Jobs and Business

Clive Efford Excerpts

Friday 10th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

It is not complacent to acknowledge the extent to which we have serious problems, which is where I started, or to compare the country with economies that are suffering similar problems. For those who are rightly focused on unemployment among young people, the simple truth is that long-term youth unemployment rose by 40% in the boom years when the Labour party was in power. Labour Members are therefore not in a strong position to lecture us on how to deal with it.

We have focused on two policy areas to deal with the problem of youth unemployment. I am most closely involved in the growth of apprenticeships and my colleague, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, will talk about the other. We have all embraced apprenticeships, including, rather belatedly, the Opposition. There is a recognition among employers and young people that it is an excellent model for training. Under this Government, the number of apprenticeship starts has increased by 86%. There were 160,000 last year. There has been a 42% growth in the number of young people starting apprenticeships. We are making reforms that will improve the system further, notably the employer ownership system, under which apprenticeship training will be channelled through employers so that there is the demand for real jobs. We are also introducing a staged approach through traineeships, so that young people have a route into proper training.

A difficult area is that what has kept unemployment down in the UK is the fact that real wages have not risen. Indeed, they have fallen. That was the main focus of attack from the Leader of the Opposition. We need to understand and explain what has happened. The British economy was hit massively by the financial crisis. We are a significantly poorer country than we were before that time, although we are now recovering. The impact of that has been felt predominantly through the reduction of wages in real terms.

We are trying to mitigate that impact in two major ways. The first is by lifting low earners out of tax, which increases their disposal income even though their pre-tax income may have fallen. The effect of that is that people on the minimum wage are paying half the income tax that they paid before we embarked on that reform. We have also taken 2.7 million out of income tax altogether. Secondly, and this is my direct responsibility, we have ignored the advice from some quarters to abandon the minimum wage or to dilute it. I have followed the advice of the Low Pay Commission on the minimum wage.

One of the points that the Leader of the Opposition made in his speech—

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Vince Cable]

I will finish my point and then take the intervention.

The Leader of the Opposition pointed to the apparently low level of enforcement of the minimum wage and the limited number of prosecutions. That worried me at the time, so I checked the history. I discovered that in the last four years of the Labour Government, the number of prosecutions under this flagship policy was two a year. We have therefore maintained a rather similar practice.

I have asked for an interview with the head of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, who is responsible for prosecutions, to establish why the level is so low, because this is a perfectly legitimate issue. I have discovered that a large number of companies are being pursued under civil proceedings, where the maximum penalty is £5,000 a year. The matter is therefore being enforced assiduously, but not through the criminal system. I will establish why we are not doing that and whether we should be doing more to underpin the rights of some of the lowest-paid people in society.

[Clive Efford]

The right hon. Gentleman has anticipated the point that I was going to make, which was about the alarmingly low level of prosecutions for not paying the national minimum wage. Is most of the enforcement not taking place through trade union activity?

[Vince Cable]

I am sure that the trade unions play a part in bringing this matter to the attention of the authorities. Every complaint is investigated. Some come from the trade unions and I welcome the role that they play.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rushanara Ali]

The hon. Gentleman’s Government should apologise for their failure to reverse the increase. Child poverty in my constituency has gone up consecutively in the past three years. He ought to apologise for that and he ought to act. He should have lobbied his Government to propose measures in this Queen’s Speech to tackle child poverty. He ought to apologise and I give him the opportunity to do so today.

[Clive Efford]

I am reading the conclusion of the Institute for Fiscal Studies report into child poverty, and it states that relative child poverty is projected to be 6% higher, reversing the fall in relative poverty between 2000 and 2010-11.

[Rushanara Ali]

What can I say to my hon. Friend but, “Well said”? I wish the Minister would take these issues more seriously. Instead of tackling the substantive problem of child poverty, his colleagues in the Treasury have decided to redefine it. As with many things the Government are doing, they find it is easier to meddle with the figures and interfere with the statistics—rewrite them, even. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is not in his place. He has just had his wrists slapped once again by the Office for National Statistics for meddling with the statistics.

The Government should rebuild trust with the British people by coming clean on these issues. They should not try to rewrite the figures, but actually do something about child poverty, an issue that is of great concern to families and to all people. Doing so would address the point, made by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), that the Conservative party is not just in the business of pretending to change on these substantial issues. We live in hope, although there is not much of that left.

The Government’s approach to child poverty and the response of the Minister highlight how out of touch they are. If he and his colleagues cannot understand the seriousness of falling living standards and rising levels of child poverty—to name but two issues—and what they mean for ordinary people’s lives, I cannot understand how we are to trust them to get us out of the economic mess that they have put us in over the past three years. It is their mess: they need to clean it up and they have categorically failed to do so.