Youth Unemployment

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I would expect the OECD to express concern about youth unemployment. Youth unemployment is a serious issue, which is why we are having this debate. We do not think the Government’s plan is adequate to deal with the problem. That is why youth unemployment is not falling at present, but is going up, which is what this morning’s figures said.

Youth unemployment in the final period of Labour’s time in office, which was also a time of economic difficulty, fell by 67,000 or about 9%. Now all of that hard work has been undone. Since we left office, youth unemployment has not continued to fall. It has not even held steady; it has gone up and up and up. We cut youth unemployment even in the face of the economic storm, yet the current Government have failed to do so even with the winds of recovery at their back. They have watched it rise while the economy is growing. That takes some doing.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend recall that two years ago during the passage of the Education and Skills Bill, we sought to extend the school leaving and training age from 16 to 18 but Members now on the Government Benches opposed that? How did that help youth unemployment at that time?

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend is right to raise that question, which underlines the dilemma so many young people now confront. With this morning’s numbers now on the public record, it is clear that young people face a summer of anxiety. If they do not make the grades to get into college—and we know the number of college places is now more limited—they will face a labour market that is tougher than ever. That is a worry for them and their families, and for older residents in this country who, having worked hard all their life, are now concerned about who will pay for the future.

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[Chris Grayling]

I happen to think that youth unemployment is a significant issue and would rather retain for a few months a programme that is underperforming while we prepare something better than do nothing at all. The right hon. Gentleman seems to think that we are doing nothing at all, but the truth is that we are doing just the opposite. It was his party that did nothing at all for a long period of time.

Let us deal with the argument about the future jobs fund once and for all. It costs around £6,500 per start—net of benefit savings, just under £6,000. That is far more expensive than Labour’s other programme for young people, the new deal for young people, which costs around £3,500 per job, and several times more expensive than other elements of the young person’s guarantee. It is twice as expensive as an apprenticeship, which I happen to think is of much greater value. Even when we net off all benefit savings, the future jobs fund is still much more expensive than any other option that the previous Administration put in place, and it did not work.

Colleagues may disagree, but to me a future job is one that lasts and on which a young person can build a career and sustain an opportunity for a lifetime. The future jobs fund did, and does, create temporary short-term placements, mostly through the public sector, where young people did not end up getting the kind of sustained work experience and training leading to a long-term career. The grants that funded the future jobs fund included no incentives whatever to move people into permanent jobs.

[Mr Lammy]

The Minister mentioned apprenticeships, and of course the whole House will know that there is an ambitious target to deliver 50,000 apprenticeships over the next year. We are now eight months in, so can he tell us how many new apprenticeships have been delivered?

[Chris Grayling]

The latest information I have received from my colleagues in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, who are responsible for this, is that apprenticeship vacancies are currently over-subscribed by both employers and employees. We are making good progress towards delivering on that target and will obviously publish full figures in due course. I am confident that we are making inroads in the apprenticeship market and creating opportunities for young people that will last a lifetime, not just six months.

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[Chris Grayling]

We fund a certain number of apprenticeships, and there are 50,000 extra this year. They are being filled at the moment, as we speak. We will fund 50,000 extra apprenticeships this year and 75,000 extra throughout the course of the comprehensive spending review. A few days ago BIS set out a clear goal to increase the number of apprenticeships in this country to 350,000. We have been in office for nine months; the Labour party was in office for 13 years, and it consistently under-delivered on apprenticeships throughout those 13 years.

[Mr Lammy]

The Minister has been extraordinarily generous in giving way, and I am very grateful, but he has not been able to tell the House how many apprenticeships he has delivered in the past nine months. I set up the graduate talent pool, which involved internships for graduates. Alongside the internships that were offered at the Conservative party event recently, how many internships have been delivered for our graduates in the past nine months?

[Chris Grayling]

Let me tell the right hon. Gentleman what we are doing to get young people into the workplace for the first time.

