Business of the House

Christopher Pincher Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I understand my hon. Friend’s concern, and I was delighted to hear about what happened. We are putting more resources into apprenticeships and the enterprise allowance scheme. We have made a change this week to the amount of time young people can spend on work experience without losing access to benefits and we are introducing the new Work programme. I hope that we can reduce the large number of young unemployed that we inherited from Labour and encourage them to become entrepreneurs.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend ask the Chancellor to make a statement on deficit reduction, which would give the House an opportunity to hear what progress is being made? It would also give the shadow Chancellor an opportunity to clarify his Bloomberg speech and state clearly whether he remains a deficit denier.

[Sir George Young]

It is very important that we establish whether the shadow Chancellor is on the same wavelength as his leader on deficit reduction. On that point, I was interested to see that the former Chancellor under the last regime said that the key to getting growth in the long term is first to get the deficit down. That is not exactly what the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday.