Jobs and the Unemployed

Richard Graham Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I will not take any more interventions, as this debate is turning into another Second Reading of the Finance Bill and I want to talk about unemployment and the future jobs fund.

In my constituency of Wakefield—which is well known to my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)—700 places were allocated under the future jobs fund. We are not clear how many have survived the Government’s hatchet job, but I was privileged to welcome 50 young recruits to Wakefield council.

In addition, with my right hon. Friend I met three future jobs fund recruits at the Able project, an environmental scheme that uses a piece of disused land owned by Yorkshire Water that lies next to a sewage treatment works. One could not hope to find a less glamorous environment, but the project has created something very beautiful. Its organisers have worked with Nacro and the mental health trust to get people digging, growing, learning and being out in nature. The land is between a sewage works and a railway line, but it is an area of environmental beauty. The project has become a green business, coppicing the hazel and willow that grows there.

I met two young workers there, and we were able to buy some of the honey that they had made. They told me that they had had an apprenticeship but that the collapse of the business meant that they could not carry on. After six months on the dole, they were desperate to get something.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and I made the visit in March, and the young workers told us that they did not know what was going to happen at the end of the six months. They asked us to try and make the period a year, as that would mean that they had a year’s experience under their belts. One young man was working visiting schools and showing children how to build nesting boxes.

The Able project is run by a third sector organisation, but I was aware that, at the end of his time there, the young man I had spoken to would have carpentry skills and experience of working with children. He was going to have all sorts of facts about nature and growing things at his disposal, with the result that a range of different organisations in the area could employ him.

I feel really heartbroken that that young man, the person whom I also met who is a support worker at Reconnect, a project that befriends older people across Wakefield who are at risk of isolation, mental health problems and loneliness, and the three people for whom I was trying to find work as wardens in Thornes park, are all now facing an extremely uncertain future.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the challenges for the future jobs fund is that, because the placements last only six months and have been taken up almost entirely by the public and charitable sectors, they do not provide future jobs? I have spoken to several charitable organisations in Gloucester, just as she has in her constituency. They have got people doing things very similar to what she has just described. They make the same points that she does, but they recognise that these are not apprenticeships. They are different: they do not provide jobs, but really just take people off the unemployment register for six months.

[Mary Creagh]

The point is that they are entry-level jobs. The future jobs fund takes people off the unemployment register for six months, but the important thing is that those people then have a CV that does not say, “I’ve been on the dole and I don’t know how to get up in the morning. I don’t know how to set an alarm because no one’s ever taught me. I’ve got used to staying in bed till half past 10 and then watching daytime TV.” Instead, their CVs say, “I’ve been doing something productive and am able to get myself to work. I’m committed and I’ve developed my communication skills.”

The young people involved may have failed at school and may not be academically successful. They need every chance that they can get: they may need a series of six-month placements to build up two years’ worth of experience, because it may take them much longer to enter the employment market than someone with an Oxbridge degree.

[Mary Creagh]

I have not finished, but I will give way to the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham).

[Richard Graham]

Does the hon. Lady agree that a real apprenticeship that lasts three years, like the 50,000 new apprenticeships that this coalition Government are committed to providing, is a much more genuine gateway to a real job than a series of six-month benefits and training programmes that has no real guarantee of leading anywhere?

[Mary Creagh]

I think that we should have both. I do not think that 50,000 apprenticeships will be enough; nor do I think that cutting Peter to spend money on Paul is a fair way to allocate resources.