Oral Answers to Questions

Steve Baker Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

This was a complicated case. I will obviously meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss it. His constituent had been laid off and then, as we were trying to support him back into work, he did work experience. It was in a different part of the business, and it was how we could best enable him to move from long-term unemployment into employment. If the hon. Gentleman would like to meet me, I am more than happy to do that, but I have already looked into this case.

[Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the Work programme has helped hundreds of thousands of people out of the misery of long-term unemployment and into sustainable work?

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend raises yet another good point. Under Labour, the number of people living in households where nobody had ever worked doubled. We therefore needed not only to do a lot of work to bring us back to the regular standards of what we had before Labour came into office, but to build on that to get more people into work. That is exactly right. We have helped hundreds of thousands of those people who were left unemployed for a long time.