Employment

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann]

When Labour was in power, it did not increase the national minimum wage to the national living wage, and pay is increasing rapidly. There has been a 3% increase in average earnings, the fastest rate for many years.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that the great success this Government have had in creating new jobs goes wider than simply the economy? Does she also agree that rising employment is the only permanent way to tackle poverty, that it is the best way to keep families together, and that there is a distinctive, powerful and important moral reason for continuing this Government’s successful economic policies?

[Baroness Altmann]

I certainly agree with that. The Government are on the road to achieving their target of full employment. The employment rate is at a record high, and there are nearly 740,000 vacancies in the economy, which is much higher than before the recession. We therefore have a record to be proud of in this regard.

Employment

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the trouble with Labour plans in this area is that they are extraordinarily expensive. The Future Jobs Fund, on which some of them are based, cost 20 times what Work Experience costs—and that produces just as good results. We cannot afford to have these artificial job creation schemes: we want real jobs in the real economy, and I am pleased to say that we now have the highest level of private sector employment that we have ever had.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

May I take this opportunity to apologise to noble colleagues on the Labour Benches, because a little while ago, on the subject of unemployment, I suggested that Labour Governments always end office with unemployment higher than when they went in? Is my noble friend aware that, according to the Office for National Statistics, since the war every Labour period of government has indeed ended with more people out of work? Is he further aware that those same statistics show that every Conservative Government have ended their period of office with more people in work? May I apologise to those on the Labour Benches for not having made that point clear enough in the first place?

[Lord Freud]

I am very pleased to answer my noble friend’s question. I was aware of those figures, and they underline the point: it is how you run the economy effectively that drives the employment figures, not how you manipulate those figures later with odd schemes.

Employment: Universal Jobmatch

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am pleased to say that I do know and can reconfirm what I said last week; I can actually amplify it. We are currently investigating about 17 sites for potentially being in breach of our terms and conditions. That does not mean that they are fraudulent; it just means that they may have mistakes in them, they may be duplicates, they may be from job boards, or there may not be a contract with the end user. That is what we mean by being not in compliance with our terms and conditions.

Universal Jobmatch is a very successful system. We are working closely with Monster and the contract runs to 2016. To the extent that there may be some misunderstanding and misrepresentation, the phrase “extend a contract” has a precise meaning: that you run a contract to a certain point, and do not go on extending but renew. We have a policy to work closely with Monster right up to 2016.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

Will my noble friend clear up some confusion? Every Labour Government there have ever been have promised to reduce unemployment —of course, because they believe in doing it. Yet every Labour Government there have ever been, from Ramsay MacDonald through Clement Attlee—if my noble friend will forgive me—Wilson, Callaghan and of course Blair and Brown, have left office with unemployment higher than when they came in. Does my noble friend think that there is anything on the website that might explain why that is?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, to run a successful economy you need to make sure that you do not run it into the ground. I am very pleased to say that with today’s figures the employment rate, if you exclude full-time students, is now running at the same high level it peaked at before the crash. Therefore we have managed to put the right structural changes in place to get employment up to as high a level as it has ever been.

Unemployment: Youth Unemployment

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am counting inactive people in the figures I am using, which are the best ones available. Clearly, under the previous Government many people were put in government training schemes and were not counted. We can play with numbers as much as we like but I am not playing with numbers—I am giving a very clear, long-term run of the most important set of figures on how we handle the structural problem of youth exclusion from the labour market.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, it is said that on a clear day some people in this Palace can see as far as Croydon. Will the Minister raise the sights of this House and get it to look as far, perhaps, as Greece or Italy, where the promise that unemployment could be solved by huge amounts of public debt has led not only to disaster but almost to despair? Does he accept that burying a future generation of our children in huge public debt is not only inept and does not solve the problem but, frankly, is immoral?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, my noble friend underlines our problem in his question. We have got to get this economy out of the mire of running a deficit of more than £100 billion every year so that it is rebalanced and we are economically self-sufficient within this generation. If we are not and we go on borrowing to the extent that we can, the people who pick up that tab will not just be our children but our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. That is not something we should want to leave to future generations.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Richardson of Calow]

My Lords, it is my understanding that what same-sex couples are asking for is not permission from the state to enter into loving, committed, lifelong relationships but the recognition by the state that the relationships they have entered into, or will enter into, are equally valid in bringing stability to society and in being a right and proper place for the upbringing of the children they take into their families. Therefore, anything other than marriage, which we have all said is the bedrock of our society and should be the basis for the ongoing upbringing of children, will not do.

[Lord Dobbs]

My Lords, I feel deeply unhappy to be divided on this matter from so many of my traditional friends on these Benches, but divided I am. Many of these amendments seem to rely on an understanding of the word “marriage”. In many of them we get down to defining the term. A “traditional marriage” is said to be,

“the voluntary union of one man and one woman for life, to the exclusion of all others”.

That is stated in several of the amendments that we are discussing. We need to look at definition to see what it means.

I will start with,

“to the exclusion of all others”.

Surely the bar is set too high for most mortals, including even the clergy and—dare I say it?—royal princes. The failure to keep to such a high trajectory does not destroy the meaning of marriage, and should not destroy the purpose of the Bill.

We are told that traditional marriage should be for life. Again, sadly, this is not so. We do our best. We promise and intend to be married for ever, but divorce is no longer a matter of public shame, although I hope it is a matter of much private regret.

Therefore, all that seems to be left of the definition is that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Traditionally that has been indisputably true. How could it have been otherwise? Until very recently, homosexuality was punished by the full force of the law: incarceration, a criminal record, chemical castration in many cases, and almost total social exclusion. Of course marriage traditionally was between a man and a woman.

However, the definition does not hold water. There is no satisfactory definition in the amendments of traditional marriage. Going back in time, we find that marriage was about inheritance, power, social standing and securing property rights. Those with no power or little social standing did it to make it easier to have sex—let us be honest. It is only in our lifetimes that marriage has been broadly based on love and any sense of equality between a man and a woman. Even today, there are still many exceptions to that rule.

Marriage has always changed its foundations. It evolves and will continue to do so. I have considerable sympathy for many of the values that lie behind the amendments. For instance, we have all suffered for too long from the intolerance exemplified in political correctness. However, with the greatest respect to many of my colleagues, we cannot base a piece of legislation on a concept of traditional marriage that has no enforceable meaning.