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Work and Skills

I shall certainly take that back, but I am sure that my hon. Friend knows the answer as well as I do. The broader point about sustainability has been well made, and it was a theme of our debate. Getting people back into work in a sustainable fashion is better than having a sort of merry-go-round, and being able to sustain apprentices in the small business sector is central to the experience and reward that individuals can get out of the process. That is why much of the £350 million refocus will be on the small and medium sector, as everyone knows. We are trying to concentrate on small businesses—a sector that may suffer more from the lack of skills and lack of speed in reskilling the local labour market. By doing that alongside the other fiscal things we are doing, we will try to sustain those small businesses. Much of the Government's focus over coming weeks and months will be all that I have described regarding the route from unemployment back into employment, but it will also be about wider fiscal interventions to ensure that jobs do not go in the first place, which is very much part of the equation. I take seriously the point of the hon. Member for Hertsmere about worklessness and lack of economic activity. We take seriously the focus on small businesses, and the point about being as local as possible, using intelligence and understanding the nuances in regional and sub-regional labour markets. That all relates to the point I made in my opening remarks about geographical and sectoral concentration of jobs and skills. As with the wider fiscal picture, in this area of all areas, within the context of the progress made thus far in periods of relative prosperity, as the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) said, we had better make sure that there is a flexibility to the new deal and everything else that the Jobcentre Plus network offers in periods of less than clement weather, if I can use that phrase. That will be the test. I sincerely think, based on what I have known as a constituency MP and as a Minister, that the Jobcentre Plus network is up to that test, as is the wider system, if the points about simplicity, local focus, flexibility and practicality are allowed to permeate the system during a period of economic downturn.