Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Neil Coyle and Helen Goodman

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that self-employment has increased by 42%? How many of those newly self-employed people does he think are in sustainable small businesses? People come to my constituency surgeries who have become self-employed and are working as window cleaners. That is fine—of course everyone needs to get their windows cleaned—but there is a limit to how many window cleaners we need in society. If people are coming out of highly skilled jobs and going into very low-skilled ones—[Interruption.] Conservative Members can protest as much as they like, but when the Treasury Committee took evidence from representatives of the Bank of England, they told us that a lot of the increase in self-employment was not real employment and that it was a sign that people could not get the kind of employed jobs that they wanted. Professor Kristin Forbes said precisely that to the Committee. Conservative Members do not need to pretend that this is some kind of prejudice on my part. It certainly is not.

[Neil Coyle]

Much has been said about the current employment levels. Indeed, we heard earlier that there had been a miracle, no less. Is my hon. Friend aware that the percentage of working age disabled people in work has fallen over the past five years, in direct correlation to the reduction in the number of disability employment advisers and in the number of disabled people being supported by the Access to Work scheme?

[Helen Goodman]

I was not aware of that fact, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for pointing it out.

On the employment numbers, I also want to point out that there are a lot of people on short-hours contracts. I am not talking about zero-hours contracts, which have now reached 750,000, as Conservative Members must know; I am talking about eight-hour and 12-hour contracts. They provide insecure employment and insufficient money for people to live on, and they make it very difficult to get other jobs. They are, however, recorded as employment. There is all the difference in the world between working 35 hours a week and working eight hours a week, and Conservative Members need to think about that before they start talking about miraculous employment figures.