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Unemployment

The number tripled under the Conservative Government. It went from 700,000 to 2.6 million. It is only because of our policies that it is starting to fall. I am happy to deal with welfare reform at the end of my speech, but I shall go through it in the right order. We know the history of previous Tory Governments and their mistakes, but the extraordinary thing is that the Opposition want to repeat those mistakes. It is as though they believed that the '80s and '90s were not mistakes, and that they followed exactly the right policy all along. They are not prepared to pay the cost of increasing borrowing, so they would not be prepared to help people back into work over the next two years. We would therefore pay the cost over the next two decades, as we have over the past two. When it comes to the Tory response to unemployment, it is not about theories. It is about the history of our constituencies and of too many families that were abandoned by the Tories' policies. The danger of the right hon. Lady's policy is that that could be the situation in the present, too. It is important to ask ourselves what an employment policy without the extra £2 billion would look like. That is the question that she wants desperately to avoid. In considering that question, let us start with the rapid response service. Today, if a company announces redundancies, it is helped by the rapid response service. We announced last November that we would double the funding for the service, and we will double it again next year. That is not fantasy policy but real delivery. The right hon. Lady said that we have announced policies but not actually delivered them. Through the rapid response service we have already helped more than 800 companies, and we will continue to help. That is not fantasy policy but real delivery that is helping people, through jobs fairs, advice on writing a CV, debt advice and reskilling. If the Tories had their way, of course, those things would not be funded and we would have to cut the rapid response service.