Compulsory Jobs Guarantee

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was at an event yesterday with the Prince’s Trust where a young man was describing how he was about to be sectioned when, thanks to the Prince’s Trust, he was able to go into a job and his mental health problem was resolved. She is also right about the costs to the economy and the health service of long periods of unemployment early on.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the jobs that we are talking about here, unlike the jobs that many young people have to take at the moment, which are zero hours and exploitative, will be real and proper jobs? They will not be the fake jobs that this coalition Government are producing.

[Stephen Timms]

I can assure my hon. Friend that these will be jobs for at least 25 hours a week and paid at least at the level of the national minimum wage.

The persistent unemployment that we still see today could be contributing to a continued cost of living crisis tomorrow, weakening the productivity and the growth potential of our economy as well as undermining efforts to keep social spending under control and to bring down the deficit. We must take urgent and effective action now to tackle the problem.

What action have we seen from the Government? One of their very first acts on entering office was to abolish the future jobs fund, breaking, incidentally, the promise that the current Home Secretary made during the election campaign. Eventually, the DWP published an evaluation of the future jobs fund and, to the surprise of nobody on the Opposition Benches, it was glowing. It found a net benefit to society—net of all the Exchequer costs—of £7,750 for every single young person who took part. It reckoned that, within three years, half the cost of that intervention came back to the Exchequer because participants stopped claiming benefits and started paying tax and national insurance. It was an exceptionally cost-effective policy.

By late 2012, when the evaluation was published, it was too late. The future jobs fund had gone. In the time since its abolition, unemployment had risen to more than 2.5 million and youth unemployment had risen to more than 1 million.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

To hear some of the criticisms from Government Members, one would think that the Labour party had no policies at all. We will restore Sure Start to what it was when we were in Government. We will continue to have a programme for modern apprenticeships and to invest in infrastructure. I should declare an interest here as chair of the all-party Crossrail group. I have the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy on the edge of my constituency, on the banks of the River Roding. It is training up apprentices in great numbers and giving them high skills. It is taking many people who are registered as unemployed and providing them with quality training. That scheme was initiated under the previous Labour Government and is operating in a fantastic way. That is the kind of skills training we need.

Some Members from Scotland and elsewhere—I am not talking about my hon. Friends—think that the streets of London are paved with gold and that everything is perfect, but we have pockets of deprivation and some serious levels of unemployment, particularly in certain communities, in our capital city. Some young people have been persistently unemployed, and we need to boost their confidence by giving them the possibility of long-term permanent jobs.

Our jobs guarantee proposal will benefit young people and older people who have been registered as unemployed for more than two years. Yes, it does cost, of course it does. When I talk about investing in young people and unemployed people, I am not thinking about the youth training schemes that were used by Tory Governments 20 or 30 years ago, the zero-hours contracts or subsidising exploitative employers. What we need to do is provide real jobs and real hope. Many of these young people will not have experienced the structured life that can exist within the work environment. Many of them might have problems in their lives, whether from disabilities or from past alcohol or drug dependence, and some might have mental health problems, and they need to be integrated into our society and given hope. This proposal provides a route for people to get the experience of work and to go from that to permanent employment. That is why the Government are totally wrong to oppose it today.