Compulsory Jobs Guarantee

Gordon Birtwistle Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Yes, it is appalling that the councillor is unhappy about the idea that more people are getting work in my hon. Friend’s constituency. The reason why she takes that attitude, I think, is that Labour wants only to be elected. The Opposition do not care about anyone else. They would rather tell bad news to get elected than have a success that they could trumpet. Perhaps that is the real point.

Ninety per cent. of all young people in Wales move off JSA within nine months, so at £6,000 a place, the alleged success that is being trumpeted is nothing like the value for money that the right hon. Member for East Ham mentioned earlier.

[Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)]

In Burnley in 2009 we were classed as a basket case—a town that was going nowhere, or going down. That was at the time that the future jobs fund was happening. Last year we were cited as the most enterprising town in the UK. We have doubled the number of apprenticeships to 4,300 and the number of young people out of work has gone down by 47%. Surely that is the right way to go, not to force people into work that they do not want to do.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

May I say to my hon. Friend—I repeat, my hon. Friend—what an excellent job he has done in championing his constituency? He is right—it is about getting private sector businesses to create real jobs for young people and older workers to go into.

I want to deal in some detail with the jobs guarantee versus the future jobs fund. A Labour press release that I saw in 2014 extolled the Opposition’s pet project as

“building on the success of the Future Jobs Fund”.

The right hon. Member for East Ham carried on the Labour line. I hope that was noted back at headquarters. He is clearly to be trusted through the election, and I give him a lot of support for that.

As for the claimed success of the future jobs fund, the DWP analysis that I quoted earlier is important. It was commissioned under Labour and was subjected to extensive peer review by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which, as I said earlier, found that not only was the fund estimated to result in a net cost to the Exchequer but that, as I pointed out, the future jobs fund was not estimated to benefit the Exchequer at any stage, and the Exchequer would not be able to get back the money that it had spent on the programme.

By contrast, as the hon. Member for Ealing North said, young people want work experience. I remember that early on, when I first went into jobcentres, I was accosted by young people who said that the problem for them was that at job interviews they were asked whether they had job experience, and when they said they had none, they were told that they could not be given a job without work experience, but their response was that they could not get work experience without a job.

Under the previous Government, people were allowed only two weeks’ work experience before they were expected back at the jobcentre. What we did instead was to allow them up to two months’ work experience in a business, and an extra month if they were offered a job or an apprenticeship. So, by contrast, work experience under this Government—this is the interesting point—has achieved the same success rate at least as the future jobs fund achieved, but at a twentieth of the cost—£325 per place as opposed to £6,500 per place. Another difference is that the vast majority of positions under the work experience programme are in the private sector, whereas I can think of hardly any private sector companies that offered jobs under the future jobs fund. It is a success versus a costly failure.