Youth Unemployment

Debate between Albert Owen and Maria Miller

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

I will not, if the hon. Lady will forgive me, because we are very short of time.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) talked about the importance of employability, which did not always come through in Opposition Members’ contributions. She outlined the importance of recognising the need to localise support for young people and, in particular, to involve local employers in imaginative thinking to try to unlock the potential of our youth. That theme was echoed by my hon. Friends the Members for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) and for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), both of whom bring important experience to the debate as employers. My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North talked about the importance of permanent and sustainable jobs and about Labour’s failure to deliver a long-term, sustainable strategy for youth unemployment. By focusing on that broader element of the debate, he brought in the perspective of the employer.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire talked about the productivity gap that we see all too often in the market, a skills gap that the previous Government simply did not address, and the importance of education in ensuring that young people are skilled up for the future job market. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) made an important point in the debate, as did Opposition Members later, about the importance of ensuring that the most vulnerable get the support they need to get into employment. I can assure her that, through my work as the Minister with responsibility for disabled people, and by pressing forward with Work Choice, we will ensure that the Work programme is supplemented by particularly specialist support in that area.

The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark), who is no longer in her place, made some important points on apprenticeships. Indeed, I think she said that she would have liked her party to have gone further on apprenticeships. I can assure her that where Labour did not go, we will go. I hope that she will support us in that.

[Albert Owen]

Will the Minister give way?

[Maria Miller]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not give way, because we have a lot to get through.

It is important to use apprenticeships in the public sector to transfer skills into the private sector. At the heart of the debate—this is the point that Labour Members were trying to bring out—is the role of the future jobs fund. We heard an impassioned speech from the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), who made sure that the House listened to his contribution, but I must set one or two of his facts straight. He asserted many points in his contribution, some of which have already been refuted by colleagues. Just to make sure that he is clear, the coalition Government did not abolish the future jobs fund; 75,000 people have started on a future jobs fund job, and that figure will rise to more than 100,000 in the coming weeks. We have honoured all future jobs fund commitments. I hope that reassures the hon. Gentleman: we will make sure that young people in his constituency continue to receive the support to which he referred.

The hon. Members for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) and for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) raised a number of issues, particularly on the importance of inter-generational worklessness—something that Government Members feel was not tackled properly under 13 years of Labour. On the importance of re-establishing the culture of work, I am sure that their constituents would not support a scheme—the future jobs fund—that leaves half the young people whom it was designed to support on benefits seven months after they started on it. That is not the sort of success that anybody would like to see for young people today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) could not have put it better: it feels today as if Labour has been trying to create a smokescreen to hide its true record of failure. Today, we have heard again about Labour’s legacy of failure: a failure to tackle the root causes of youth unemployment, with the number of people in youth unemployment when they left office 270,000 higher than when they entered, and a legacy that they tried to fix with a catalogue of short-termist schemes that seemed to owe more to managing unemployment figures and creating headlines than to trying to provide for the long-term futures of the young people whom we represent.

Let us be clear: the future jobs fund has not delivered, and it does not deliver the long-term opportunities that we, as constituency Members, want. The undeniable fact is that about half of those who went into the future jobs fund were back in the unemployment queues seven months later. The right hon. Member for East Ham called for action, and that is exactly what the coalition Government are delivering. In contrast to Labour, we are focusing on long-term skills.