Youth Unemployment and Bank Bonuses

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. That is why, as part of Labour’s five-point plan for jobs and growth, we include a national insurance holiday for all small businesses taking on new workers—a policy that would help small businesses and the more than 1 million young people who are desperately searching for work.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady accept responsibility for the failure to skill up our young people to take on jobs? For example, after the Labour party’s 13 years in office, we had the smallest proportion of 16 to 18-year-olds studying maths of any OECD country.

[Rachel Reeves]

People are not getting jobs at the moment not because they do not have skills but because the jobs are not available. In all our constituencies, five or 10 people are chasing every job. That is why unemployment is rising. Until the Government take responsibility for that, the numbers will get worse, not better.

The price that families struggling with the consequences of redundancy and young people forced to abandon their career plans pay is incalculable. We cannot go on like that. Maybe some hon. Members—we have already heard from many of them—greet the prospect of rising unemployment with a degree of fatalism, perhaps resignation. They may feel that the punishment being inflicted on innocent families and young people is the sad but inevitable consequence of austerity and economic adjustment. Indeed, as I said earlier, there is a grim familiarity about the figures, which bear a depressing resemblance to the record of previous Conservative Governments.