Seasonal Work
Paul Holmes Excerpts(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Nigel Huddleston
Absolutely. My right hon. Friend makes a really important point. It is quite remarkable, following the Budget, to hear Labour MPs say to their constituents, “We have helped you out. We have reduced costs.” If they talk to their constituents, they will find that the very opposite happened.
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
Like me, the shadow Secretary of State will have been out in the constituency speaking to small businesses, and I am sure that Labour MPs will have been doing the same over the weekend. A local publican told me that that she would have to lay off staff in January because of the extra taxes that the Chancellor had come back for—more taxes, though she said at the last Budget that she would not introduce more. I wonder whether the shadow Secretary of State has had the same experience when talking to hospitality businesses, which particularly employ young people.
Nigel Huddleston
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. The hospitality sector has been particularly hard-hit by Labour’s damaging economic policies. Many of us who were out on small business Saturday spoke to a number of those businesses, and unfortunately, UKHospitality fears that there could be a further 100,000 job losses because of Labour’s policies.
Antonia Bance
The hon. Lady makes her point well, and she has made it; there is no need for me to respond.
After 14 years of flatlining wages, wages are now growing faster than prices. That is incredibly important. I was so proud to see wages go up by more in the first 10 months of this Government than they went up in the first 10 years of the last one. The Budget did more on the cost of living, whether it be through frozen fares, frozen prescriptions, frozen fuel duty, £150 off energy bills or—my favourite policy—thousands of pounds in the pockets of the poorest families in the UK. They will spend that money on high streets, like those in my constituency: Crankhall Lane and Union Street in Wednesbury, and our shopping centre in central Tipton. That is where low-income families spend any extra pounds on food and on stuff for their kids.
Paul Holmes
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way; she is being characteristically courteous. She is entirely correct in outlining the choices and some of the policies that her Government have made, but does she not agree that those choices and policies will be delivered on the back of higher taxation? As a result, employers have less money to employ people, so the proceeds of growth do not mean that there will be better public services. The hon. Lady is right that her Government are spending more money, but that is on the basis of taxation, because of the policies that her Government are advancing, and not on the basis of growth or entrepreneurship.
Antonia Bance
I thank the hon. Member for his kind words, and for his intervention. It is absolutely clear that alongside investment in public services, there is investment in infrastructure, in house building, and in making sure that this is a good country in which to grow and scale a business. I am glad of those things. I am also glad that we took action to ensure that the poorest families are able to feed all of their children. The way to make the high street thrive is for people to have more money to spend. Let me repeat the statistic mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger). There are more people aged between 18 and 24 in work this year than there were a year ago, but NEET numbers are still too high. People familiar with the constituency I represent will not be surprised to hear that they are particularly high in my corner of the Black Country. This is in no small part due to the failures of the Conservatives in government, not least during the pandemic, when they kept the schools closed but allowed pubs to open.
Opposition Members keep calling on us to engage in further welfare reform to cut the welfare bill. It is interesting to me that when we do so—when we announce a clear, costed, proven, evidence-based plan to get young people back into work, as we did this weekend—they do not like it. It feels like history repeating itself. I remember the future jobs fund from 15 or 16 years ago, and the way it gave hope to a generation of young people kicked out of work as a result of a global financial crisis, through no fault of their own. Hundreds of thousands of them got jobs through the future jobs fund. It was particularly effective for the hardest-to-help young people, and in tough labour markets, in places like the one that I represent, but it was canned, basically on day one, by a Conservative Chancellor. I am so glad that our Work and Pensions Secretary is building on the legacy of the future jobs fund to help a new generation of young people.
Business and the Economy
Paul Holmes Excerpts(6 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Torsten Bell
The most important fact for my Swansea West constituents is that wages at the end of the Conservatives’ period in office were stuck at the same level as when they came into office in 2010—14 wasted years for my constituents. To respond to the hon. Gentleman’s question about unemployment, I would not use the claimant count at that level because the data is not as robust as it should be. Several hon. Members have, over the course of the debate, talked about increases in the unemployment rate in recent months. Why has the unemployment rate gone up? It is not because employment has come down, but because the inactivity that shot up on the Conservatives’ watch has started to decline. That is what is going on beneath the numbers.
Why do Conservative Members not want to talk about their disastrous record on the labour market? It is because they left us as the only G7 economy whose employment rate still had not returned to pre-pandemic levels. They left us with 2.8 million people out of work through long-term sickness, and 1 million young people not in education, employment or training—more than one in eight young people were left on the scrapheap by the Conservatives.
Let me turn to the labour market today, which hon. Members have mentioned. Some 200,000 jobs have been created since the Government took office. Pay has outstripped prices, with the strongest real pay growth for years. Let me pause on the question of wages, because for many people, what they get paid is the economy. Here is a fact so staggering that it tells us all we need to know about the failure of the previous Government and the progress made under this one: wages have grown faster in the first 10 months of this Government than they did in the first 10 years of Tory Governments from 2010. That is what a country turning a corner looks like.
Torsten Bell
It is not boom and bust. Wages for workers need to rise in Britain once again. We also need to turn the corner on an economy that is far too unequal. That is what our Employment Rights Bill will do.