Job Insecurity

Chris Williamson Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)]

I am delighted to respond to the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) and I appreciate that, as he acknowledged at the beginning of his remarks, he has a problem because trying to manufacture an Opposition day debate on the economy is difficult when it is now growing rapidly.

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Vince Cable]

Give me some time and I will happily take interventions. I am always generous with interventions and I will wait until a suitable point and give way to the hon. Gentleman.

The danger the hon. Member for Streatham faces is that of creating a cliché such as “triple-dip recession” or “no more boom and bust” that then proves to be positively cringeworthy when the situation changes. Labour’s slogan is now the “cost of living crisis”, and at first sight that is a plausible line of attack because, as I have always acknowledged, real wages fell in the wake of the financial crisis, the country is poorer and the consequences have been painful. The hon. Gentleman buttressed his argument by quoting from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that this painful process is likely to go on until the end of next year. That was what it said until quite recently, but I do not know whether he has seen its report today, which states that the cost of living crisis is to turn around this year. Inflation is now falling so rapidly and the economy recovering so quickly that it expects that turnaround to happen by the middle of the year. I fear that the “cost of living crisis” may be another to go in to the museum of clichés.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vince Cable]

That is correct. I was merely referring to the point at which things start to turn around and improve. The IFS, like everyone else, underestimated the strength and speed of the recovery. Of course, its forecasts, like everyone else’s, may have to be revised upwards.

I have been responding to debates from my current position for the best part of four years, and I have seen the Opposition’s jobs argument go through four or five iterations. When we first started, the argument from the Opposition was that the attempt to deal with the fiscal crisis would result in mass unemployment. That now looks positively silly today, but if they go back to their speeches in 2010, that was their prediction. We now have the highest level of employment ever—30 million. We have 1.3 million more people in employment than in 2010. The jobless—unemployed—total has fallen not just in relative terms, but in absolute terms by 650,000 to 7.1 %. Of course, there are regional variations. I accept that there are particularly serious problems in the north-east, which is the only part of the UK that has double-digit unemployment.

It is worth contrasting the overall picture with some other countries that had a far less serious experience of the financial crisis than we did. Sweden has 8% unemployment. The unemployment rate in Canada, which everybody thinks is a wonderful economy—we recruited our central banker from there—is higher than in the UK. In the eurozone, even including Germany and Austria, it is 12%. Our unemployment position is significantly better than that of most other western countries.

[Chris Williamson]

Will the Secretary of State at least acknowledge that the degree of underemployment is masking the real problem in the economy? If those people were put in full-time equivalent posts, the number of unemployed people would be a much bigger picture, would it not?

[Vince Cable]

I am going to come on to underemployment and part-time employment shortly, because it is a legitimate concern. Obviously, there are people who took part-time jobs in the depth of the recession who now want full-time work—of course that is true. What the hon. Gentleman might not be aware of is that in the past year the number of people in part-time employment has actually fallen in absolute terms by 7,000, and that the number of people in full-time employment has risen by 475,000. There was an issue relating to part-time jobs in the depth of the recession. It was understandable that people took part-time jobs in a very difficult situation, but over the last year the position has changed dramatically. Building an argument around part-time employment is now of historic interest, not contemporary interest.