Employment

Debate between Lord Freud and Lord Dobbs

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the trouble with Labour plans in this area is that they are extraordinarily expensive. The Future Jobs Fund, on which some of them are based, cost 20 times what Work Experience costs—and that produces just as good results. We cannot afford to have these artificial job creation schemes: we want real jobs in the real economy, and I am pleased to say that we now have the highest level of private sector employment that we have ever had.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

May I take this opportunity to apologise to noble colleagues on the Labour Benches, because a little while ago, on the subject of unemployment, I suggested that Labour Governments always end office with unemployment higher than when they went in? Is my noble friend aware that, according to the Office for National Statistics, since the war every Labour period of government has indeed ended with more people out of work? Is he further aware that those same statistics show that every Conservative Government have ended their period of office with more people in work? May I apologise to those on the Labour Benches for not having made that point clear enough in the first place?

[Lord Freud]

I am very pleased to answer my noble friend’s question. I was aware of those figures, and they underline the point: it is how you run the economy effectively that drives the employment figures, not how you manipulate those figures later with odd schemes.

Employment: Universal Jobmatch

Debate between Lord Freud and Lord Dobbs

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am pleased to say that I do know and can reconfirm what I said last week; I can actually amplify it. We are currently investigating about 17 sites for potentially being in breach of our terms and conditions. That does not mean that they are fraudulent; it just means that they may have mistakes in them, they may be duplicates, they may be from job boards, or there may not be a contract with the end user. That is what we mean by being not in compliance with our terms and conditions.

Universal Jobmatch is a very successful system. We are working closely with Monster and the contract runs to 2016. To the extent that there may be some misunderstanding and misrepresentation, the phrase “extend a contract” has a precise meaning: that you run a contract to a certain point, and do not go on extending but renew. We have a policy to work closely with Monster right up to 2016.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

Will my noble friend clear up some confusion? Every Labour Government there have ever been have promised to reduce unemployment —of course, because they believe in doing it. Yet every Labour Government there have ever been, from Ramsay MacDonald through Clement Attlee—if my noble friend will forgive me—Wilson, Callaghan and of course Blair and Brown, have left office with unemployment higher than when they came in. Does my noble friend think that there is anything on the website that might explain why that is?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, to run a successful economy you need to make sure that you do not run it into the ground. I am very pleased to say that with today’s figures the employment rate, if you exclude full-time students, is now running at the same high level it peaked at before the crash. Therefore we have managed to put the right structural changes in place to get employment up to as high a level as it has ever been.

Unemployment: Youth Unemployment

Debate between Lord Freud and Lord Dobbs

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am counting inactive people in the figures I am using, which are the best ones available. Clearly, under the previous Government many people were put in government training schemes and were not counted. We can play with numbers as much as we like but I am not playing with numbers—I am giving a very clear, long-term run of the most important set of figures on how we handle the structural problem of youth exclusion from the labour market.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, it is said that on a clear day some people in this Palace can see as far as Croydon. Will the Minister raise the sights of this House and get it to look as far, perhaps, as Greece or Italy, where the promise that unemployment could be solved by huge amounts of public debt has led not only to disaster but almost to despair? Does he accept that burying a future generation of our children in huge public debt is not only inept and does not solve the problem but, frankly, is immoral?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, my noble friend underlines our problem in his question. We have got to get this economy out of the mire of running a deficit of more than £100 billion every year so that it is rebalanced and we are economically self-sufficient within this generation. If we are not and we go on borrowing to the extent that we can, the people who pick up that tab will not just be our children but our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. That is not something we should want to leave to future generations.