Job Insecurity

David Rutley Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

Indeed, and to be fair to the shadow Secretary of State, he did acknowledge that job insecurity—particularly zero-hours contracts—was not particular to our period in office but was a long-term trend.

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

The Secretary of State makes an important point about the focus being on private sector, not public sector jobs, which is an important development, especially for the north-west, where my constituency is situated. Under the previous Government, far too many jobs—tens of thousands—were created in the public sector, which crowded out jobs and had a detrimental impact on the private sector. Will he confirm that this Government are putting the focus on private sector job creation, encouraging people to become first-time entrepreneurs and, through things such as the employment allowance, enabling them to become first-time employers as well?

[Vince Cable]

The so-called crowding-out problem might well be an issue, if we run into problems of labour shortage, and indeed we are running into serious vacancies in some parts of the economy, so that might be a highly relevant consideration.

The rapid results service behind me has produced an answer on the number of hours worked. Apparently, in the last quarter, 969 million hours were worked, which was a 2.5% increase on the year.