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Unemployment

I am pleased to follow on from the concluding comments of the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen), because it is terribly important that this debate does not end up as a contest between different parties in which they make comparative claims as to who can offer the better quality of unemployment. Somehow, we have to reach beyond the merits, or otherwise, of jobcentres and Jobcentre Plus, to address the nature of employment in the UK, rather than the quality of unemployment. Probably the only good thing that we can say about any recession is that it gives the Government of the day, and the country, the chance to come out at a different place from where we went in. We do not have to try to reconstruct parts of the economy that have gone into recession and contraction, and that probably are not suited to the nature of the economy in which our children and grandchildren will have to find a secure place. So we can use the trauma of a recession to give ourselves a transformation moment, and that is what the House needs to discuss. That transformation moment must address not only where the work will be, but how we will create a society that is able to meet other non-negotiable obligations that we will all have to meet. That includes dramatic reductions in our carbon emissions—how we will achieve reductions in the ecological footprints that we place on society. I want to try to address the issue of unemployment in relation to those unavoidable obligations, and this is the key question that I want to ask of all parties and Members: where are the jobs that we see ourselves seeking to construct, in a society that will be able to live sustainably as we come out of the recession? In the past couple of weeks there have been two important reports that should be shaping this debate. This week, there was a report from the Met Office Hadley centre in Exeter, which said that, on our current policies, if all goes well we still probably have only a 50:50 chance of surviving this century. By implication—and, in some cases, quite directly—it is saying that nothing in the current framework of public policy, other than "a flip of a coin" prospect will deliver the scale of carbon reductions that will allow society to survive in any civilised way by the end of the century. It is telling us that we need a dramatic shift in our priorities, in our intervention strategies and in the jobs we seek to deliver in order to get us out of the mess we are in and into a different future. The second report that should frame the terms of reference of this debate is "A Climate for Recovery", which was produced by HSBC. It is an assessment of the intervention packages pursued by different Governments around the world in trying to address the recession into which we have all been thrown. It looks at how far the nature of our intervention strategies relates to a transformation moment rather than a recreation of the past. The report specifically produced a league table placing different countries in a pecking order based on their green stimuli. A great deal of publicity has been given to that, both in the UK and in other countries. The difficulty is the gap between what we claim and what we do. Just before the Prime Minister gave his press conference about this issue last week, the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and Al Gore had a letter published in the Financial Times. In that letter, they not only warned about the consequences of and threats to the world from climate change, but they pointed out the opportunities. They said that, worldwide, there are now more jobs in renewable energy industries than in the entirety of the gas and oil sectors. They thought that this represented not just a policy choice and shift but a real opportunity to bring together employment agendas and strategies for getting out of global crises. However, the HSBC report pointed out that, although Britain tries to claim that it wants to lead the world from the front, only £1.5 billion of our current economic recovery package goes into green initiatives and green stimuli. By comparison, France is spending three times as much, Germany is spending six times as much and China is spending 110 times as much, in straightforward cash terms. Britain may wish to lead the world, but it is difficult to do so from the back of the pack. To address the point slightly differently, I should point out that Lord Stern has said that in order for us to have a viable and sustainable economy for the future, this country needs to be spending about 20 per cent. of its economic recovery packages on green investments. The tragic thing is that the current figure for the UK is about 6 per cent. Even on those percentage terms, the UK compares badly with other countries facing the same recessionary problems. Germany is spending 13 per cent. of its economic recovery package on green stimuli, and the figures for France, China and South Korea are 21, 38 and 81 per cent. respectively. Those are real resources going into a green transformation to deliver sustainable jobs for a sustainable future. It is somewhat embarrassing to read the HSBC report, because the UK is one of only three of the evaluated countries that it puts into a category referred to as "pending". I do not think that we have a way out of the recession if our intervention measures cannot get beyond the category of "pending". It is