Oral Answers to Questions

Helen Grant Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

There will not be a gap, all existing programmes are being extended, and the Work programme will be applicable to all those young people in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. Having only just gone into opposition, he might like to reflect on the past 14 years, and the fact that when his party left office it left us with more than 1.3 million 16 to 24-year-olds not in full-time education, employment or training. That is 200,000 more than were left to the Labour party in 1997. It is a shameful record, and we do not need lectures from Labour Members about youth unemployment.

[Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)]

How does my right hon. Friend plan to break the cycle of intergenerational unemployment? In my constituency there are many families in which no one works. That has a devastating effect not only on those families but on their communities.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

My hon. Friend asks an important question. In the past 14 years huge sums of money have been narrowly focused on different groups, and we have forgotten that in households with families, far too many are out of work. That is one reason why child poverty has been so difficult to tackle, and why we must change the system. We want to consider how to make work pay for those on the lowest incomes, and how work can be distributed more among households and less just among individuals. Most particularly, we want people to recognise that it is more important and more viable for them to be back in work than on benefits. The complicated system that the previous Government introduced, with all its different taper rates and withdrawal rates, meant that people needed to be professors of maths to figure out whether they would be better off going to work or staying on benefits. Our job is to ensure that the system is simpler and easier to understand. Unlike the previous Government, we will value households that take a risk and try to go to work.