Employment: Universal Jobmatch

Debate between Lord Freud and Lord Dubs

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are their plans for the Universal Jobmatch website.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

As I stated last week, our plans are to continue to make improvements to the Universal Jobmatch site based on feedback from employers, jobseekers and staff.

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, is the Minister not just a bit embarrassed that the official government job website has about a third of a million bogus jobs on it, such as “MI6 target elimination specialist” or “International courier for CosaNostra Holdings”? If the Government are anxious to tackle fraud, should they not put their house in order immediately?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, there is a great deal of confusion around this. I am pleased to be able to straighten it out, because there has been a lot of misrepresentation. There is a small amount of fraud on the site, as there is on other sites. It is less than one in 1,000. We clear them off. This is a hugely successful site. It has more than 500,000 employers on it and nearly 6 million job searches a day. It has transformed the service of getting people back into work, which is of course now at record levels.

Child Poverty

Debate between Lord Freud and Lord Dubs

Tuesday 14th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on child poverty in the United Kingdom.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)]

My Lords, the IFS report is an interesting addition to the work on tackling child poverty in the UK, but the Government do not believe that it is possible to predict poverty levels with any certainty so far away. Poverty figures rely on the performance of the economy, on people’s behaviours and on government policy. As the report acknowledges, these cannot be predicted effectively over this timescale.

[Lord Dubs]

My Lords, it is disappointing that the Minister chose to brush aside a very sound piece of work, which I am sure he has read and looked at in great detail—or his officials have. Is it not alarming that a reputable organisation with sound analytical methods has predicted that child poverty is likely to increase by 1 million by 2020? Even if the figures are a bit out, the fact is that they are going up alarmingly, and child poverty is such a damaging blight on our society.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I have read the report with great interest and not relied on my officials. There are a lot of very valuable things in it. One of the most interesting things, as the noble Lord will be aware, is the uncertainty caused by the way in which absolute poverty is measured. The report says that because the rather unreliable RPI measure is used, the figure is 10 percentage points higher, whereas if the CPI measure were used it would be only 1.5 percentage points higher. The report states that we should look at that very closely, which we are doing.