Youth Unemployment

Anne Begg Excerpts

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. In a recession private sector jobs are thin on the ground. Anything that keeps young people closer to the labour market, closer to the habits of work and closer to the disciplines of having a job must be a good thing. The lesson from the 1980s, when youth unemployment spiralled to 26%, is that if we let young people get too far away from the habits of work, they are scarred for generations to come.

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

When we looked into the future jobs fund in the Select Committee, it became clear that everyone who had experience of it, as a young person in a placement or as an employer, viewed it as a real job that lasted for six months, with a real wage, and was closer to the workplace than anything that could be offered by work experience. That is why it was successful. None of the providers had a bad word to say about it. They thought it was a very good scheme.

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend, who chairs the Work and Pensions Committee, makes an important intervention. I hope her comments allow us to strike a note of consensus.

My final point is about the long-term costs. In all recessions and in all recoveries, it is our young people who face the toughest challenge. That is especially true of the fight that young women in our country now confront. Overwhelmingly, they are working in the public sector. Overwhelmingly, it is they who are exposed to the cuts and the redundancies that have been announced, which now number around 156,000. We must remember the lesson of the 1980s. When youth unemployment was allowed to soar, and allowed to fester for years, communities were damaged for generations. As the Cabinet Office’s former chief economist put it this week:

“If the Government doesn’t act it will not only damage the employment prospects of young people now but hurt them for the rest of their lives”.

The motion that we have tabled asks that the Government look again at the lessons of the future jobs fund, be ambitious about the programme that they put in place, and ensure that they learn the lessons from the 1980s. We fear that a generation is being lost to the clumsy behaviour of the present Administration, so I call on the Government this afternoon to think again, to preserve the promise that this country should make to its young people, to reconsider the action that they are taking to ensure that our children will do better and better than us, and to think again before we confront once again a lost generation.

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[Chris Grayling]

Does the hon. Gentleman honestly think that businesses in his constituency would have been better off with a 1 percentage point jobs tax rise, as the previous Administration planned? That would have caused more of an increase in unemployment than anything else the Government could have done.

The right hon. Member made one point, however, which is absolutely right and with which we absolutely agree. Youth unemployment is a major problem for our society and one that absolutely must be tackled. The failure to tackle youth unemployment with schemes that work contributes so much to many other issues that we have to deal with on streets and in neighbourhoods throughout the country.

Endemic worklessness is underpinned by an ever more complex benefits system that traps people in unemployment. Inter-generational poverty is fuelled by welfare dependency, involving generation after generation of people who have not worked. There is a lack of aspiration, especially among young people who lack role models in a country where almost 2 million children are growing up in workless households. Worst of all, the young people who escape welfare dependency and poverty will still carry the economic scars of unemployment for years afterwards, in terms of lower wages and future employment gaps. That is the harsh reality of Labour’s legacy for our young people.

[Dame Anne Begg]

I worry about the either/or in the Minister’s equation. He says that the answer is either apprenticeships or the future jobs fund, but it should be both, because the young people who go into apprenticeships are not the same cohort who suffer the inter-generational worklessness to which he refers. They need extra support, and that is where the future jobs fund has been very, very effective.

[Chris Grayling]

I accept the principle but do not agree with the detail of what the hon. Lady says. I shall come on to discuss the Work programme and how I aim to use it to deal with the problem that she rightly highlights.

Opposition Members should remember that over the years they made lots of promises about apprenticeships but consistently under-performed on them. Our job is to make sure we do not do that.

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[Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)]

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate on youth unemployment. As I am sure all hon. Members know, youth unemployment is a huge problem that needs to be tackled. We should try to avoid playing politics on such an issue, but, sadly, the motion serves to make a party political point.

The future jobs fund is currently part of the policy, but the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) seems to think that it is the be-all and end-all, and a utopian solution to the problem of youth unemployment. He does not take into account the fact that it is part of an overall policy to tackle the huge problem of getting our young people into the labour market on a sustainable footing—I emphasise the word “sustainable”.

In proposing the motion, the Labour party is creating a smokescreen—it is a red herring—to disguise the many years of failure to tackle youth unemployment. One in five young people is out of work, nearly 1 million are unemployed, and 600,000 who left education under the previous Government are yet to find work. That record of abject failure and that legacy leave little room for the Labour party to lecture the Government who are trying to sort those problems out, having taken on the worst public finances in living memory.

The future jobs fund was, I am sure, beneficial to some young people, but was it cost-effective and sustainable? Did it lead to permanent and sustainable employment for our young people? The evidence tells us that it did not.

[Dame Anne Begg]

As an employer, would the hon. Gentleman employ the person with two weeks’ work experience on their CV or the person with six months’ of work?

[Mr Jones]

It is incumbent on the Government to offer not short-term help but long-term sustainable help for young people. It is important for this Government to make sure that we create a culture in which our young people are ready for work, not force them into short-term work to try to prove themselves to employers. Our youngsters must be ready for work.

The evidence tells us that the future jobs fund was twice as expensive as an apprenticeship. In some places, particularly Birmingham, only 3% of jobs were in the private sector and in most instances very few permanent jobs were created. Most young people, however, are looking for permanent jobs. A grandmother who came to my surgery a few weeks ago wanted her grandson to have a sustainable, long-term future.

I would also like to explore the job market and the culture behind it, which is very important. Throughout Government policy, we must promote the idea of getting our young people into employment and it must be a priority across Departments to reduce the barriers that prevent young people from getting work and take down the barriers that prevent employers from taking young people on, because such barriers do exist.

We also need to look at aspiration, which is acknowledged, particularly by head teachers, as a problem in my constituency. On a number of recent visits to schools, I was told that many of their young people have two aspirations: one is to become a footballer and the other is to become a pop star. My lifelong knowledge of my constituency tells me that during my lifetime we have probably bred three or four people who have become professional footballers and made a living from the sport.