Oral Answers to Questions

Iain Wright Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Clearly, we face difficult economic times. We will go on in a minute to talk about the growth plans that are required in Europe, but what we have to do in this country is rebalance our economy, which had become over-reliant on the public sector, over-reliant on financial services and not fairly spread around the country. We need a growth of the private sector and of manufacturing and technology, and we need it to be more fairly spread across the country, including in the area that my hon. Friend represents. What we see from the employment figures is, yes, a decline in public sector employment, which would frankly be inevitable whoever was in power right now, but the 600,000 net new jobs in the private sector show that some firms are expanding and growing, and we must be on their side.

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Q9. Unemployment in Hartlepool and the north-east is higher now than in May 2010. How much of that increase is down to the Prime Minister’s Government’s policies?

[The Prime Minister]

The point that I made to the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) is that the last Government excluded from the unemployment numbers people who were on temporary employment schemes. We include those people. People on the Work programme are included in the unemployment numbers. We measure these things accurately, and comparing like for like, youth unemployment has fallen since the election.