Youth Unemployment

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on obtaining this important debate and for the way in which he introduced it, which reflects entirely the motivation and determination he showed when he was a Minister in the education department.

While echoing many of the things that have been said around the House, I want to think outside the box. I do so because what has been said recently, particularly in connection with the riots, has stimulated three questions which have been in my mind for a long time. They are unconnected, but one was particularly stimulated by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham in our recent debate on the report on the riots. I have long believed that the only raw material that every nation has in common is its people, and woe betide it if it does not do everything it can to identify, nurture and develop the talents of all its people, because unless it does so, it has only itself to blame if it fails. That is a burden on all of us, not just our educators.

The second question refers to a visit that I paid to the Indian Army in 1973, including the state of Orissa in East India. That evening, we had an audience with the very impressive governor of the province. I said to her that I had noticed, driving around Orissa, that I had not seen a single agricultural machine, all I had seen were people with hoes and spades. She said: “You tell me which is best. Is it best to have machines producing more than you can use; or is it better to have everyone in employment?”. It is a question I have never been able to answer.

The third question refers to when I was commanding Belfast between 1978 and 1980. During that time, I used to see a great deal of a very interesting politician called Paddy Devlin, one of the founders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, who was imprisoned in the 1950s as a member of the IRA but was a very distinguished Minister of Health in the short-lived power-sharing executive in 1974. During that time, there was a proposal that a car factory should be developed by a firm called DeLorean on the interface between the Catholic and Protestant areas, employing people from both sides, but the Catholics did not have a tradition of working with metals in that sort of industry. The Government established an employment centre in Turf Lodge, in the heartland of Catholic west Belfast, to start training people to get jobs in the DeLorean factory. That was objected to by the IRA, who sent in the 10 year-olds to try to burn it. They failed, so the 14 year-olds were put in. They did not do it, but the 16 year-olds made a much better job of it, which left a derelict site which I then took over as a base.

During that time, I had a long talk with Paddy about unemployment in the area, because I was concerned that there was nothing for people other than that. He explained to me that one reason why the IRA burned the DeLorean training centre was because it did not want people to be employed. He said that a man wants to earn enough money to feed, clothe and house his family, to have a holiday and, occasionally, to change the wallpaper. If society produces that, he will support it. If society does not, he will not. If there was therefore a possibility of that happening and driving people away from the IRA, it wished to bring them back in. At the same time, Paddy asked me if I knew how many unemployed there were in that part of west Belfast. I said that I did not but that I would try to find out, so for July 1979 we counted all the men of employable age and what they did during that time. We found that the unemployment rate was about 80%. I mentioned this to Paddy and he said, “I would not have been surprised if it was 90%”.

To echo very much what the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said, it is therefore terribly important that instead of taking figures which represent an average over a whole area, we should identify hotspots. This brings me to there having been some figures in the report on the riots which struck me as being very important. They were perceptions: the 83% who felt that youth unemployment was a problem in their area and the 71% who felt that there were insufficient opportunities for young people. Only 22% felt that public services were doing enough.

In that climate, we then find talk of youth contracts, payment by results, career support guarantees, youth job promises and apprenticeship programmes but I am bound to ask: for what? Are the jobs actually there which can be operated by the young people to whom we are promising all these guarantees, supports, results and so on? Have we ever analysed exactly what the situation really is in terms of the availability of jobs? We live in an era when, as one found in Orissa, machines are taking over from men and labour-saving is the phrase, so where are these jobs? I ask that because it is hugely important that the Government should establish precisely what the job situation is going to be before making all these promises. There is nothing worse than to make promises that are totally incapable of being kept, particularly to the young. With the disillusioned young, they will lose not only this generation but other generations for the future.