Compulsory Jobs Guarantee

Steve Webb Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

We will be delivering a guarantee, exactly as we did with the future jobs fund. Anyone can look back at the record of the future jobs fund, where a guarantee was delivered. It will be again.

I shall say a little more about how the guarantee would work. Participants would be required, if their employer did not plan to keep them on when the subsidy ended, to pursue intensive job search for a permanent opportunity at the end of the six months. Any jobseeker who refused to take up a job offered under the guarantee would, in the normal way and in line with the long-standing conditions for benefit claims, lose their benefits. That is always the case.

[The Minister for Pensions (Steve Webb)]

The right hon. Gentleman is very careful with his figures, so he will know the answer to this question. He points to the future jobs fund as evidence of how his new scheme would work, and he says he hopes those new jobs would be in the private sector. What percentage of future jobs fund jobs were in the private sector? What is the figure?

[Stephen Timms]

Very few. There is the good example of Jaguar Land Rover taking on a group of young people under the future jobs fund, and my understanding is that every single one of those young people was kept on in their job when the wage subsidy ended. The future jobs fund was largely about the charity and public sectors; the guarantee is largely about the private sector, exactly as Jobs Growth Wales has been.