Jobs and Work

Gordon Marsden Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

No, I want to make some more progress—[Interruption.] I have been quite generous in giving way.

Countless other colleagues have talked about opportunities for young people. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) has drawn attention to the lack of apprenticeship opportunities for people in her constituency. Under-19 apprenticeship starts have fallen by 17,000 over the last academic year, and there are now 2,000 fewer under-19s starting apprenticeships than in 2009-10, and less than 2% of apprenticeship starts last year were at level 4 or above. Where was the Bill in this Queen’s Speech to require all large companies taking on large Government contracts to provide apprenticeships, as we called for? It was not there. Where was the requirement for all apprenticeships to last at least two years and to be at level 3 or above to ensure we maintain their quality? It was not there. We need to see more done on that.

It is important to help those who want to get into work through jobs and training, but it is also important to help those who want to create their own jobs, and they will not be able to do that without the finance. We are told that the small business Bill will make it easier for small businesses to access finance. I really hope so, because in the last year, net lending to small and medium-sized businesses fell by £3.2 billion. Scheme after scheme after scheme—from Project Merlin to funding for lending—has simply failed to resolve these problems. In the last quarter, net lending to businesses by funding for lending participants actually fell by £700 million—an issue on which I know my hon. Friends the Members for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) and for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) have been campaigning.

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

Let me inform my hon. Friend that what I hear in my Blackpool surgeries, particularly from small businesses and hoteliers, about the continued failure of a number of banks, including those still supported by this Government, underlines what he is saying. Does that not also underline the fact that we should be looking at the regional initiatives on banks that he and his colleagues have brought forward rather than having the long-standing dithering from the Secretary of State on the whole question of the investment bank?

[Mr Umunna]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The problem with the Government’s scheme is that, to date, the main transmission mechanism to our small businesses has been the very high street banks that have been the problem. That is why we want to set up not only a British investment bank, but a network of regional banks like the Sparkassen in Germany, to ensure that we get the money to our small businesses.

Finance is one thing, but cash flow is an issue too. If, as we are told, the Government are to extend the obligation for public sector bodies to pay small businesses as their suppliers within 30 days and to apply it all the way down the supply chain, that would be welcome, but on its own it will not be sufficient. We will press Ministers to introduce—I think this will be in the small business Bill—more stringent reporting requirements for customers of small businesses to crack down on those who do not pay on time. I think that the practice of late payment is an absolute national scandal that needs to be dealt with.

I saw the Business Secretary and the Deputy Prime Minister make their trip to the pub the other week. On the one hand, I suppose this was a “kiss and make up” event after the activities of a certain rogue pollster—perhaps the Liberal Democrats’ equivalent of Lord Ashcroft; and on the other hand, it was to draw attention to the measures in the Queen’s Speech on a new statutory code and independent adjudicator to ensure that the sole traders and small businesses that run our 20,000 or so tied pubs are treated fairly. To be honest, after the dither and delay we have seen from this Government and the numerous debates we have had to force on the issue, any action from this Government is welcome, but my fear is that the real reforms that we and others across the House have campaigned for will be watered down. We will scrutinise the detail when the provisions are introduced.

I want to say a word about rebalancing, particularly between regions and within regions. It has simply not happened, and I see nothing in this Queen’s Speech to change that.

--- Later in debate ---

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

In the limited time available to me, I will look at the Queen’s Speech and jobs and work through the eyes of my constituents—the people who come to talk to me in my office and bring me casework—and what I hear as I go around. The Business Secretary, who is now in his place, started off a little grumpy, saying that we were not talking enough about today’s unemployment figures. I will certainly talk about the unemployment figures in Blackpool and praise the modest reduction in the overall number of people out of work and the very modest reduction in the number of people out of work for more than 12 months, but the devil, as always, is in the detail.

The unemployment rate in Blackpool is still twice the UK average and 50% more than the north-west average. We have always had challenges, like many coastal towns, with part-time and seasonal work and low skills, but the way in which the Government have failed to tackle those issues has exacerbated the problem enormously. Great work is being done by our small and medium-sized employers, by Blackpool council, by the “Build It” unit, which gets people back into construction, and by our further education colleges, and I have tried to get things moving, in my own modest way, with the skills fair we held last year: some 450 people turned up and we had 44 exhibitors, and we will repeat that event next year. The reality, though, is that we are not moving in anywhere near a strong or fast enough way.

If we want to know why this “recovery”, so widely talked about by the coalition, is not being felt on the ground, perhaps we should look at the TUC’s “Economic Quarterly Report”, which has just come out. It rightly talks about the continuing under-use of resources and the fact that 1.4 million people in part-time jobs say that their first choice would have been full-time work—a figure 700,000 higher than the typical pre-recession level. We need to look much more carefully at why people are going into self-employment, where there has been a big increase. What I and many Members know anecdotally is that many people, particularly women, are going into self-employment because they have lost their full-time or part-time jobs—often, their job has been outsourced. Their incomes, as the TUC reports, can be modest indeed: the average annual income from self-employment is less than £10,000 for women.

There has been a lot of discussion today about the minimum wage and zero-hours contracts, which are big issues for us in Blackpool. There is also the issue of low-hours contracts, which the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers has taken up and which particularly affects women. If we want to address those issues, we have to take real measures, not the perfunctory measures on zero-hours contracts that have been suggested, particularly at a time when the reduction in the cost of living gap is modest. In fact, figures today from the Office for National Statistics and the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggest that it is becoming even more modest.

As we know, one key thing is to get young people into skills training and then into decent, meaningful employment. However, as the shadow Secretary of State said, the figures still show that the majority of the significant increase in employment has been among the over-25s. The traineeships programme, which we supported and which the Government quite rightly said was really important, has been a fiasco so far. It has not been promoted properly, and it took the Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and for Work and Pensions months and months to get an agreement on the 16-hour rule. The programme is still not being promoted properly, it is still not clear and we now have a situation in which the Minister for Skills and Enterprise, in a panic about the take-up, proposes to reduce the time involved to as little as three weeks. The disincentives, the problems that people face in getting into work, which I have seen in my Jobcentre Plus in Blackpool, and the sanctioning process are doing nothing to help.

This Government are doing too little for younger people, but they are also doing too little for the 40-somethings and the 50-somethings in my constituency who want to reskill and retrain properly. The Government have got the balance wrong between stuffing people into short-term, low-skilled jobs, which are often temporary, and having a strategy that will produce real growth, real skills and real jobs for those people.