Employers

Douglas Lumsden Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Sandher]

I want to start there. I disagree with the Conservatives’ motion. It effectively says that if we cut national insurance contributions, good jobs will follow. The first thing to note is that, yes, we did raise national insurance contributions in our first Budget, and there are a million more people in work today. The second thing to note is that the Conservatives’ mistaken moral aims would lead to poorer material ends. They are googling; they are finding out the difference between the pay-as-you-earn measure of employment and the Office for National Statistics measure of employment.

There is something else on which I disagree with the Conservatives. I read the document entitled “The Right Way”, which they produced before their conference. It effectively said that if the Government just step away and create the right conditions, businesses will create the prosperity and good jobs that we need. We have seen that this has not worked. Post-industrial areas are still post-industrial. We saw the Government step away in the 1980s, and we saw those areas remain poor over time. In places like Middlesbrough, the employment rate is 20 percentage points lower than the national average. For non-graduate men, the employment rate is down by about 20 percentage points, too.

[Douglas Lumsden (Aberdeen South) (Con)]

The hon. Member is talking about deindustrialisation; it is happening right now in my constituency, because we are turning our back on the oil and gas industry. We are not approving Rosebank, when we should. It is an absolute disgrace that the Labour Government are killing off jobs right across north-east Scotland.

[Dr Sandher]

I think about 90% of jobs in the oil and gas industry have disappeared over the past 20 or 30 years, including 150,000 in Aberdeen. That is basically because the North sea is a declining basin; we cannot change geological facts. As the hon. Member will know, the Rosebank decision is a quasi-judicial one that will be made by the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.

I come back to the fact that in the 1980s, the Conservatives said, “If you just cut taxes, good times will follow,” but they did not follow for huge numbers of people and huge areas of this country. We also see the legacy of the Conservative Governments from 2010 to 2024: in the past few years, there have been 250,000 more young people not in education, employment or training; areas have not recovered; and there has been the longest wage stagnation since Napoleon’s time.

We have seen the outcomes of the Conservatives’ philosophy. They had 14 years in government, and it was not a success. We did not see good jobs across this nation, because there was not the means or materials for them, or a foundation of prosperity. There were not the skills; the number of apprenticeship starts for young people was down by a third. The population was not healthy; we had the longest waiting lists on record. There was not enough transport infrastructure—ours was the worst in western Europe—and energy costs were the highest in the G7. That was the legacy of your Government, because the only thing Conservative Members have ever believed—