Employment

Lord McFall of Alcluith Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

We are most concerned that people should be able to work as much as they want to. We are creating a new system to allow that, supporting people as they progress, in universal credit, into full-time work. We have extensive in-work progression trials right round the country, to find ways in which we can most effectively support people to work the amount that they want to and get the earnings that they need.

[Lord McFall of Alcluith (Lab)]

My Lords, in a speech in April this year the Chancellor was explicit in committing the Conservatives to the concept of full employment, and in a contradictory echo of a previous Conservative Chancellor said that unemployment was a price not worth paying. Can the Minister inform me what the Chancellor meant by “full employment”? Did he have a particular equilibrium unemployment target in mind, or was it just an empty rhetorical gesture to fit the occasion?

[Lord Freud]

As the noble Lord knows, that is an extraordinarily complicated economic question. The Chancellor has clarified that the target around full employment is a better employment rate than other countries are seeing. We are currently not far off the full employment rate, at 73%, that we have seen in the past.