Employment: Job Creation

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I am very happy to accept the correction.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

As the Minister said, we do not have precise international comparisons on job creation, but we are doing okay on the number of jobs. However, is not productivity also very important? On average, we have lagged behind the French by 20% over the last 20 years. Does the Minister agree that the answer is to invest more in people and lifelong learning? If he agrees, can he tell me what the Government will do about it?

[Lord Freud]

An economist would reply that the way to get more productivity out of people is to put more capital in and raise the quality of people’s input. It is clearly a long-standing issue that we have lower productivity than other major countries; the comparisons are often with the US and Germany. However, there is something about the structure of our service-based economy that means the comparisons are not necessarily what they seem to be. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that one of the major challenges of this economy is to get our productivity up.