the gap between the promises and the delivery that leaves us in this "pending" category. I do not doubt for one moment the good intentions of Ministers and Secretaries of State in different Departments. The difficulty is levering the matter out of the Treasury, so that the recovery measures for the real economy can be at least as generous as they have been for the financial economy, which got us into the mess in the first place. The real challenge that we have to address is the fact that the Government, as well as the Opposition parties, need an employment strategy, not an unemployment strategy. It is not enough for the Opposition to table a motion that barely mentions an employment strategy. That is the great weakness of what the House is being invited to vote on today. It is helpful that at least the motion refers to the national loan guarantee scheme. I thought that it said a lot about the Opposition that it was not mentioned at all in the speech made by their Front-Bench spokesperson. It fell to the Secretary of State to refer to the scheme, but at least there is recognition that it is an important part of the platform that we have to address. My concern is that the House should describe fairly specifically the nature of the scheme. I invite the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, the Secretary of State and the House to consider the model for such a scheme that can be found in a microcosm of the UK economy. In Kirklees, a remarkable initiative known as the RE-Charge scheme has offered households interest-free loans of up to £10,000—as a second charge against the house, redeemable only at the point of sale—to enable them to shift into energy-saving and energy-generating systems. The response has been overwhelming. The lesson for us is that giving the public the chance to make that shift shows a hunger in the land to live more sustainably and more lightly than we do at the moment. We need to start to attach such conditions to the way in which a national loan guarantee scheme should work. It is not enough to talk about guaranteeing a business just because it is in business. We have to use the levers of intervention mechanisms to deliver a business that will be fit for the future rather than a legacy of the past. The way in which the scheme needs to be extended has been set out for us in the references made by the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) to the follow-up report produced by the Renewable Energy Association. I am sure that other organisations around the country are able to spell out where the jobs might be, but the REA is the first that I have come across that has tried to do so. It has said to the Government, for instance, that if we were to expand the low-carbon building programme to deliver 70,000 renewable energy systems in the next two years, that could deliver 10,000 jobs. Those jobs would go to people in the construction industry who are being discarded from jobs and who have skills, rather than our having to deliver those skills from scratch. The tragedy is that, if we lose the skills, by the time we make that transformation the only people who we will find to do the work will probably be in France, Germany or other parts of Europe, where they are already intervening to give themselves the skills base, and the jobs base, for a different future. If we were to extend the programme, that would allow the Government to deliver the commitments that we have made to turn 7 million houses in the UK into energy-efficient houses by 2020. We will need those skills if we are to make that transformation and act even remotely to timetable. If we extend the thinking behind the conditionalities of the national loan guarantee scheme, we can see how it could impact in various other sectors. In transport, for instance, we should not offer loan guarantees for the purchase of yesterday's vehicles instead of tomorrow's. Germany has introduced a scrapping scheme under which people are paid incentives to trade in their old cars in favour of low-carbon vehicles—the vehicles of tomorrow. The scheme will keep people in car manufacturing in work, but for tomorrow's models rather than yesterday's. Britain could do the same. To underpin the 2012 Olympics, the Government could make a simple commitment to convert 500 buses and other vehicles in London to run on biomethane. That shift in sustainability could be part of a national strategy to provide jobs, vehicles and transport systems, and it is an example of the direction in which we must move. In the energy sector, we need to bring forward our commitment to feed-in tariffs. We must not allow their introduction to slip back to 2010, because we need them this year. We need Government funding for demonstration projects on heat networks, biogas injection into the grid, smart grids and decentralised transmission networks. We also have to remove restrictions on the carbon emissions reduction targets—CERT—so that we can replace the 4 million band G boilers. All of those changes would translate into jobs, and that will be the test against which the Government are judged. The Government should not be judged on promises, or on the network of jobcentres or Jobcentre Plus offices. They should be judged on where the jobs will be delivered tomorrow. It is right for the UK to want to lead the world, but to do that we have to change the plan. If that is going to happen, it will be driven by deeds from the front, not by words from the back.