, not only the freeport in Teesside but the Treasury North campus in Darlington. I am sure that the Leader of the Opposition’s campaign director, who is now in the other place, will also be thrilled that Treasury North will be in Darlington.
Right across the country we are laying the platform for businesses to create jobs, and my Department is ready and primed—indeed, we are already delivering—as we put our foot to the floor, our pedal to the metal, on our plan for jobs. Over this year, as our economy starts to recover, my priority, and that of the Government, is getting people back into work, investing in skills and training, and helping people to get up the career ladder and increase their income.
We came into this pandemic with record high employment. That was down to successive Conservative Governments since 2010 focusing on supporting people in moving to and progressing in work, including by reforming the welfare system through universal credit, which is a conservative benefit. Unlike the legacy benefits, whereby people would often be worse off working under tax credits and similar, universal credit is a benefit that always makes sure that work pays.
I am truly astonished that the Opposition continue to want to scrap universal credit, when it has clearly done its job of getting money into people’s pockets within days of their making a claim when newly unemployed, and remembering that 40% of UC recipients are working and it automatically puts extra money into people’s pockets when their hours are reduced, never mind the £20 uplift for covid.
We know that we have a huge task ahead of us, but I am confident that we will deliver, fuelled by the firepower of our plan for jobs. Just as we have had the jabs army putting vaccines into people’s arms, we now have the jobs army of our work coaches, with an extra 13,500 recruited to bolster our support to help get people back into work.
In the jobs market, sadly it is the hopes and prospects of our young people that have been affected more than most. That is why we launched kickstart, a scheme that helps to give young people that first key step on the jobs ladder and offers employers effectively free access to the next generation of talent, as long as they provide an additional real job and job support.
I am concerned that the hon. Member for Oxford East and the Opposition are giving kickstart a bit of a kicking. Instead of slamming it, they should be supporting it. The Chancellor and I launched kickstart in September, the first young people started their jobs in November, and since then I am pleased to be able to share with the House that around 4,000 young people have now started a job, with 30,000 vacancies to be filled in the next month, and there are more in the pipeline. More than 140,000 jobs have already been approved, with agreed funding, which is more than the 105,000 that the future jobs fund of the last Labour Government created over its entire lifetime—and we have achieved it more quickly.
This is not, however, a tit-for-tat on numbers; this is about real people and helping them with their lives, right here, right now. Take Cerys, for example, who is 19 and had sadly lost her job in catering last year. With the help of her work coach, Cerys has started a kickstart job with Northam Care Trust in North Devon as a care worker. In her own words, this has changed her life. With the ongoing interest from employers and our making it even easier for them to join kickstart with direct applications through DWP, I am confident that by the end of this year, we will have helped a quarter of a million young people become kickstarters, setting them up for a great future.
With kickstart getting into the fast lane, the rest of our plan for jobs is also firing on all cylinders. Recognising that some sectors may continue to struggle, we have doubled the number of places on our sector-based work academy programme—SWAP—scheme to 80,000 this coming year. SWAPs help jobseekers to upskill, retrain and find a route into a new sector with a guaranteed interview for a real job. We are also supporting people in their job searches through our job entry targeted support—JETS—scheme and our job-finding support digital offer, which is now operating across Great Britain, helping those who need only light-touch support.
These schemes are working for people in every constituency. Take Marius from north London. He recently lost his job in the hospitality industry after 15 years and was worried about his future prospects. His local jobcentre referred him to a SWAP, and, after completing just a two-week course to build skills and experience, he was offered a job in the care sector.
This summer, as we restart the economy, businesses will get their restart grants, and we will also restart people’s careers. The new £2.9 billion restart scheme will provide intensive help to over 1 million jobseekers who, sadly, have been out of work for over a year. But we are also helping our jobs army with further assistance by considering new tools to help them diagnose people’s skills and help transform their lives. As part of the Budget, we are investing just over £1 million to pilot the use of new innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence tools, to match jobseekers’ skills to vacancies they may not otherwise have considered. Work coaches and test sites will start signposting claimants to these services from August.
Also in this Budget, we have brought forward some measures that we know will help people still on low incomes. In particular, we are bringing forward to next month a measure that will allow universal credit claimants who request a new advance to help them with their budgeting to spread the phasing of that support over 24 months rather than 12. That will allow them to retain, on average, £30 more per month up front. We are also bringing forward a reduction in the maximum amount that can be deducted from a claimant’s standard allowance for debts such as rent or utility bills, from 30% to 25%. We expect that that will allow more than 350,000 families with the highest levels of debt to retain up to £300 extra per year.
On top of these measures, we are going further to help some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in society. We had already agreed to have exemptions on the shared accommodation rate for care leavers and people who have been in homeless hostels from 2023, but I am pleased to say—this is thanks particularly to the Minister for Welfare Delivery, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), who is here in the Chamber today—that we are bringing forward those exemptions by two and a half years, so that we will provide additional housing support for care leavers up to the age of 25, and for younger claimants who have spent at least three months in a homeless hostel, from next month. That will give them the stability and the foundation to take on the opportunities that work can provide, and will provide, to help them build their future.
