Jobs and Work

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

There are few issues of more primary importance to our constituents’ lives and our wider economic health than jobs and work. After the deepest recession for a century, the economy, however tentatively, is improving. The news today of another fall in unemployment should be welcomed across the House. I am especially pleased to see the highest level of women’s employment in Scotland since records began. I am also pleased to note a further fall in unemployment in Banff and Buchan.

Nevertheless, employment is still not back to its pre-recession levels. We should all be concerned about some of the significant challenges lurking beneath the surface figures. The first of these is youth unemployment, which remains unacceptably high. I came of age in the 1980s, when mass unemployment left a generation of school leavers languishing on the dole. I remember how that was not only soul destroying for the individuals affected, but destructive of our whole social fabric. Unfortunately, I see the same mistakes and oversights being repeated before our eyes. Youth unemployment is still around 18% across the UK. The economy is recovering and employment is growing in the wider labour market, but young people are not seeing the benefits.

The scale of the problem and its potentially long-term consequences should shake the Government out of any sense of complacency. In Scotland, the modern apprenticeships scheme has meant that 77,000 new apprentices have had an opportunity over the past three years, and the follow-up shows that 92% of them remain in work six months after completion, the vast majority of it full-time. Additionally, the opportunities for all scheme has offered a training position, a work placement or an educational place for every single 16 to 19-year-old in Scotland.

However, from 2014 a new programme of EU funds becomes available to enable member states to deliver a youth guarantee that would offer those opportunities to any young person up to the age of 24. These additional resources would enable the extension of the opportunities for all scheme to other young adults. I would be keen to know what use the Government intend to make of that funding so that all our young citizens can benefit from the EU youth guarantee.

It is clear, however, that we still have an awful lot of work to do. The interim report of the Commission for Developing Scotland’s Young Workforce, chaired by Sir Ian Wood, highlighted the need for schools, colleges and employers to work much more closely together to equip young people for the workplace and to ensure that vocational education meets their needs and those of the labour market. The report also highlighted the need to tackle inequalities, whether the barriers faced by disabled youngsters and minority ethnic groups or the chronic cross-cutting inequality associated with occupational gender segregation.

In my constituency I have seen a lot of good practice, for example in the North East Scotland college in Fraserburgh, which is working with local employers and schools to create pathways for young people into work. Only a couple of weeks ago I presented prizes to pupils from Mintlaw academy who won this year’s Technology Challenge, a competition run by the college, sponsored by several energy and manufacturing companies and involving second-year pupils from schools across northern Aberdeenshire. The competition is a model of good practice because it involves all the pupils in the early years of secondary school, before they make their subject choices, with a view to making them aware of the excellent career opportunities open to those with qualifications in science, technology, engineering and maths. Importantly, the competition insists on the equal participation of girls.

That leads me neatly on to the other key issue I want to address today: the persistent gap between male and female earnings, even 40 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970. Occupational gender segregation continues to be a problem, and too many women are in low-paid, part-time or insecure work. I do not think that anyone would pretend that these problems are easy to resolve, but I would like to have seen the Government attempt to make more headway. As I have said before in the House, the austerity measures of the past few years have fallen wholly disproportionately on women, to a large extent because women are more likely to have caring roles, to be in part-time or low-paid work and to be in receipt of tax credits.

The availability of affordable child care is an acute issue for parents combining work with family life, but we have seen only this week how parents are falling foul of the Department for Work and Pensions’ new sanctions regime, which is making it impossible for some parents to meet their family commitments. This is carers week and it is also important to acknowledge the role that carers play in providing social care and the impact that has on their employment prospects.

It has become a truism of political discourse to say that work is the route out of poverty—indeed, the Prime Minister said it twice this afternoon. Of course, at the most obvious level, well-paid, full-time work is a route out of poverty, but over recent decades rapidly increasing wage inequality has meant the rise of the working poor. For those in minimum-wage jobs who are unable to secure full-time hours, in-work poverty has become a new reality. We are in a situation in which a family with two children, paying average rent, with both parents working full time in low-paid jobs, will be a family on the breadline. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, those in the lowest paid jobs would be over £600 a year better off. We need to acknowledge that the minimum wage is no longer a living wage and that it needs to catch up with the cost of living.

Meeting these substantial challenges requires strategic interventions and a willingness to try innovative approaches, so I am disappointed that the Gracious Speech failed to address youth unemployment—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.