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Work and Skills

We would certainly join forces with the hon. Gentleman and others in giving individual help to people. I invite him to look at our proposals to put in place a funding mechanism to allow that help to be provided, including to the hardest to help. Under our proposals, they would not be at the back of the queue while the ““easier”” people are helped first. We should not allow ourselves to be misled by the picture that is sometimes painted about the level of employment in the UK. In part, that picture reflects the number of people from both inside and outside the EU who come here to work. In those circumstances, talking about the level of employment is not the same as getting economically inactive people back to work. Ministers need to be aware of the scale of what is happening with people from inside and outside the EU coming here to work, and its effect on the employment level. Two weeks ago, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions asserted that"““800,000 more UK-born people are in work than there were in 1997.””—[Official Report, 7 October 2008; Vol. 480, c. 205.]" A different complexion is put on that figure by what the national statistician told me this week in a written parliamentary answer. She said that, over the same period, 1.7 million people who are non-UK born have found work in the UK. Similar deep-rooted problems exist in the field of youth unemployment. It is a simple yet salutary fact that, despite all the claims made for the new deal, there are more unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds in the country today than there were in 1997. That may have been what led the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) to write of the new deal a week ago:"““It is little short of a calamity: 300,000 new dealers under 25 have had to enrol twice on the course, 88,000 have enrolled for a third time and more than 25,500 have started the scheme four or more times. The number of young people not in employment, education or training is at a record level””." Although I might not go quite as far as the right hon. Gentleman in calling the new deal a ““calamity””, I hope that we can all accept the finding of the recent report from the Social Market Foundation. It said that the recent performance of the new deal had been less than impressive and that the number of job outcomes had ““dropped significantly””. I hope that we can make common cause on the new deal, as the Minister's predecessor, the present Financial Secretary to the Treasury, wrote the foreword to the report and welcomed it. It is welcome that the Government have recognised the problems with the new deal, and that they have decided, in effect, to abolish the substance of the new deal programmes. We want to take a constructive approach to bringing help to unemployed and economically inactive people. We have brought forward our own proposals, and I commend them to the Minister. We have advocated the early assessment of people's needs, tailoring support to individual needs, sustained support, mentoring, getting people into sustainable jobs—an important thing in the present economic climate—and putting in place the funding mechanism that I have mentioned already and that will enable all that to be achieved. Of course, equipping people with the right skills will be very important in helping them to find work. It will also help to keep people in work who have found work after being unemployed, and help those who have yet to enter the labour market. Skills are vital for obtaining work and for making progress once in work. The Minister may have wanted to say a little more about skills if time had permitted, but the Opposition have brought forward our own very significant policy proposals in that regard. We are conscious of the background to the problem and of the challenges ahead, and recognise that much remains to be done to ensure that skills are as widespread as possible in our country. We understand that there are 5 million adults who are functionally illiterate, and several hundred thousand young people who are not in any kind of education, employment or training.