Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Graham P Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Graham Evans]

The hon. Lady raises a good point, which others have raised, too. I would encourage the Select Committee to do a further investigation into Jobcentre Plus. My personal experience is that it does an outstanding job. I carry out job fairs in my constituency and I am organising my fifth one since I became an MP, during which time I have seen unemployment halved in Weaver Vale. One thing I learned from working with the jobcentres in Runcorn and Northwich was the number of high-quality and well-paid jobs available.

Let me provide an example. Waitrose came to town—to Northwich. It is under no obligation to give interviews, but when it came to Northwich, it said it would interview 25% of local people on the books of the local jobcentre. In the end, it interviewed 70%, and I am pleased to say that more than 50% of those it took on for the new Waitrose in Northwich were local people. I spoke to many of the people employed there. There were lots of young ladies, and ladies not quite so young, who had been unemployed for many years. They now have themselves a fantastic career with a John Lewis partnership. I asked them why they were unemployed for so long, and they said that the training given by Jobcentre Plus and the local Cheshire West and Chester work zone was what made them job-ready, able to do well in interviews and capable of producing a good CV.

The last time I checked, Waitrose was delighted with the quality of the workforce—one that, as I say, had been unemployed for a very long time. Some of the jobs are part time, but some people want that, and they are good-quality jobs and very well paid. This is exactly the sort of Jobcentre Plus activity that I hope goes on in everyone’s constituency. I was going to say more about Jobcentre Plus, but I shall give that a miss as I have already made the points.

Everyone with the ability to work should be given the support and opportunity to work. The previous system wrote too many people off and left too many trapped in a cycle of welfare dependency. Over the last five years, the number of people in Weaver Vale claiming jobseeker’s allowance and universal credit while not in employment fell by more than 1,000—a 51% drop. I am not saying that my jobs fairs had anything to do with that, but they probably helped in some way.

This Government’s long-term economic plan is working for Weaver Vale, getting people off a life on benefits and back into work. I have not heard of an alternative to our long-term economic plan recently—or at all, in fact. Employment has been this Government’s real success, with 2 million more jobs—and 1,000 created each and every day during the last Parliament.

[Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

I question this “long-term economic plan”. Is it the one intended to cut the deficit entirely by 2015 or the one to cut it by 2020? Which one of those long-term economic plans is it?

[Graham Evans]

The hon. Gentleman raises a good point. The long-term economic plan I am talking about is taking this country from the depths of despair we experienced in 2010. If we carry on the way we are going, we will be the biggest economy in Europe. I have to confess that I have a vested interest as I have young children and I am interested in their future. Do we all want to leave a credit card debt of £1.4 trillion? As long as we carry on with the deficit, we are adding to that debt. It is all about choices and paying down the deficit, which we will do by 2019-20. It is about paying down the debts of my children and the hon. Gentleman’s children so that they will not be saddled with our credit card debt.

We understand that the route out of poverty is not through welfare; poverty can be left behind through work. International development is a recognition of that. When we as a country give 0.7% of our GDP to overseas development, we look for ways to help countries to stand on their own two feet. Helping communities and individuals all comes through work.

The OBR has predicted that a further million jobs will be created over the next five years, but this is the party of ambition, and we want to go further. This Bill is working to a target of full employment and puts an obligation on the Secretary of State to report on progress towards that target. I wholeheartedly agree with that.

This Bill is a major stepping-stone, moving Britain from a high welfare, high tax, low wage economy to a lower welfare, lower tax and higher wage economy. It continues the work of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the last Parliament, making work central to Britain’s welfare system. These reforms are transforming the lives of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our communities and giving people the skills and opportunities to get on in life and stand on their own two feet.