Jobs and Growth

Gordon Marsden Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

One reason why there has been such a negative reaction to the Queen’s Speech, particularly from business, now that we are again in the midst of recession is the absence of measures to boost growth. There was a particularly exasperated reaction from the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) quoted at the beginning of the debate, straightforwardly accusing the Government of playing short-term politics instead of boosting the economy. A lot of people thought there would be a boost to the economy in this Queen’s Speech, but it simply was not there. The problem is that the Government’s policy has not delivered. We were told after the election that the policy being introduced would deliver a steady and sustained economic recovery with low inflation and falling unemployment. Unfortunately, that simply has not happened. The shadow Chancellor and the former Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), warned that the policy put the recovery at risk. They have been proved right and Ministers have been proved wrong.

There are other reasons for the Government’s dramatic loss of popularity, one of which is a sort of policy incoherence across government, with different Departments going in contradictory directions. Let me give an example: people receive tax credits only if they work more than a certain number of hours. The previous Government set the threshold at 16 hours per week, but the Minister who is winding up the debate has announced that when universal credit is introduced in October next year there will be no hours thresholds. Support will be available only for people working very few hours, and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has perfectly fairly presented that as one of the virtues of his new system. However, the Chancellor, who opened the debate, has gone in the opposite direction. He has raised the threshold from 16 hours to 24 hours a week and more than 200,000 households have lost out. They cannot both be right, although one of them might be. The announcement from the Department for Work and Pensions goes in the opposite direction to the Treasury’s. No. 10 ought to have spotted that and sorted it out. People see that incoherence across government.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, made some telling observations about the Work programme. We know remarkably little about what is happening in that programme because the Government have banned Work programme providers from publishing any data. When under pressure in January, the Minister with responsibility for employment promised guidance to allow them to publish, which they want to do. When he was pressed again he said that the guidance would appear by the end of April, but we are now in the middle of May and it still has not appeared, so providers in the Work programme have no way of comparing their performance with that of others. My right hon. Friend said that she could not find out what was happening in her constituency and every other MP is in the same boat. Jobcentre managers have no idea what is happening in the Work programme in their area, and the effectiveness of the Work programme is being weakened as a result.

This week, a very good charity working with homeless people, St Mungo’s, has resigned from the Work programme. It had three separate contracts with three Work programme prime providers, but in the 11 months since the Work programme started the charity has not had a single individual referred to it by any of those three prime providers.

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

I am listening with great interest to my right hon. Friend, not least because I have heard similar things in my constituency, not just about the voluntary sector but about experienced private providers. Does he think it is time that the Government started doing a proper job for the third sector? They want to involve it in the big society, but they are cutting its legs off.

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Step one would be to allow the data to be published. Instead of banning everybody from saying what is happening, the Government should let us have some numbers so that we can see what is going on. That would offer the chance for clarification.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

The Government have done little to promote jobs and growth for towns such as Blackpool. They scrapped the regional development agency, which helped us to renew our tramway and our key visitor attractions, including the tower and the Winter Gardens. They also scrapped the area-based grants that targeted our pockets of severe deprivation.

The Government seem incapable of understanding the challenges faced by Blackpool and other second-tier towns, particularly in seaside and coastal areas. They have done no strategic targeting of the regional growth fund by industrial sector, which was highlighted by David Marlow, who has said:

“Blackpool has not yet had a distinctive RGF success despite benefit and public sector ratios 80% and 60% above national averages, and private sector ratios at about 65% and 25% below average.”

Any narrow focus on city regions risks ignoring surrounding areas. We suffer from imbalances not only between regions, but within them. We need growth in second-tier towns and cities, seaside and coastal towns, and suburban areas.

Just what are the Government delivering on the ground for young people in terms of jobs and growth? I have seen first hand the positive impact the education maintenance allowance had in encouraging young people in Blackpool to go to colleges, where we have struggled to improve our skills levels. Given our pockets of extreme deprivation, that assistance was vital, but it is now gone, along with opportunities for thousands of young people from my sixth-form college and Blackpool and the Fylde college, which were jeopardised at one stroke of a pen in the Department for Education, the same Department that cut off the dedicated money—£200 million—available to schools for careers advice.

Yesterday’s unemployment figures also illustrate that that problem is not budging. In my constituency, one in 10 of the active population is out of work, including more than one in five young people, which is 8% higher than this time last year. Those figures disguise the work shortfall for young people and key groups such as women, a point strongly made by my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) earlier in the week. Thirty-four thousand women nationally gave up work altogether in the last quarter.

The previous Government had imaginative schemes such as the future jobs fund, through which Blackpool football club, which will battle for premier league status again at Wembley this Saturday, gave young people real opportunities. The Deputy Prime Minister’s belated youth contract promised to create half a million new job opportunities for young people, but we have seen no indication of it in Blackpool yet. If his figures are as reliable as the ones so recently demolished by the National Audit Office, I will not hold my breath.

This story is not just about statistics, but about individuals’ blocked hopes and frustrations. Wherever I talked to young people—not just in Blackpool, but in places such as Crawley, Reading and Milton Keynes, which I visited during the local election campaigns—I have found that they are in “it” together: they are in the mire, north and south, thanks to our Chancellor.

What about our small businesses, which are critical to our economic recovery and prevalent in my constituency? The Government have talked a good game, but my case work shows that many small businesses are being let down by the banks. When will the Government tell the banks to give support rather than telling people to stop whingeing?

We need proper activity on VAT, but we are not getting it, not on tourism and regeneration, or on repairs and renewals. The Government believe not in active and intelligent government but in scapegoat Britain. They scapegoat everybody except themselves, but their growth and jobs policies have failed.