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Unemployment

So the hon. Gentleman says, but one of Labour's key pledges was:""We will get 250,000 young unemployed off benefit and into work"." Today, as my hon. Friends have reminded the House, there are 140,000 more 16 to 24-year-olds unemployed than there were in 1997. That is the scale of the Government's failure. What is worse, however, is that it is not entirely connected with the present recession. The number of unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds started to rise long before this recession took hold. In their expert analyses, my hon. Friends the Members for Altrincham and Sale, West and for North-East Hertfordshire demonstrated that the Government's claims were a statistical fiddle, while throughout that time they were failing to provide the personalised help that people needed. Yesterday—my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) mentioned this—the Government told me in a written parliamentary answer that there were approximately 200,000 more young people aged to 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training than there were in 2000, when the recording of the so-called NEETs began. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says, from a sedentary position, "What about the 2 million?" I think that he would do better to spend his time thinking about the problems that people face today. He was happy talking about the claimant count in 1986; why will he not talk about the claimant count today, and about what should be done to bring it down? He must face the fact—he must admit—that his policies have not been the success that the Government wished. As the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) wrote in The Daily Telegraph last week—and he is in a position to know, if anyone is—the new deal has""not been the success that ministers claim."" Little wonder that the Government have chosen radically to alter, if not abolish, the mandatory new deal, and to put the flexible new deal in its place. As my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire pointed out, we want help to be provided for people, and we believe that our proposals would be far more effective in getting help to the unemployed. In the meantime, however, we need to ensure that whatever help is offered by the Government is put in place, and we need to hear a much clearer definition—a much clearer spelling out—of what will happen to the flexible new deal. Will the Government guarantee that it will be in place by 1 October this year? Thousands of unemployed people, including young unemployed people, want to know the answer to that question. Far too often, instead of providing the help that is needed, Ministers have presented a picture of what is happening that is very far from the experience of the thousands of our constituents who are obliged to visit jobcentres. In October, when we last debated this subject, the Secretary of State said that whatever problems we brought to light, we could not""detract from the fact that there are 600,000 vacancies in the economy".—[Official Report, 7 October 2008; Vol. 480, c. 205.]" I will be corrected if I am wrong, but I think that there was an interesting silence from the Secretary of State today on the subject of the number of vacancies in the economy. What was the reason for that eloquent silence? Could it be connected to the fact that since the Secretary of State gave that figure in October, the number of vacancies has fallen in every month? In January, to which the most recent figures relate, the number of vacancies was barely 500,000. As for the number of vacancies advertised in jobcentres, the situation is bleaker still: the number has fallen from 383,000 at the time when the Secretary of State made his comment to 271,000, the most recent figure.