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Work Programme (Wales)

I do not know what the Secretary of State has against graduates getting jobs. If lots of time has been spent from the ages of three to 21 giving them a good education, a little £5,000 primer to get them back into employment would be a good return on that investment. I thank her for that helpful intervention. We need proper jobs, because there cannot be a jobs policy without jobs. The ““Panorama”” programme that I quoted before was titled ““A Job to Get Work””. It certainly is a job to get work under this Conservative Government, when 83 people, as I quoted before, are seeking one job in the Rhondda. Establishing jobs fairs is one thing—or is it jobs unfair?—but is it fair if 83 people are being taken along for one job? People’s hopes are being raised and dashed. They are being taken on a point of a stick. We have proved in the Vale of Clwyd that such things can be achieved in a co-operative and collegiate way. If the language and terminology that is eking and seeping out of the Conservative party is used, it will affect the 70 partner organisations on Rhyl city strategy, including state ones such as Jobcentre Plus and the careers service. Many of the organisations are from the voluntary sector and the public sector. They will pull away if they think that it will be forced upon them and rammed down people’s throats. It can be demoralising and dehumanising. Let us look at the macro picture. It is interesting that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has now said, in today’s or yesterday’s press, that the coalition will have to get a package of capital investment together to prime the economy. Is that too little, too late? Have the Government gone too far, too fast? I think that they have. We cannot cut our way to growth. An old capitalist maxim is that we have to speculate to accumulate. We have proved it here in north Wales with the example I that gave of Airbus, where £450 million in launch aid, to be paid back, resulted in 6,500 jobs rising from the ashes of Shotton steelworks, which suffered the biggest single lay-off in not only the UK, but the whole of Europe, when 7,000 men were sacked on one day in 1981. Now, owing to Labour’s investment in that area, it has one of the most successful micro-economies in the whole country. We need to invest. The Under-Secretary asks, ““Chris, where are we going to get the money from?”” but where are we going to get the £46 billion of additional borrowing that we have had to go in for because the figures are wrong? The figures that were forecast last year are wrong, so the Government will have to do another £46 billion of borrowing. On top of that, the figure for inflation in September, which came out yesterday, was 5.2%. The September figure is used to uprate benefits. Everybody on benefits will have them uprated by 5.2%. That is an extra £4 billion or £5 billion. The more people that are put on the dole, the more dole the Government have to pay. That is basic economics. The Conservative party was not left with a golden legacy, but it was left with a nascent recovery, where unemployment was going down and growth was going up. All the statistics for the past 15 months, since the coalition was put in place, are heading south, and they will all go even further south.