Youth Unemployment

Baroness Clark of Kilwinning Excerpts

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate and to speak in favour of the motion, which is far from narrow. It goes much further than simply criticising the cancellation of the future jobs fund, which would have created 200,000 jobs. The motion states clearly our belief

“that the Government’s economic policies have slowed economic growth, raised youth unemployment and created the highest graduate unemployment for over a decade”.

It is in that context that we need to have this debate. As Members from all parts of the House have said, youth unemployment is a significant problem in this country at this time. Given the economic figures that we are seeing, particularly the most recent growth figures indicating that the economy is shrinking and the revised figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility showing that levels of growth are projected to reduce, it is incredibly important to have this debate.

It is unfortunate that the future jobs fund and apprenticeships are being counterposed. The number of apprenticeships created by the previous Labour Government has been mentioned, and I would have liked Labour to have done even more on that. I hope that this Government will set about an ambitious apprenticeships scheme, but we have not seen it yet. I assure the Government that if they do so, they will get the full support of Labour Members, because we fully recognise the value of apprenticeships in both the public sector and the private sector.

My constituency has a strong tradition of public sector apprenticeships in engineering and in organisations such as the Ministry of Defence. Individuals have been trained in the public sector and have worked in it for a number of years, and have then gone on to work in other parts of industry and in the private sector. We want to encourage these apprenticeships and we want the Government to take this on board. Labour Members wish to see policies that will develop our industrial and manufacturing sector, that will support apprenticeships and that will do everything possible to create employment in the private sector. That is particularly important in constituencies such as mine, which faces a significant problem of unemployment, particularly youth unemployment.

My part of the world traditionally had a strong industrial and manufacturing sector, but those manufacturing jobs have gone over the course of many decades. In the 1970s, 17,000 people were employed by ICI at Ardeer in my constituency; 7,000 or 8,000 jobs went in the 1980s at the Glengarnock steel mill; and even when I was at school in the 1980s some 10,000 miners worked at the Killoch pit in south Ayrshire. So I come from a part of the world that has a strong and proud industrial past, but which has been devastated. The manufacturing base is now comparatively weak and we are dependent on the public sector to replace the jobs we had, so the 500,000 public sector jobs cut that the Government are proposing will have a disproportionate impact on areas such as mine.

My constituency has probably the worst youth unemployment problem in Scotland. The statistics show that 20% of our young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are receiving benefits, which is the highest level in Scotland, and that 14.7% of our 18 to 24-year-olds are claiming jobseeker’s allowance.

So it is very fair to say that the part of the world that I represent faces significant challenges, and it is the duty of any Government to create policies that address those challenges and create the economic environment that will ensure that young people are able to get employment. There has been a significant increase in the number of young people in my constituency going into further and higher education over the past 20 years, which is to be welcomed. However, further and higher education is not necessarily the best choice for every young person. It may be something to consider at a later stage, but well-paid employment that gives hope for the future is the best option for some young people.

We have heard tragic stories today of young people who are unable to get jobs, and we know from experience that it takes many decades to recover from a period of high unemployment. All sorts of social problems are associated with high levels of unemployment and youth unemployment, and we spend many hours debating how to grapple with those. Such problems include crime, and drug and alcohol misuse, and they arise when we have the kinds of poverty that are associated with unemployment. Many of the benefit changes being proposed by this Government will disproportionately affect the unemployed, particularly the long-term unemployed. I am thinking of policies such as reducing housing benefit for those who are unemployed for 12 months or more— there are more and more of those people. The number of 18 to 24-year-olds in Scotland claiming jobseeker’s allowance for six months or more has risen by 119% in the past two years, and the number of these people out of work for 12 months or more has risen by 349%. So we face significant challenges.

We have heard criticism of the future jobs fund today, but all the feedback I have received in my constituency, both from people using the fund and from those placing people on to it, has been very positive. The motion calls for an independent evaluation of the fund. We need that to be done, because the future jobs fund is one of the few schemes that is delivering for young people. We need to do everything we can to give young people political priority, so I think it is a tragedy that the scheme is being cancelled. I call on this Government to do more. They should not only support the future jobs fund, but take other steps to give young people the future they deserve. I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for letting me contribute to this debate.