Youth Unemployment

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend speaks with some passion, because he is right. We cannot tolerate any longer a situation in which long-term youth unemployment continues to rise at today’s pace.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Byrne]

I shall, because the rise in long-term youth unemployment in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency is three times the size of the rise in mine.

[Nick de Bois]

If the right hon. Gentleman is as interested as I am in developing sustainable long-term jobs to deal with youth unemployment in particular, does he agree with and welcome rolling back the heavy hand of employment rules and legislation, including vexatious employment tribunals, and will he commit his Front Benchers to do that and even go further, so that it is easier to employ people?

[Mr Byrne]

Before I became a Member, I started a business. I know what it is like to start a business with two people around a kitchen table, to grow it, build it, take on new staff and do well, but dealing with regulation was the easy bit; selling and making a profit was the tough bit, and that is why we need urgent action to get growth back into the economy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

I know that my right hon. Friend will agree that it is curious that while unemployment is going down in America, the eurozone and Japan, it is going up in this country.

[Nick de Bois]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[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.