---

Unemployment

Actually, my right hon. Friend said that we have to look at that, and that is what we are doing. One of the uses to which we are putting the money from the pre-Budget report is increasing the amount going to the flexible new deal, precisely because the costings are increasing. However, the hon. Gentleman can ask me about that issue again when I turn to it later in my speech. I was glad that the right hon. Member for Maidenhead recognised that job clubs already exist. Perhaps she should tell the Leader of the Opposition, because he keeps saying that we should introduce them. The truth is that job clubs continued after her Government lost power, but we modernised them, contracting with the private and voluntary service providers to deliver them. What we announced yesterday was an extra £40 million to ensure that we can widen the service and ensure that everybody gets a service that is personalised to them, so that, for instance, professionals and blue-collar workers get the right service for them. That is exactly the right thing to do and, since the right hon. Lady asked, the programme will start in April, along with the rest of the six-month offer. [Interruption.] She says, "Along with everything else," but that is when we said we would introduce the programme. We announced in January that we would introduce it in April and we will introduce it in April. She may not realise that the difference between being in opposition and being in government is that people actually have to do things in government—they cannot just put out a press release on something and somehow it magically comes along. When people want to do things in government, they need a certain amount of time to implement them. We said that the programme would start in April and it will start in April. Let me turn to welfare reform. As I am sure the right hon. Lady would agree, the Government have made strong—and in some respects remarkable—progress on welfare reform over the past 10 years. That is a genuinely impressive record. Does she disagree with the soon-to-be-Lord Freud's views on that issue? No. So I am sure that she will agree with him that we have made remarkable progress over the past 10 years. She will welcome the fact that 300,000 more lone parents are in work now than in 1997. She said that the level of people on sickness benefits was too high in this country. Actually, it was lower than in Finland, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Australia and the United States. This country was at the bottom of the league of international comparison, precisely because we reformed the welfare state and had a labour market that got people into work.