Oral Answers to Questions

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the need to ensure that much greater emphasis is placed on vocational education in schools, including to get people ready for apprenticeships. The Government have done a huge amount towards that. There are 1 million new apprenticeships. The report that came out when we first arrived said that there had to be a greater emphasis on that. None the less, our youth unemployment rate is remarkable when compared with the average in Europe and, apart from Germany and Holland, is significantly lower than anywhere else.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

In May 2010, the claimant count in my constituency was 1,702. This month, it is 684. In a European context, will my right hon. Friend help me? Is that fall in unemployment in my constituency due to the increased vibrancy of a diversified rural economy such as mine, or the absence of a plan long terme économique elsewhere?

Pensions and Benefits Uprating

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

The House is not clear whether the hon. Gentleman is saying that we should spend more or less on welfare. As far as I could tell, he was arguing for both at the same time.

The hon. Gentleman referred to a failed economic policy. Is that an economy that is growing faster than any other developed economy in the western world, and an economy in which unemployment has fallen for 24 consecutive months? If that is failure, I am not sure what success looks like.

The hon. Gentleman asked about getting to grips with underlying economic issues. Worklessness is, of course, the most fundamental underlying economic problem, and worklessness is down substantially on 2010. Unemployment is down. Full-time and part-time work are up. Those are the things that helped us to announce yesterday that welfare spending is lower than had previously been forecast.

The hon. Gentleman mocked the term “over-indexing”, which means putting something up by more than one is legally obliged to. We have done that for the poorest pensioners. I am not sure whether he opposes or supports that, but I can tell the House one thing: we have looked at what the Opposition would have done had they been in our position and had put the state pension up in line with their announced policy. We assume their policy would have been RPI until 2012 and earnings thereafter, as that is what their manifesto said. We have discovered that had Labour been in office the state pension would now be £7 a week lower than the coalition is paying. I do not think we have any questions to answer from the Opposition.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

As a former Minister for people with disabilities, I welcome the protection given to the benefits that my right hon. Friend has announced this morning. It is an object lesson in the fact that it is only a strong economy that can provide that degree of protection, in stark contrast to what we saw before. Will he say from the Dispatch Box whether is he confident that the degree of protection offered by the Chancellor is likely to continue in the future if the Government are returned in due course?

[Steve Webb]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. He is right that our ability to afford the substantial increases in the state pension in particular depends on a sound economic strategy. He will know that what we have been seeking to do is make sure that we have both a strong economy and a fair society, as delivered through this statement today. In terms of what happens post-2015, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has indicated that he wants to see the triple lock continued and I certainly want to see it continued. Indeed, I would like to see it as the law of the land after the next election.

Jobs and Business

Alistair Burt Excerpts

Friday 10th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) has just spoken about talking the economy down. I know it was three years ago, which seems a long time, but we need to remind people of who in 2010 was talking this country’s economy down—it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer and this coalition Government. They expressed the ridiculous notion that without the draconian cuts that they brought in, which the Business Secretary said earlier they now recognised were a mistake, we would end up with an economy like that of Greece. We heard the nonsense, which was repeated by the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock, about the fact that we had the largest debt in the developed world.

Let us look at the facts. In 1997 the Labour Government inherited a debt to GDP ratio of 42%. At the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 that had been reduced to 35%, so irrespective of the Prime Minister’s claim in opposition that we were not mending the roof while the sun was shining, that is exactly what we were doing, which left us in a strong position to weather that financial crisis. The deficit that we inherited in 1997 was 3.9%. That was nearly halved by 2008 to 2.1%. The hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock throws around figures suggesting that we had the largest debt. In cash terms, yes, but for the millionaires in the House— I do not know whether there are any in the Chamber today, although there are plenty in the Front-Bench team of the Conservative party—

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Alistair Burt)]

Not guilty.

[Mr Jones]

I accept that.

If one looks at the debt of a millionaire in cash terms, of course it will be larger than that of someone who is earning the minimum wage. To compare the size of the UK economy to that of Greece takes no account of that.

We need to recognise who talked the economy down and who took the disastrous decision in those early days to take demand out of the economy. We were growing, as the shadow Business Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), rightly said. That destructive early cut, along with talking the economy down, sucked confidence out of the economy. Getting that confidence back is very difficult. Clearly, many people, and certainly those in my constituency, are very cautious about what they are spending.

Let us have this debate based on the facts. I accept that we in the Labour party missed a trick. We were self-obsessed for nearly six months as we selected a new leader of the party, so we did not rebut the nonsense that was put out at the time.

The Business Secretary said, strangely, that the Queen’s Speech is not the mechanism for getting the economy going. I find that remarkable. This is a lost opportunity. The Queen’s Speech was so thin on substance that it could be marketed by WeightWatchers. There is nothing in it that will help the 20% of young people who are in long-term unemployment. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) spoke about a lost decade. That is so, and we need to remind the House that that has consequences for individuals. The 20% who are now unemployed—and their number is increasing—will have their lives affected for ever. We must recognise the human cost behind the statistics. The problem will not be solved for those individuals in the short term and will have long-term implications for constituents such as mine and those of my hon. Friend that will need to be addressed in the long term.