The Economy

Debate between Lord Harrington of Watford and Richard Graham

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Harrington]

Just to correct the hon. Gentleman, some of the tube fares for areas outside London are set by the owner of the stations, London Midland, rather than by Transport for London. I know that he did not mean to mislead us on that point.

The shadow Minister claimed that working people are worse off today than they were under the magical mystery tour of the previous Labour Government. I am not sure where that claim comes from, but I imagine that he, like the shadow Chancellor, bases his statistics on the retail prices index, comparing it to wages, which most credible economic sources no longer use as an indicator because it does not include the huge increase in the personal allowance and tax cuts of £700 per person.

To get back to reality, when somebody who has been unemployed for a long time, or indeed who has never worked, gets a job, it will not necessarily be a highly paid one. If the hon. Gentleman accepted my invitation to come to Watford, he could visit the local jobcentre—he might be hoping that I will be enrolling there next May—and see that long-term unemployment has fallen by 44% and youth unemployment has halved. Nobody could say that those working people are worse off than they were before 2010.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about getting people back into work and about youth unemployment, which has also been halved in Gloucester. Does he agree that the rise of apprenticeships provides an important opportunity for young people to develop skills sets that will enable them to have a bright future? There are 5,000 new apprentices in Gloucester, and I have no doubt there are many more in Watford.

[Richard Harrington]

Indeed there are. I totally agree with my hon. Friend and am fully aware of all the work he has done on apprenticeships in his constituency.

When I started running jobs fairs in Watford in 2010—I hope that the shadow Minister is listening—70% of the 2,500 people who came were unemployed and were looking for a job; the others were already employed but were looking for a better job. Last year, 70% of the 4,000 people who came were already in employment and were looking for a better job. To take a Watfordian lesson from that, those people’s real wages will go up in the normal progress of things, now that, as a result of the long-term economic plan, the economy is beginning to move and people are getting back into employment.

The Opposition have set a national minimum wage target of £8 an hour by 2020. Perhaps I have misunderstood —I hope the shadow Minister will explain when he winds up the debate—but on current trends the national minimum wage will be more than £8.10 by 2020 anyway. I do not think he is pledging to cut the national minimum wage in 2020 if he is in government. I recently met Julia Unwin of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and John Cridland, a former member of the Low Pay Commission, and in fact, they seemed to think that Governments planning to set a minimum wage target is exactly against what the Low Pay Commission does. When they explained to me how they calculate what the minimum wage should be, after negotiations with employers and all the different interested parties, they said that they really wanted the calculation to be taken outside of politics and that they were quite worried about the shadow ministerial team’s proposal.

I wish I had time to go through each point in this rather lengthy motion, but as my time will be up in five minutes—and, indeed, as there is an election in five months—I do not think that I have time to do the task justice. I will instead focus the rest of my remarks on some key points. The real raising people’s wages is not done directly by the Government. Governments do not set wages in quite the way the Opposition imply. What really matters is making available the types of jobs that people are trained to do.

One Government policy that has not been mentioned today, but which I think is directly relevant to the debate, is the founding of the university technical colleges, one of which was recently opened in Watford. The good thing about the UTCs is that half the curriculum is set and designed by local employers, so jobs are available in those fields. Hopefully, the children graduating from those schools—it is early days yet—in addition to getting the more formal academic qualifications, will be halfway into a job and not on the ground floor, because they will already have had years of training. In Watford’s case it would be in tourism and events management—Hilton Hotels is very much behind this—or in IT. They will not just be leaving school, looking for a job and getting in at the bottom.

I hope we all accept that the real problem is the skills shortage, which has been a problem since the second world war, if not before, so it has not been caused by a particular Government. The Education Act 1944 tried to do something about that, but it never seemed to happen. The UTCs might seem a small step, but they are an important way in which more children can get into the right kind of employment from an early age. I realise, of course, that on its own, that really is not enough.

The real way to raise living standards is by having long-term stability and confidence in the economy. It might seem strange to hear me quote Bill Clinton. I do not think he has been to Watford, but if he happens to pick up Hansard and see my offer to the shadow Minister, I would be happy to make exactly the same offer to him—it is just off the M1. [Interruption.] Indeed, Mr Clinton probably has not been to Nottingham either. His speech to the Democratic party’s 2012 national convention in Chicago is one of the best political speeches I have ever heard, apart from the Minister’s response to the shadow Minister today. He said—you will be delighted to hear that I will not attempt an American accent, Madam Deputy Speaker—something along these lines: “So let me get this clear. You all agree that the last guys screwed it up. You may think that the current guys have made slower progress than you had hoped and have not done all the things they said they would do. It hasn’t happened as quickly as they wanted it to. So the answer is to bring back the guys who screwed it up, right?” That thought, for me and my constituents, is a very important one.

We go from Bill Clinton in Chicago to the shadow Minister in Nottingham. If both of them had been to Watford and seen the reduction in long-term unemployment, the doubling of apprenticeships and the 400 new businesses that have been created since 2010, they might both have cause to pause for thought. I hope that will be borne in mind when the Opposition wind up the debate.