Youth Unemployment
Debate between Liam Byrne and John Hayes(13 years ago)
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Mr Byrne
I will give way in a moment, because I want to turn to apprenticeships, which the Minister has mentioned. Apprenticeships have sometimes been seen in this debate as the Department’s silver bullet, so let us be clear: ours was the party that rescued apprenticeships. We inherited 65,000 apprenticeships; the figure was over 260,000 when we left office. This year, 85% of new apprentices will not be young people, but people over 25. Leaked documents seen by The Guardian show that Ministers have been warned that apprenticeships are actually a re-badging of existing jobs. It turns out that about 11,000 of this year’s new places have gone to 16 to 18-year-olds. I should point out for the House that 205,000 of those aged 16 to 17 are now on the dole. If they all applied for one of those apprenticeships, they would have a 5% success rate. Getting into Oxford university is less competitive than that. Given those figures, an ally of the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said that the Chancellor thought that apprenticeships were
“a rare piece of good news, but it’s turning out to be a con”.
The unnamed ally is right: it is a con. We have a Work programme that is all programme and no work, a youth jobs scheme that costs less than the stationery budget and an apprenticeship scheme that is harder to get into than Oxford university. No wonder overall long-term youth unemployment is going through the roof. Let us hear an answer from the Minister.
The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)
I am very happy to tell the right hon. Gentleman all about it, but I wonder whether he will acknowledge that today there are more apprentices under 25 than the total number of apprentices when his Government left office and that the two-year growth in apprenticeships for 16 to 24-year-olds over the last two years is bigger than at any time when his party was in office.
Mr Hayes
I am not sure that that is particularly relevant to the question that I asked, but I will ask the right hon. Gentleman another question. His Government commissioned the Leitch report—[Interruption.] It was probably the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) who commissioned it—he was running the show in the Treasury then, or so he now pretends. What does the Leitch report say? It says that we need to upskill and reskill the work force and that apprentices are a critical way of doing that. Is the right hon. Gentleman now denying that? Has he changed his mind, or does he in fact think that we need to use apprenticeships for that purpose?
Mr Byrne
I want apprenticeships for young people, and it is this Government who are not delivering them. That is why, all over the country, we now see long-term youth unemployment rocketing up. Some 233 Members of this House now represent constituencies where long-term youth unemployment has risen by over 100% this year. Overall, long-term youth unemployment is up by 64% since the start of the year. All over Britain, scars that we thought were gone for ever are reappearing, and not just in Labour constituencies, but in places such as North Dorset, Aylesbury and Stevenage. Some 238 of us now speak for constituencies where, since the election, youth unemployment is up by 20%.
Mr Hayes
I will not give way.
Hearing Labour Members talk about generational joblessness reminded me of the plight that my father and my grandfather suffered in the ’30s when they were jobless. The story now, as we have heard from Members across the House, is no less tragic than it was then. That is why the Government are doing something about it.
All hon. Members who have spoken in the debate must be disappointed by the motion. Like worn-out conjuror’s paraphernalia, it is all smoke and mirrors. It resembles the economic policy that the last Government practised when the shadow Chancellor was their senior economic adviser, and we all know where that led. It led to the point at which the shadow Secretary of State, who introduced this debate, left his famous letter saying “There’s no money left”. We can see the shadow Chancellor’s footprints and fingerprints all over the motion.
Mr Byrne
I am genuinely grateful for the tone that the Minister is trying to strike, but does he understand the signal that it sends, in a debate on youth unemployment, when the Department for Work and Pensions Minister cannot be bothered to turn up for more than half the debate and the Secretary of State is nowhere to be seen?
Mr Hayes
The right hon. Gentleman obviously wants to make party political and partisan points. However, I was suggesting, perhaps unfashionably—perhaps this is not typical for the Opposition—that this matter goes beyond party divides, and that we should be united in our concern and in a call for action.
The shadow Chancellor is not without redeeming skills. I understand that, when he was at public school, he was good at playing the violin. So Balls fiddles while Byrne roams around talking down Britain’s chance to succeed.
Let me deal with the three principal points that have emerged from the debate—first, the future jobs fund. It was by far the most expensive part of the September guarantee package, at £6,500 for each individual, and 50% of the people who were under the influence of the fund found themselves unemployed eight months later. That is why we questioned its value—not because it did no good, but because it did not do enough good and was simply not cost-effective.
The second big issue that has been raised today is that of NEETS. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) and the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) must know that the NEETS figures are part of a deep, long-term structural issue. Throughout the good years, the NEETs figures were at an unacceptable level. The right hon. Gentleman will see from the figures that in 2009, on Labour’s watch, the number of NEETs rose to 925,000. The truth is that youth unemployment involves long-term structural and systemic issues, and this debate was a chance for us to consider them seriously. Instead, what we have heard from the Opposition was little more than party political knockabout.
The third point to emerge from the debate relates to apprenticeships. Let us deal with them head on. I shall leave aside the fact that the right hon. Gentleman has rubbished all those in his constituency doing apprenticeships in their 20s—people like those at Jaguar Land Rover or at BT.
Mr Hayes
The right hon. Gentleman knows the answer: over two years, the growth in apprenticeships for people under the age of 19 has been 29% and for people aged between 19 and 24 it has been 64%. Labour could only dream of those figures, and would have died for them in government. The number of apprenticeships for young people is growing. There are new opportunities, and while Labour is deliberating, the Conservatives and Liberals are delivering. That is the difference.