Covid-19: Low-income Families

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

The Government have put £9 billion into the welfare system to help the poorest. As I said in my original Answer, the bottom 10% have not had their income lessened at all. I know how passionate the noble Baroness is about this, and I respect her tenacity in raising it on a regular basis. I have put my head above the parapet and organised an all-Peers briefing session on the benefit cap, with the Minister for Employment, next week. I am sure these issues will be talked about in greater detail then. I extend an invitation to all noble Lords to attend that briefing.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD) [V]]

In 1942, William Beveridge introduced his report which led to the welfare state and the NHS. We are still facing the same giants that he was tackling at that time: squalor, want, idleness, ignorance and disease. Is it not time that we had another commission like that, and found an outstanding person with Civil Service colleagues to produce a report that will really tackle the long-term issues facing us?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I can only assure the noble Lord, and the whole House, that the excellent civil servants we have got, and the partners that we work with at DWP, are all the time trying to find better ways to deliver services to people so that they can realise their destiny.

Poverty Programmes: Audit

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I am absolutely confident that the core architecture of universal credit is doing what it is designed to do, which is to encourage people to move towards greater independence. I simply do not agree with many of the conclusions of the Resolution Foundation.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, does the refusal to let asylum seekers work until they have been here for 12 months—and for them to be in poverty during those 12 months—enhance the Ministers?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, there is a different process for asylum seekers. However, once they have the right to remain, they are entitled to our welfare support.

Unemployment: Young People

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, we have a number of programmes aimed at getting youngsters into the workforce all around the country. There is a mixture of the Work Programme, the flexible support scheme, the sector-based work academies and work experience. We are using a whole range of programmes to help youngsters into the workforce. They are working not just in London but right around the country. Clearly, we just have to stay on the issue and make sure that we get everyone in every part of the country into the workforce.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, do these new figures, which have a bit of sunlight about them, depend upon our continued membership of the European Union? Is there not something we could do to encourage young people to cross borders to other countries so that they get work experience in different places and build bridges of understanding for the future?

[Lord Freud]

The fundamental driver of these much sunnier figures is clearly our economy, which is now the fastest growing of the major economies. It is vital that we keep that process going. It is also vital that we have a benefits system that encourages and enables people to go into the workforce rather than being blocked from going into it.

Youth Employment

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Wednesday 30th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am keen to reaffirm that the Youth Contract is both comprehensive and working. One element, the wage incentive, has now helped more than 65,000 youngsters into jobs. The other elements of the programme are performing powerfully: 148,000 youngsters have started work experience on the programme, and 46,000 have gone into sector-based work academies.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, while I congratulate the Government on what has been achieved, the Minister surely understands the great devastation of youth unemployment, not only in the UK but throughout Europe. It is destroying hope and potential. Can we not now initiate a new European-wide project to somehow lower that figure across the board and restore hope to so many young people?

[Lord Freud]

Youth unemployment is different in its nature from general unemployment in that there is a scarring effect for the young if they do not get into the workforce early. We therefore need to make extra effort to get youngsters into the workforce, which many of our measures are designed to do. There has been a real recasting of support for youngsters, whether through training, education or apprenticeships, and we are providing this support for them through the Work Programme, the jobcentres and work experience. We have myriad programmes, and they are actually having an effect. We are now seeing very steep falls. It is not yet good enough but it is moving aggressively in the right direction.

EU: Youth Unemployment (EUC Report)

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity briefly to intervene and thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, her committee and the team for their work. This is one of the most important issues that we face today. We have a generation, not only in Europe and the UK but throughout the world, of young people unable to dream of or aspire to any particular career, but in many ways wasting their lives. It can be a cause not only of great despair to them but of great danger. Where we have unrest, we have what comes from that unrest, which is a danger to democracy itself. I thank the committee for this report.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, has just mentioned careers advice. That is why I am intervening: to make sure that we realise how important it is to have the best advice possible in our own country. At a time when we are cutting school budgets and so on, we must in no way demote careers advice and the guidance and mentorship in our schools which comes from that. It is so important that we can somehow give every child the best possible advice—and not by simply sitting him or her in front of a computer. There must be somebody who cares and understands, and possibly has a family in the same sort of situation. That is vital. That could of course lead to Jobcentre Plus, and I would like to know exactly what the link is between that and careers advice in schools. We must put this at the top of the agenda.

We should look not only at youngsters but at young people who want a second chance at their careers—who perhaps took the wrong road in the beginning, thinking that it would be easy. I could say that of myself: in school I chose Welsh instead of French because I already spoke Welsh. It was the easy way out. So often, we can make those wrong choices in our lives.

There is a lot more to be discussed, but this report is a step in the right direction. As other noble Lords have mentioned, the unemployment situation is not a level blanket across the country. You have places in the north-east and the valleys of south Wales, even though they are not included in this list, where the need is far more desperate than elsewhere. I looked at this list and there is such a difference between Wolverhampton and Wokingham: in one area you have possibly three times the unemployment rate of the other. In the north-east we have 25% of young people unemployed, whereas it is 15% in the south-east—so we need to prioritise.

