amendment of the law

Debate between Tony Baldry and Guto Bebb

Tuesday 25th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Coventry and Banbury are not that far away from each other. When the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) and I entered the House of Commons together about 30 years ago, I think that the unemployment rates in our constituencies were not dissimilar at about 15%. Unemployment in my constituency today is 1%, so it is possible to make progress if the community works together and drives forward jobs.

[Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)]

Indeed, progress is being made in Coventry South, where the number of jobseeker’s allowance claimants has fallen 17% year on year. In the 18-to-24 age group, it has fallen 20% and the number of long-term unemployed in Coventry South has fallen 16% in the past year.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

But, of course, Opposition Members simply are not willing to acknowledge that there has been a persistent fall in unemployment. I am not sure that their dirge of pessimism will resonate with electors, however. This past week was a defining week. By Friday, the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions was acknowledging on “Any Questions?” that the Opposition would support the Government’s pension changes. She obviously had a busy weekend, because on Sunday she acknowledged in The Observer that Labour

“will vote for a cap on welfare spending to keep the overall costs of social security under control.”

Of course, the Chancellor has attached the welfare cap to the charter for budget responsibility in such a way that tomorrow, essentially, the Opposition will be voting for the coalition’s deficit reduction programme. Having spent pretty much all of this Parliament resisting every welfare reform and every attempt to reduce the budget deficit, at the end of the Parliament with just over a year to the next general election the Opposition are suddenly trying to catch up, accepting the fundamentals of the Government’s economic policy and recognising the strength of the Government’s long-term economic plan.

The Opposition can do the big stuff, but when it comes to the detail they still cannot quite bring themselves to acknowledge what they must do. They say that they will reverse the spare room subsidy. I still do not understand why they want to treat tenants in the social housing sector differently from the way in which they treated tenants in the private rented sector, notwithstanding that they will have to find nearly £500 million to reverse that policy. Where do they say the money will come from? The shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said again from the Dispatch Box today that it would come from taxing higher rate taxpayers through the winter fuel allowance, but that would bring in only £100 million. We can already see that they are about £400 million adrift on just that simple question. It is all very well talking the talk about signing up to the welfare cap, but they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what they will have to do to enforce that. Welfare budgets were completely out of control under the previous Government. The number of households in which no one had ever worked nearly doubled under Labour. This Government have taken difficult decisions to bring the benefits bill down, saving £19 billion a year for the taxpayer. The new welfare cap will ensure that never again will the costs of welfare be allowed to spiral out of control and never again will the incentives to work be distorted. The level of the cap will be allowed to rise only in line with forecast inflation. Of course people who have worked hard all their life deserve security in their retirement, so the cost of the state pension will be excluded from the cap, as will cyclical unemployment benefits. We need to see a welfare system that returns to the safety net that Beveridge intended, instead of the entrapment that it had become.

We have seen the Government make some brave and positive moves to get the welfare budget back under control. The latest workless household figures show a dramatic fall of 450,000 since 2010. We have record employment figures. I can recall at the beginning of this Parliament Opposition Members all saying that the Government’s long-term economic plan would lead to the disappearance of a million private and public sector jobs. What has actually happened since 2010 is that more than 1.7 million more people are employed in the private sector, which is more than four times the number of jobs lost in the public sector.

As we heard in an intervention from the hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon) in the speech of the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham), the Opposition’s answer to any conundrum is more public sector jobs. Their default position is still more public spending and more public sector jobs. In reality it is in the private sector that more jobs are being created. Indeed, almost 80% of the rise in private sector employment has taken place outside London, in constituencies such as mine and Coventry and in the constituency of probably every Member who has spoken in the debate. Almost 90% of the new jobs went to British nationals.

There are those, such as the Bank of England, who argue that the increase in employment has to a certain extent been as a consequence of the tightening of the eligibility requirements for some state benefits, which have caused people to see whether they cannot find their way back into the world of work. I visited one of the Work programme providers in my constituency the other day, which is doing a really good job of ensuring that the long-term unemployed get back into work. So the increase in private sector employment is now more than four times the number of jobs lost in the public sector. The rise in employment is being driven by businesses and entrepreneurs across the country who are feeling increasingly confident with the improving economy.

I have few large employers in my constituency. The continuous driving down of the unemployment rate month on month, week by week, in constituencies such as mine is being achieved by the private sector and by entrepreneurs, all of whom found measures in last week’s Budget that were supportive and which they supported.

We heard much about young people in the debate, but the number of young people in work has increased by 43,000 in the last three months alone, and the proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds not in employment, education or training is at its lowest in five years.

Employment is at a record high, up by over 1.3 million since the election. For the first time in three decades, the number of people employed in the UK is better than that in the United States. Unemployment in other European countries is going up, whereas unemployment in the UK is going down. That bodes well and will bode well for the Government come the general election next year.