Jobs and the Unemployed
Matt Hancock Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Rushanara Ali
The Labour Government made every attempt to help people into work. There are great challenges and complex circumstances in helping and enabling people to work, but at least the Labour Government did not shirk their responsibility. At least they tried to support people, as Labour Governments will always do. I appeal to the coalition Government to try to provide support, so that people can achieve their potential. This is not about handouts; it is about giving a helping hand. That is the progressive route to supporting communities.
Rushanara Ali
I am short of time, so I would like to make some progress and share the following example. At a recent employment fair in my constituency, 10,000 people were queuing up for jobs, but there were only 1,000 places at the work fair. That does not show that people are not interested in jobs or that people will sit idly by waiting for opportunities to come to them; they want to work, they want opportunities and they need support from the private sector, the Government and the voluntary sector. I hope that that is the spirit in which this Government will seek to work.
The cost of unemployment is ill health, depression and anxiety; it is many social consequences that we cannot afford. I regret that unemployment remains high for some sections and that some people continue to feel left behind. I acknowledge that my party did not achieve as much as it would have liked, but the fact is that my party never walked away from people who needed support in constituencies such as mine.
Matthew Hancock
I thank the hon. Lady for a very thoughtful speech. Will she join me in welcoming the new Government’s proposal to increase the number of apprenticeships, because she mentioned that earlier?
Rushanara Ali
I welcome any effort to try to help people to get work but, as I said in my earlier intervention, it is important to ensure that training programmes are meaningful. I would say that to my own party and my own Government—in fact, I lobbied my Government to keep making progress, because that is the right thing to do. The point is that there is no guarantee of a job at the end of this. Young people, with whom I have spent some years working, need to be convinced that when they get involved with these programmes, there will be a result and the programme is meaningful, not a fudge. That must be our focus. I welcome the 50,000 apprenticeship opportunities, but people will have to wait until next spring. What am I meant to say to my constituents, who have been waiting for help from this Government? We contributed support. The problem is that the recent announcements, whereby all this is to be left until next spring, are not good enough.
I wish to conclude by saying that we must not fail the challenge of trying to help people get into work. We must give them hope, we must realise their potential and we must help them to meet their aspirations. We have not seen evidence of investment in the aspiration that the Prime Minister talked so much about when he was campaigning. I hope that we will see that, and that this Government will not turn their back on the people who want to contribute to this society and this economy, and whose potential we need for economic growth. I hope that this coalition Government will deliver a progressive solution, not one that leaves people behind.
Capital Gains Tax (Rates)
Matt Hancock Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
I will give way in a moment, because I want Government Members to hear this: far from the absence of detail in the Budget, the Budget prepared by the then Chancellor of Exchequer and presented to the House in March set out to the last penny £19 billion-worth of tax rises and, yes, £20 billion-worth of spending cuts, including £1 billion in cuts from the reform of public sector pensions, £1.2 billion in savings from welfare, £3.5 billion in holding down public sector pay, £5 billion in cuts to lower-priority programmes and £11 billion in savings through the biggest shake-up of Whitehall in a generation. That was on top of £15 billion of efficiencies in this year alone—all carefully broken down by Department.
Matthew Hancock
Does the right hon. Gentleman think that there is no money left, or does he no longer agree with himself?
Mr Byrne
We can see at whose feet the hon. Gentleman has been training.
Our plan was different from the one the Chancellor presented. Unlike the plan that we heard last week, our plan really did have fairness at its heart. Last Monday night, the Chancellor’s spin doctors made fairness his key Budget test, and by Tuesday lunchtime he had failed it. The night before the Budget, we are reliably informed, Lobby journalists were equipped with an analysis of the Budget’s impact on different groups of citizens, yet somehow, someone forgot to tell the press that the picture was only fair because it included Labour measures. The Government would not dare to present a Budget to stand and fall on its own merits; they had to borrow ours. It did not take long to hear why.
What was the Budget’s impact on pensioners? Age UK says:
“Our research shows that cuts of this scale will be disastrous for older people”
and warns that thousands of lives will be lost. What is the impact on children? Save the Children says:
“Freezing child benefit…will hurt the poorest parents most, rather than their richest peers”.
A 20% VAT rate means driving some of the poorest parents into the arms of loan sharks. The Child Poverty Action Group said:
“This is a disappointing budget for child poverty…The increase in VAT is a regressive measure which will impact hardest on poorest families.”
Perhaps the final word should go to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In a phrase that will come back to haunt Government Members, it said that the cuts to benefits will
“hit the poorest hardest and keep on hitting them harder year on year”.
Six days on from the main event, the Government’s progressive credentials already lie in ruins.
The price of keeping down unemployment in the worst global recession for 60 years was a price worth paying. It was the price of a national defence in a global storm. When we left office, unemployment was 500,000 lower than people expected a year ago. Repossessions were half the level of the 1990s, and company insolvencies were just a third of the rate they reached in the recession of the early 1990s. We are proud that we got the country though the recession in one piece and that we have delivered a return to growth.
It is true to say that no Government would have had an easy time in this Parliament, but the difficulty of the task demands that we do not take gratuitous bets with the nation’s hard-fought recovery and that we pay down the debt in a way that is fair. The Budget fails both those tests, and we will campaign for a plan that is better in this House and beyond.