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Pre-Budget Report

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. It was under his period at the Department for Work and Pensions that unemployment came down from 1.6 million to the 900,000 of today. He is absolutely right that the central question is how to persuade people to get the skills for the future. He knows that the train to gain programme, with which he was involved in the DWP, is now equipping 90,000 men and women in the workplace with the necessary adult skills. Only yesterday, I visited a college where men and women who had previously thought that they would never get a skill were encouraged to come into college to acquire it. Many of them were talking about starting their own businesses in the future. That is the way forward. I appreciate what my right hon. Friend says about Oxford. He is an excellent representative of the constituency around which a huge amount of science and innovation is going on. I can give him the assurance that we will continue to invest in science and innovation in his constituency.