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Work Programme (Wales)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton. To respond to the point made by the hon. Member for Arfon about selective VAT reductions, jobs cannot be disaggregated from the economy, and it would be prudent to consider making selective reductions or cuts in VAT now to get more life into the construction industry. I reiterate the sentiment that I am pleased to be in Wrexham. Being here is becoming a bit of a habit. I was here for the Eisteddfod on a glorious day in the summer, and this is the second time in a week that I have been in Wrexham, because I was here over the weekend when the Welsh Liberal Democrats had a very encouraging conference. It was very confident and bullish, a statement which I am certain no one can contradict because, looking round the room, I cannot see any other Liberal Democrats. Although I am pleased to be in Wrexham, we sometimes have difficulties reconstructing our diaries to ensure that we have a good turnout, so I encourage the usual channels to ensure that everyone is aware that we should put dates such as these in our diary. From a Liberal Democrat point of view, we would certainly have been pleased to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central, because of her role as co-chair of the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party committee on work and pensions. With her co-chair Lord German, she supports and encourages the Department for Work and Pensions in the coalition Government and, given her expertise on the Work programme and DWP affairs, she would have made a very knowledgeable contribution. I know that, under the coalition Government’s protocol, she works very closely with her Department. Not only diaries, but matters such as child care arrangements cannot be altered at short notice, and we need more information so that all that can be put in place. I am particularly concerned about the unemployment of young people, as I have been for many years. The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and I worked on the Development Board for Rural Wales for several years, trying to bring employment into rural Wales, particularly in manufacturing. One of the directors was a Scottish gentleman, Professor Jim—I cannot think of his name at the moment. However, I always remember that he said there are two approaches to encouraging jobs or to looking for inward investment. We can look either for the high-quality skilled jobs that will be there for the duration or for the more easily attracted types of employment, such as the so-called ““screwdriver”” or manufacturing jobs that do not need many skills. He used to say, ““Sometimes you can shoot at anything that flies and claim anything that falls.”” His message was that we have to be more selective about attracting inward investment to Wales, and that has proved to be the case in relation to employment. Many of the jobs that we attracted into Wales—not just into mid Wales, but into south Wales, in particular—were manufacturing jobs. Those jobs were there while companies could see the financial sense in maintaining them, but when they could get cheaper labour those jobs were very often lost from Wales to low-cost countries in the far east or eastern Europe. All the work that the Government do in encouraging employment and encouraging people into employment, must be seen against the background of the general economic and business environment. If we are to ensure more prosperous times and have better employment opportunities in Wales than at the moment, we must invest in the education and training of our young people. Employers looking to invest are looking not only for facilities and accommodation for the business, but people with the necessary skills, the people they want to recruit. Sadly—and I am not making a political point—we have seen educational qualifications and attainment in Wales going backwards over the past few years. We have just seen the PISA report, which puts us fairly low down the pecking order, below our colleagues in the other countries of the United Kingdom. Our results at GCSE have now fallen below those in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland.