Welfare
Debate between Helen Goodman and Stephen Crabb(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Stephen Crabb
One of the big challenges we have as a Government is working with employers to reassure them and support them in making good decisions about recruiting and hiring disabled people. We have a really important initiative in my Department called Access to Work. We need to publicise it a lot more and get more employers looking at it and accessing it.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
We were all pleased to hear the Secretary of State say, “We have no further plans to make welfare savings beyond the very substantial savings legislated for”. Can he therefore guarantee that there will be no reductions in rates or eligibility criteria for any social security benefits in this Parliament?
Stephen Crabb
The statement was very clear. The kind of changes that the hon. Lady describes would be cuts to people’s benefits, so we as a Government are not looking at that at this moment in time.
Unemployment (North-east)
Debate between Helen Goodman and Stephen Crabb(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Stephen Crabb
I dispute that. The Government are trying to move away from the one-size-fits-all policies of the previous Administration. We are looking at locally and regionally tailored solutions, where appropriate.
Several hon. Members mentioned today’s labour market figures. I am not as gloomy as the shadow Minister about them. There are reasons for a measure of optimism. Nationally, employment is up by more than 400,000 since 2010. Private sector employment has gone up by 843,000, since 2010, and it has gone up again in the past month. In the past 12 months, in the north-east region, employment overall has gone up by 10,000 and private sector employment has increased by 17,000, which more than offsets the drop in public sector employment. That counters the point that the Opposition made about the drop in public sector employment being a driver of overall unemployment in the north-east region.
Those are encouraging signs, but we recognise that unemployment remains too high. It is true that unemployment in the north-east remains higher than in other parts of the country. Several Members have referred to the fact that it has the highest unemployment figures of all the UK regions.
Long-term unemployment affects only a minority of people, but it is a particular concern because it brings with it the risk of detachment from the labour market and people losing the hope of finding work again or finding that the skills that they had are diminished or outdated.
In the north-east, more than 24,000 people have been claiming unemployment benefits for more than 12 months. That figure is much lower than it was 25 years ago—the hon. Member for Hartlepool referred to the 1980s—but it is still too high, and we are not complacent.
One of the groups that has been hardest hit during the last two years of recession is young people. We have seen encouraging signs recently that youth unemployment might be starting to come down. Excluding unemployed students, it fell by 23,000, to just over 700,000 in the most recent quarter. That still leaves almost 50,000 16 to 24-year-olds unemployed in the north-east, so there is clearly much more to be done.
In April, we announced an additional £1 billion package of support for young people through the youth contract. Very few Opposition Members mentioned the action that is taking place and the fact that, in the past year, some 7,000 young people have benefited from the work experience scheme in the north-east. Nor did they mention the fact that there are 30,000 additional apprenticeships in the north-east, more than 1,000 of which are in the constituency of Hartlepool. It is not surprising that they do not want to talk about it. As Labour Members elsewhere have mentioned, one of the big failings of the previous Labour Administration was that they did not recognise fully the importance of apprenticeships and the link between high-value apprenticeships and upskilling in the economy.
Helen Goodman
Surely, the hon. Gentleman is aware that the number of apprenticeships increased tenfold under the Labour Government.
Stephen Crabb
In the last 12 months, 67% more apprenticeships were created than in the last year of the previous Labour Government.