Jobs and Social Security

Jane Ellison Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sheerman]

I thank the Secretary of State for that intervention, and I accept what he says. He knows that what I am getting at in this short contribution is that we play this game of blaming each other all the time, but the problem is international and global and we will have to sometimes forget party differences and work together on it. I want to make a couple of suggestions as to how we might do that.

Let us face it: all Governments throughout Europe, the United States and beyond have a long history of failure. Modern industrial democracies have this problem of skilling the work force. Indeed, I have never heard such castigation of our country’s further education system as that in yesterday’s annual report by the chief inspector of Ofsted, who said how poorly further education was performing in our country. All the evidence shows that further education is where young people get skills for the good life. It is where they get high skills to get good jobs to be the full citizens that I am after.

I have never heard of the chief inspector picking on one town in particular. I do not know what he has against Hastings, but he said that early years and primary schools are a failure for the children of Hastings and that they also fail when they go on to secondary school and further education. I was astonished. Thank God he was not talking about Huddersfield. It comes down to the fact that a significant percentage of people in our country have inadequate training and skills, and we need to work across parties to do something about that.

I want to share some of my experiences. One of my last reports when I chaired the Children, Schools and Families Committee looked at the problem of those not in education, employment or training. We found that intelligent programmes on the ground which represented a positive response from local authorities that understood their local communities, and which also had good local skills training and good employers, could make a significant difference to the number of people gaining skills and getting into work. There are good exemplars in this country, but some towns are more fortunate than others in retaining their manufacturing and employment base.

[Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)]

I rise merely to express agreement with the thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s argument on skills, and in particular to say that London is the classic case that supports it, because it has created hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past decade or so, yet large numbers of our young people have been left behind. That points to a much more deep-seated problem.

[Mr Sheerman]

That is why I spoke of our experience in the United Kingdom, which has good exemplars of significant improvement, but the best example that I found in Europe was in the Netherlands, which has a much tougher welfare policy than us. It is difficult for someone to get any welfare payment there until they are about 27. If they are not in work, they have to be in education or training, and if they are not in education or training, they do not get a welfare payment. We in this country seem to have accepted over a long period that significant numbers of young people, many of them with low skills, can be left in a shadow land—a marginal existence—on housing benefit and a little benefit for subsistence, and that they can live in this half world as half citizens for a very long time.

During one of my shadow ministerial jobs a long time ago—it was so long ago that I was a deputy to Roy Hattersley—I became something of an expert on crime and criminality. It is fascinating that if young people do not get into crime before they are 25, they do not at all; unless they bump off their partner for the usual reason later on, they do not get into criminality. The sensible policy on deterring young people from crime is to spend money on doing so early on. We can apply the same analysis of our society to unemployment. What we hate most is intergenerational worklessness, where three generations of a family have never known anyone work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Guto Bebb]

That is an important point. I have visited Jobcentre Plus in my constituency to pay tribute to the work it is doing. Jobcentre Plus has been successful in getting people back into employment quickly, which means that the Work programme providers are not dealing with the low-hanging fruit, but with difficult-to-place individuals who need support and guidance over a longer period than Labour is willing to admit. It is also important to say that a job is not just a job, but an opportunity to change one’s lifestyle, gain respect in one’s family and community, and show that one can make a contribution.

[Jane Ellison]

The rather dismissive attitude towards jobs in retail that my hon. Friend has described drives me to distraction as well, particularly as I am co-chairman of the all-party retail group. Retail is an industry in which a great many people have started at the bottom and, from that chance on the shop floor, have risen to the very top through their application and talents. There can be no more meritocratic industry, so he is quite right to castigate the Opposition for being so dismissive.

[Guto Bebb]

Indeed. My experience of going around Tesco’s partnership stores, for example, has been quite inspiring. I found somebody who had been unemployed for eight years and was given an opportunity to work in the bakery section; 18 months later she was the manager, and famously said, “They’ll be carrying me out of here in a box, because I’ve been given an opportunity.” That is the reality of what creating a job and helping people into a job is all about.