We must not forget the other areas. How we do it, I do not know, but John Wesley would say, “Go to those who need you most”. That is my sort of thinking on this issue, and I thank noble Lords for giving me the opportunity to join in.

Youth Unemployment

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the figures show that the long-term unemployment figure is still 6% higher than it was in 2010, on top of the doubling that was seen under the previous Government. I am absolutely behind training because it is the way to help people, particularly youngsters, get into the labour market. The trouble is that when things such as training allowances are used as a way of distorting the underlying problem, it misleads people. Indeed, I think it has misled a lot of Members on the other side of the House.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, first, is the Minister satisfied with the quality of the interviews being conducted by Jobcentre Plus and with careers advice in schools? Secondly, does he agree that we need to look very much at the core unemployment rate, which is a major problem that the Government are not succeeding in solving, whichever party is in power?

[Lord Freud]

We are looking to improve careers advice in schools and Ofsted has confirmed that it will give this guidance a higher priority. Reducing unemployment is clearly a central objective for this Government, and I thought it was interesting that a couple of weeks ago the Financial Times reported that we have now overtaken the United States in our participation rate, a rate that normally falls during a recession. We have also been pushing employment up in the key 25 to 35 year-old group between 2007 and 2013.

Welfare: Cost of Family Breakdown

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I will have to write to the noble Lord; I do not have that figure at my fingertips.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, what contribution do the Government make to the work of Relate and similar organisations?

[Lord Freud]

We support a number of charities supporting marriage. I do not think that I have to hand the exact level of that support in monetary terms. However, the figure is available and I shall write to the noble Lord to provide it.

Employment: Young People

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the figures the noble Baroness quoted are very distorted by the training allowances, which got people off the long-term measure. I will not go into a long song and dance about it, but those figures were the result of a very distorted comparison. I have quoted the real figures—the ones that matter—to this House on a regular basis. When you look at youngsters who are both workless and outside full-time education, that figure rose through the longest boom we have seen in our history because of structural inability to get those youngsters into the workforce. There was neither adequate education nor routes into the workforce. We are turning those figures round—and they are the real figures.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

May I ask the Minister how we monitor the success of these training schemes and apprenticeships? How many are effective in providing long-term, standard employment when their training or term of apprenticeship comes to an end?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is vital that we have routes that lead into long-term, sustained employment and into being part of the economic life of the country. It is a bit early to look at the apprenticeship figures yet, because they are long term, but if you look at the work experience figures, nearly half the people on work experience were off benefits 21 weeks after starting a placement. That is more or less the kind of figure we saw with the Future Jobs Fund. The difference is that this work experience cost one-20th of what the Future Jobs Fund cost the previous Government.

Employment: New Jobs

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Well, my Lords, I have very good news for the noble Lord. We are currently restructuring the benefits system to help with that productivity issue. One of the things that universal credit does is to make sure that we have as flexible a labour force as possible. That is something that employers around the country welcome.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

As we welcome those throughout the European Community who come to work in the hospitality industries—I come from a seaside resort—what is the Minister doing to encourage UK youngsters to take up jobs in the hospitality industry?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, one of the most enthusiastic sectors to adopt the sector-based work academies was the hospitality industry. The industry has a programme to make sure that people have training, work experience and then a chance of a job, and that has been going very well in that particular sector.

Unemployment: Youth Unemployment

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to create all-party consensus to tackle long-term youth unemployment.

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

My Lords, we are providing young people with the help they need to get back to work through Jobcentre Plus, the youth contract, the Work Programme, traineeships and apprenticeships. Our approach is working. Over the past year, the number of JSA claimants aged 18 to 24 has dropped by 84,800. We have also made £55 million available to cities for them to develop new and innovative ways of reducing long-term youth unemployment.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

I am sorry that the Minister does not seem to share my deep concern about the problem of youth unemployment. Is he aware that 21% of young people aged between 16 and 24 are currently out of work? Does he know that long-term youth unemployment has more than quadrupled in the past 10 years? Some 115,000 18 to 24 year-olds have been out of work for two years or more. Whichever parties are in government in 2015, they will have to tackle long-term unemployment. We have tried to tackle this problem over the past 10 to 20 years. We must tackle it together and we must share the concern. If we cannot share the concern, is it not time to put our differences aside and to work together to resolve this nightmare situation for thousands of our young people? Will the Minister lead us in arranging some measure of co-operation?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the short answer is no. The policies of the previous Government were extraordinarily expensive. The Future Jobs Fund was introduced by the previous Government. At the time, I was in the department as an independent adviser, and that shocked me somewhat. It cost £6,500 for each job and half the people were back on benefits at the end. That is more or less the same performance as the work experience programme, which costs only one-20th.

I agree that the figures about which my noble friend is so concerned are a real concern and have been for a long time. I look at the figures for the unemployed and inactive youth. In 1997, it was 1.1 million youngsters. By 2010, after the longest boom in our history, it had risen to 1.4 million. Under this Government, in the worst recession since not the 1930s but the 1920s, it has come down 89,000 to 1.2 million. That is the way in which to have proper policies to handle the structural problem of youth unemployment.