Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Snowden Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

I have heard the hon. Gentleman’s comment and will raise it with the responsible Minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, but it is important that all pensioners who are entitled to support get it. That is what the Government are focused on.

[Mr Andrew Snowden (Fylde) (Con)]

3. What assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of recent trends in the unemployment rate.

[The Minister for Employment (Alison McGovern)]

Thanks to the dreadful inheritance left to us by the Tory Government, we need to raise productivity, reduce economic inactivity, increase employment rates and drive up economic growth. Our “Get Britain Working” plan sets out how we will progress our ambition of an 80% employment rate, which would place the UK among the highest-performing countries in the world.

[Mr Snowden]

There was some lovely wording in that answer, but the Government appear to be doing absolutely the opposite. Following the Budget, it appears that there is not a week that goes by without another employer announcing significant job cuts. Reed recruitment has already announced that job postings are plummeting. What will the Government do to support the Minister’s Department in the situation it will find itself in—a rapidly increasing number of people looking for jobs and a rapidly decreasing number of jobs being posted because of the Government’s policies?

[Alison McGovern]

I am glad the hon. Gentleman is bothered by the employment rate and I hope he is bothered by the record of his party, which saw employment fall off a cliff after the pandemic and never recover. We were an outlier in that; it did not happen anywhere else in the world. As it is, our jobcentres, which, as we have said, are full of brilliant staff, see just one in six employers ever consider using them to recruit. We will change that. We have a new strategy. The Secretary of State recently announced our plan to ensure that the Department of Work and Pensions serves businesses and that we get the best jobs into jobcentres so that people can take them up, improve their lives and grow our economy.