One of the first things I received on entering government was an e-mail from the mother of a young woman who had arranged a month’s work experience for herself but been told by Jobcentre Plus that she could not do it, because the rules, which the previous Administration put in place, prevented her from doing so. We have therefore changed things.

We now encourage work experience. Through Jobcentre Plus, we will actively find work experience for young people, without their losing their benefits, and give them the opportunity to solve the age-old problem whereby, if someone cannot get the experience, they do not get the job, but, if they do not get the job, they cannot get the experience.

We have also strengthened volunteering opportunities for young people, and we will have Prince’s Trust representation in every job centre, so that we can steer young people towards voluntary work and take advantages of the trust’s skills to help unemployed young people.

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is collective amnesia among those on the Labour Benches. One of the things they have also conveniently forgotten, which was revealed by one of their number, the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, is that over the course of those years nearly 4 million new jobs were created in this country, the vast majority of which went to people coming to the UK from overseas. The Labour Government completely failed to make a serious inroad into the nearly 5 million people on benefits, or to get British people into what was once described as the goal of the previous Prime Minister—British jobs for British workers.

[Mr Lammy]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Grayling]

No, I have given way enough, and I am going to make progress. [Interruption.] When Labour Members have some useful contributions to make, I might give way again.

We now need to talk about what we are going to do about this. The Work programme, which we will introduce this summer, will, I hope, go a significant way towards dealing with some of the problems to which the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) referred. We have huge challenges in the labour market, with young people who face huge difficulties in their backgrounds. For them, the Work programme will deliver specialist intervention after just three months in the dole queue—much earlier than it has ever been done before. It will be a revolution in back-to-work support in Britain. It will provide a level of personalised support that we have not seen before, because in order to survive in a payment-by-results regime, the providers will need to cater for the individual. It is the kind of revolution we have needed for years—the kind that was promised in Labour rhetoric but never delivered.

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[Jenny Willott (Cardiff Central) (LD)]

It is worrying how many young people are unemployed at the moment. We can bandy figures around all day, but the figure that sticks with me is that one in five young people between 16 and 24 is out of work. That is a worrying—indeed, horrifying—statistic, and is a tragedy for every one of them, and for their families and the communities around them too. However, when we look more deeply it becomes clear that this situation is, in part, the Labour legacy, as has been mentioned over and over today. The number of people who have been unemployed for more than 12 months has increased. This Government have not yet been in power for more than 12 months, so we are clearly dealing with a legacy left by the last Labour Government. As a result of Labour messing up the economy, the Government are having to deal with a serious financial mess and the unemployment that goes alongside that.

People have talked about complacency about the youth unemployment figures. I have not seen complacency on either side of the House today—clearly people are seriously concerned—but if Labour Members were that concerned, they could have done significantly more when they were in office, rather than leaving a lot of young people on the shelf. Labour could have done more in power to ensure that people had the opportunities that they needed.

[Mr Lammy]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Jenny Willott]

I will not give way. Everyone will have the chance to speak later if they wish.

As has been mentioned, unemployment among young people has gradually increased since 2002, and that was during the good times, so clearly in the bad times it will not be easy to get people back into work. It is now even harder for the new Government to get them into work, as they have already been out of work for longer, and we know that the longer people have been out of work and the further they are from the jobs market, the more effort, money and time it takes to get them back into work. However, the problem is that the future jobs fund was not working. It was created to ease youth unemployment and make the figures look better; it was not established to create long-term sustainable jobs. Opposition Members have mentioned that many times, but it is not that public sector jobs are not real jobs—of course they are—but rather, that the jobs created for the future jobs fund were not real jobs. They were short-term, six-month placements created for the purpose of the fund; they were not jobs that were sustainable in the long run. That has been borne out by the initial information on what people have done after being placed by the future jobs fund. About 50% of people were back on working-age benefits after seven months—one month after finishing their placement. Of those in a comparable group who found work through other programmes or found work for themselves, only 35% were back on jobseeker’s allowance after seven months. Clearly, the future jobs fund has not been working. It is performing less well than the other programmes that the previous Government put in place.