---

Unemployment

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West (Mr. Jones), who made a powerful speech putting the position in north Wales into perspective. This debate has been interesting and wide ranging. I felt, however, that the Secretary of State got the mood of the House completely wrong in his opening remarks. Anyone who saw his performance, bouncing up and down at the Dispatch Box and taunting the Opposition, will have been very disappointed. We are talking today about the serious issue of unemployment, which really is not party political. Before I became a Member of Parliament, I had the unfortunate duty to make people redundant. Telling people that they no longer had a job was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. Many of them had worked for me for many years, and it was not their fault that they were losing their jobs. The mood of the House today has reflected situations such as those, with the exception of the Secretary of State's opening speech. I do not want to speak too long, but I want to raise two specific points that have not been made in the debate. First, however, I need to set my constituency in context. Unemployment in Wellingborough increased by nearly 100 per cent. increase over the past year. Jobcentre staff are doing an extremely good job, but it is very difficult for them to deal with what amounts to a 100 per cent. increase in their work load. They cannot provide the detailed support they would like to give to each claimant, as the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) said earlier. Claimants simply cannot be given the time and attention they deserve. Unfortunately, unemployment in Wellingborough is now 26 per cent. higher than it was in 1997. I remember the pressures on the Government at that time—a failing Government as people saw them then—when there was such massive unemployment. We see the same happening now, but the present Government show no real concern about what is happening out there in the country. My first point is about keeping people in work. Much of our debate has focused on how to help people who have lost their jobs, but it is important that we consider how to keep people in employment. I received a phone call yesterday from the managing director of a major employer in my constituency—I will not say who it is, but it is a major employer. This company has traded for many years and has run an extremely successful business. Like every other, however, it is seeing a downturn in demand—hardly surprising in the light of the recession expanding across the country. The managing director told me that the banks, instead of helping him, were making his life a misery. He told me that he had been with his bank for 40 years and that it had made a lot of money over that period, but instead of helping the company and asking how to make its life a bit easier by reducing interest rates, which the Government have cut nationally, to make it less painful, his bank proposed to increase interest by 2.5 per cent. That means that the company will have to pay £750,000 extra in a year.