We have also added a further £59 million of support for local welfare provision, so that the covid winter grant scheme will be extended into the Easter period, helping the most vulnerable families with the cost of food and bills.
My right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury will respond to some of the questions asked by the hon. Member for Oxford East, but it is fair to point out to the House that, among public services, we have already allocated an extra £55 billion of support; we have already initiated, or we are preparing for, the catch-up summer for children; and we will continue to invest in our public services. We are already increasing the number of nurses. We are increasing the number of police officers. I think the public pay uplift is for those people with salaries below £24,000, not the figure to which the hon. Lady referred. We are also making sure that the national living wage rises above inflation from next month.
The hon. Lady also pointed out aspects of statutory sick pay. She will be aware that that is the minimum rate required to be paid by employers; many pay a lot more than that. However, in recognising that universal credit supports people on low incomes, the Department of Health and Social Care introduced the self-isolation payment of £500 in order to help people who need to self-isolate and would otherwise be deprived, perhaps, of a lot more of their usual income. That is a sensible approach that we have taken.
It is important to say that, of course, in order to help control coronavirus infections, we had already changed the rules so that workers could receive statutory sick pay from day one rather than the eighth day of being off work, as well as extending it to people who are self-isolating rather than just sick themselves, so we have already taken measures in that regard to help others. In addition, I think it is an estimated £3 billion of extra support that has gone to local authorities next year to help manage the impact of covid-19 across their services and on their income. Of that, half is non-ring-fenced to ensure that they can adjust to what is needed.
The hon. Lady referred to some of the extra support that will be going in to support towns and other places around the country, with the new town deals that are coming, the community ownership fund—which is particularly interesting—to help communities to buy local assets such as pubs and theatres, and opening up as we get ready for the UK shared prosperity fund. We are already setting the scene with the community renewal funds and the levelling-up funds. I think those measures should be welcome.
Let us not pretend otherwise: as we reflect on 2020 as a wretched year when many people have lost family members, lost friends and lost colleagues, there is no doubt that the British spirit has been tested, but the response has been remarkable and, frankly, typical of the Britain I love. Our focus, with the successful vaccine roll-out, should be on giving hope and confidence to millions of families and businesses that there genuinely is light at the end of the tunnel. While the focus has rightly been on the jabs army, we are mobilising our jobs army to help people to get back into work as we speed towards our recovery.
This Budget builds on what is already one of the most generous and comprehensive economic packages in the world to provide further support and protection. We are ratcheting up our support. We will be super-charging skills. We will rebuild, revitalise and regenerate our economy and level up across the country. I am really looking forward on 21 June to toasting the victory of the vaccine over the virus, when we will get back to normal, building back better and building back fairer, with a brighter future for Britain.
Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)
It was a real pity that the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) was cut off in his prime earlier as he was embarking on a very good defence of our pharmacy sector and its contribution, and I want to associate myself with his comments. There is a real issue with regard to the moneys advanced to pharmacies to deal with the consequences of the pandemic; it now needs to be clawed back and that is going to hit our pharmacists, who have been at the front end of the fight against the pandemic. I just remind Ministers to get together with the NHS to come up with a solution to this. Notwithstanding the fact that pharmacists are independent providers, they are very much part of our NHS and should be treated as part of the NHS family. I hope that the House will indulge me in finishing the hon. Gentleman’s speech off for him.
I commend the Treasury team and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor for the Budget presented yesterday. It has to be said that they were not dealt the best set of cards to start with. As Conservatives, we know that everything has to be paid for by taxpayers, whether they are the taxpayers of today or the taxpayers of tomorrow, and we have to balance our responsibilities to all taxpayers when we make these decisions.
Notwithstanding that, the Budget showed great imagination. It took it on the chin that we need to continue the support until we really can release the restrictions that we are working under. It also laid some foundations to encourage investment—particularly imaginative ones, I would add. In that regard, let me celebrate the fact that the Thames freeport has been given the go-ahead by the Chancellor. Clearly, that will benefit my constituents, but it takes in not just the port of Tilbury but that at London Gateway, the Ford site at Dagenham and what used to be the Petroplus oil refinery in Stanford-le-Hope.
Far from the freeport just displacing activity from elsewhere in the economy, the Ford site and the Petroplus site are redundant industries. Ford manufactures diesel engines for export, and Petroplus, where, clearly, the demand came from petrol-fuelled cars, went into receivership a few years ago. That land is ripe for development, and this is a perfect opportunity to encourage inward investment from overseas to take advantage of the freeport policy. I very much look forward to seeing Ford’s plans to use the Dagenham site, which has been with us for so many decades, to invest in new technology to deliver autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, because that is the future. This very action will do so much to facilitate that and to breathe economic growth into an area of east London that really deserves it.
It has been very tiresome hearing Opposition Members say, “Oh, all the help’s going to Tory-held seats.” I just remind them that Barking and Dagenham are very much not Tory-held seats, and that Tilbury, which I represent, is the poorest of the 100 poorest towns. I am really grateful that this Government are showing faith in Tilbury and making those investments. Let me also say to those on the Opposition Benches that they could have done it when they were in power, but they chose not to. The Government are doing the right thing, and I commend the Budget to the House.