Jobs and Growth

Anas Sarwar Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central) (Lab)]

Like thousands of my constituents, I am deeply disappointed that after taking us back into recession this Government have failed to come forward with a substantive plan in the Queen’s Speech to get the economy back on track. In the fourth quarter of 2011, growth dropped to minus 0.3%, and to minus 0.2% in the first quarter of this year. Long-term youth unemployment has risen by a shocking 264% in the last year alone. What might be described as an embarrassment by the Chancellor is a tragedy for families up and down the country. Nothing announced by the Government in the Chancellor’s Budget and certainly nothing in the Queen’s Speech will address the problems that hard-working families face across the country.

We all know that business lending is a vital part of any healthy economy. That is why the Opposition wanted the Government to tackle what the Business Secretary himself described as a “yawning mismatch” between the demands of small business for finance and the banks’ reluctance to lend. Instead, we got a small sticking plaster to cover a massive business funding gap that is estimated to reach £150 billion by 2016.

We have a coalition Government who have completely the wrong priorities. They are more interested in papering over coalition cracks than getting Britain back into work. Instead of helping hard-pressed families and small business owners, the Government decided in the Budget to give a tax cut to those earning more than five times the average salary.

I was disappointed not to see any mention in the Budget or the Queen’s Speech of families struggling with the rising cost of child care, which is higher in Scotland than anywhere else in the UK. It is no surprise that 10% more women are in employment in countries such as Norway and Denmark, where parents have access to affordable child care, than in the UK.

I was even more disappointed to see nothing in the Budget about supporting disabled people into work, following the Government’s shocking decision to close the majority of Remploy factories. According to the Government’s own figures, about 500,000 disabled people will lose their benefit entitlement when the disability living allowance is replaced by the new personal independence payment. Case studies conducted under the Government’s consultation on the PIP suggest that blind and visually impaired people who are judged to have adapted to their disability will not qualify for the higher rate. That ignores the reality that the difficulties, the barriers and, most importantly, the costs continue regardless of the length of time a person has lived with sight loss.

I urge the Prime Minister to look for inspiration to my home city of Glasgow, where the Labour council that was re-elected last week with a commanding majority —a feat that is almost impossible under a proportional representation voting system—has managed to lower unemployment in the past year in the face of this Government’s economic failures and the Scottish Government’s swingeing cuts. In Glasgow, people voted for a manifesto that put investment in jobs, growth and education first. They voted for the £25 million investment in the Glasgow guarantee, a programme that will use the Commonwealth jobs fund, the Commonwealth apprenticeship scheme and the Commonwealth graduate fund to create a lasting legacy of employment from Glasgow’s proud hosting of the Commonwealth games in 2014.

The people of Glasgow rejected the scorched earth policy of mass austerity and the imagined magic wand of separation in favour of investment to create jobs—investment such as that proposed by my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor in our five-point plan. We want to see the establishment of a state-owned British investment bank, similar to the bank for small and medium-sized enterprises that John Longworth, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, has been calling for, to help businesses to create the jobs that our country needs. We also want to see a jobs Bill that would ensure that money raised from a tax on bank bonuses was used to provide real jobs, with real wages and responsibilities, for more than 100,000 young people aged 18 to 24.

We have an out-of-touch Government at Westminster who are repeating the mistakes of the 1980s and a distracted Government at Holyrood who are concerned more about a separation referendum than about the real issues affecting the lives of ordinary Scots, and people up and down the country can see right through them. That is why we saw the elections results that we did last week.