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Work Programme (Wales)

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Havard, and thank the people of Wrexham and the county council for hosting us. I echo the Secretary of State’s praise for Linda Badman, whom I met on many occasions when I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales. She is a dedicated and an outstanding public servant. The Secretary of State invited comments on holding this Welsh Grand Committee in Wrexham and I would like her to consider a number of points. First, she should assess the number of members of the Committee who are otherwise active on Committees in Westminster and unable to come here. If we had held this sitting at Westminster, they would have been able to come to at least part of it. Secondly, this should not in any sense be seen as a rival to the National Assembly for Wales or to the Welsh Government. Thirdly, we should assess the additional costs to the taxpayer of holding this session here. Fourthly, if, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd indicated, she wants meaningful discussions about the future of the Welsh Grand Committee, she must listen. She should have listened to the demands from Members across all parties, including her own, to have a proper discussion about the demolition of Welsh representation in Parliament and the destruction of traditional communities and community identity in north Wales and right across Wales that will occur as a result of the reduction by a quarter of the number of Welsh MPs in Parliament, which her Government have driven through. Her offer to listen and to have a meaningful consultation would be taken much more seriously if she had listened in the first place, when there was a demand for a sitting of the Welsh Grand Committee. There is an ominous work crisis in Wales. Forgive me, but I feel really angry about the Secretary of State’s speech and the soothing and sultry words uttered by the Minister of State. What they describe bears no resemblance to the desperate situation in all our constituencies of young people who have no hope at all, of older workers who are losing their jobs and who have no prospect of finding another one, and of people whom my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East described as being frogmarched off incapacity benefit. They face a cut in their benefits and are being forced to look for work when employers do not want them. That disjunction between the reality on the ground and what the Government are saying in meetings such as this makes me wonder whether they are living on a different planet from the communities that we represent in Wales. This time last year, in October 2010, unemployment in Wales was falling. I welcomed that drop in this Committee last December, but warned that the figures might give a false sense of security. Barely three months later, by March of this year, the recovery had plainly lost momentum. Under the pressure of public spending cuts and tax rises, the jobless figures turned upwards and today, sadly, unemployment in Wales seems set to surge. The fastest rise in unemployment since the 1980s is happening under this Government. Ours is supposed to be an economy in recovery, but unemployment is higher than at any point since 1994. I was astonished when the Secretary of State compared the situation when we left office with the position now. We had just gone through arguably the worst banking crisis that the world has ever seen, and certainly the worst recession since the 1930s, yet she had the effrontery to make that kind of comparison. In fact, unemployment was falling when we left office as a result of the investment that we put in and the fiscal policies that we pursued, and the economy was beginning to grow. Unemployment was falling and businesses were expanding, but all those improvements have gone into reverse as a result of this Government’s economic policy, which is devastating Wales. Last week’s quarterly unemployment figures were a devastating verdict on the Government’s economic strategy. In Wales, the number of people in work fell by 26,000 on the previous quarter, and unemployment increased by 16,000 on the quarter to reach 131,000. The number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance increased by 800 on the previous month, and youth unemployment has never been higher since records began. One in five youngsters is out of work and there is every prospect of a lost generation similar to the one in the 1980s, which is a shocking indictment of this callous Government’s callous indifference and its obsessive dogma of cutting the deficit regardless of the economic and human consequences. The Minister of State, who at least talked about the Work programme, denigrated the future jobs fund. I find that insulting, as do many of my colleagues whose constituencies I visited to see the excellent work that the future jobs programme was doing, giving new hope and opportunity to thousands and thousands of young people in Wales. Because it paid the minimum wage for a set part of the week, those young people were given a lifeline and an opportunity, and they were queuing up to get into the programme. That is a very different picture from the one that we find under the Work programme.