Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I strongly welcome the focus in the Gracious Speech on jobs, skills, progression and careers. Since 2012, at the peak of unemployment, we had something of a jobs miracle before the start of the pandemic as a result of the creativity of British business, the favourable investment conditions, our flexible labour markets and our effective labour market policies. Now our focus, quite rightly, is on keeping people in jobs, as far as possible, and helping those out of work to return as soon as possible. To call the most recent projections from the Monetary Policy Committee encouraging would be something of an understatement: they are really quite dramatic if they can be realised. All the support that has had to be put in place to make that possible has obviously been very expensive, but it looks as though the record will come to show that that investment will have paid off fiscally as well as in reducing the human cost on individuals, families and firms.

Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), I hope that we will soon be able to return to our 0.7 % commitment, not only for the reasons he rightly set out, but also in terms of our shared prosperity as a world because of the effect that co-ordinated ODA can have on areas such as improving health outcomes, reducing conflict and general economic development.

Despite the good projections we have seen, we are not out of this yet. We are rightly especially focused on youth unemployment because of its potential scarring effect, and I very much welcome programmes such as kickstart. However, as we look beyond the very short term, we should reflect that the one problem we never cracked in the jobs miracle, despite the great growth, was productivity. The productivity problem did not just exist in the 2010s, or under Tony Blair, or under Margaret Thatcher; we have had a yawning productivity gap against the United States, Germany and France since before I was born. Academics used to talk about a low skills, low wage equilibrium, although we do not hear so much about that now: firms design jobs around the skills that they think are available, and then there is little incentive for individuals to upskill because there are not the jobs available for them to upskill into. We need to break that cycle, and I am confident, with the momentum from this programme, that that can be done.

There have been important reforms such as universal credit, with progression at its heart and removing things like the 16-hour rule, as well as the national living wage, the apprenticeship levy and the growth of high value-added industries, and the plan for growth can help in that, but we need to ensure that growth and opportunity are evenly spread. We have significant challenges to address. Some 11 million adults in England have missed out on A-levels or their equivalent, and a much lower proportion of people reach what is called in the technical jargon levels 4 and 5, which are the higher-level technical qualifications—people not going on to do a degree, but doing those qualifications that can be worth so much.

There is so much change going on in the world, with, for instance, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and voice computing. Any one of these things on their own could constitute an industrial revolution, but right now they are all happening together, and on top of that we have the opportunities and changes that come from leaving the European Union, what we have to do around the net-zero ambition and then of course the new challenges that we face as a result of this pandemic.

I am therefore pleased that skills and investment in human capital are at the heart of this approach. Quality standards and intensiveness of courses were already being addressed through steps like apprenticeship reform, the creation of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education and the institution of T-levels, and I am pleased that that is going to be taken further with a statutory role for employers in the design of qualifications and in the skills accelerators. I also very much welcome the bold plan to significantly reform student finance, which up until now has been very much centred on traditional three-year, away-from-home undergraduate degrees, by making it much more flexible and enabling people to do things in manageable chunks so as to work with their careers and to do more learning from where they live.

We clearly need to go further and build on all of this, and although we are of course focused on young people we must not forget older people: whenever there is a slowdown, there is always the danger that people leave the labour market earlier than they would otherwise have done. We can do more on returnships and helping people get back into the labour market. Sometimes a short, intensive type of training is all that is required, and I would finally just reflect from my time as an Employment Minister and also when we were doing the national retraining scheme that what we heard most in terms of the things that hold people back was not some specific skill but confidence, and helping people through that journey has to be at the heart of what we do.