Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between William Bain and Jim McGovern

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

3. What steps he is taking to improve competition in energy markets.

[Jim McGovern (Dundee West) (Lab)]

4. What steps he is taking to improve competition in energy markets.

Remploy Factories

Debate between William Bain and Jim McGovern

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Streeter, and to have secured this debate on behalf of Remploy workers and their families in my constituency and across the country.

Tomorrow is the day of judgment for the Chancellor’s failure to grow the economy, but today is the day of decision for this Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey). The honour of serving in the Government comes with responsibilities, and the hon. Lady and her colleagues must accept that it is not just the Chancellor’s fiscal and growth policies that are not working, but her Department’s strategy on long-term unemployment among the disabled, which has been worsened by the short-sighted and ruinous decisions to close 31 Remploy factories across the country this year. Now, 46 jobs in the Springburn Remploy factory in my constituency hang in the balance, and it is to those dedicated workers that the Minister must give hope, and clear answers, today.

The Minister will no doubt remind me that there have been Remploy factory closures before, under different Governments, but the economic, and particularly the employment, climate are now very different. This is the longest journey out of an economic slump for 140 years, with median wages in Scotland falling by 7.9% in the past two years. We need only look at the closed stores on our high streets to see the effects that the lack of demand is having on the spending power of local communities. If unemployment in general is far higher than it should be, nearly four years from the low point of the recession, how much worse is the picture for disabled people?

There are 63,000 more disabled people out of work than a year ago, and 554,000 of them out of work in total, which is a record high since figures were separately allocated for the disabled.

[Jim McGovern (Dundee West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this very important debate. I have visited the Remploy factory in my constituency so many times now that I am on first-name terms with almost all the members of the work force. They seem to be a happy work force. They are happy to stay where they are and do not wish to go elsewhere. Does my hon. Friend not agree that it seems a perverse Government policy to throw disabled people on to the dole, against their wishes, and then tell them that if they do not find alternative work they must work for nothing or have their benefits cut?

[Mr Bain]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend highlights precisely the complete lack of logic in the proposals, at this time when the disabled, young people and people in long-term unemployment are encountering the toughest employment conditions in decades.