Lord Skidelsky
Main Page: Lord Skidelsky (Crossbench - Life peer)
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)
It is the turn of the Lib Dem Benches.
Lord Katz (Lab)
Of course, I completely agree with my noble friend; I will offer just one illustration of that. Under the last Government, long-term sickness became the most common reason why people were economically inactive for the first time. It reached a new, record high of 2.8 million people. This is a shameful record, and not something that they should be preaching to us on.
Lord Katz (Lab)
The noble Lord has raised a number of factors there, and I do not want to take up too much time in the House going through them one by one. For example, I have already talked about the Employment Rights Act and how that is about benefiting millions of employees. Also, to be absolutely clear, we are taking active measures on energy costs. We are working with Sir Charlie Mayfield to ensure that when people get work, they stay in work, and lots of employers are working with him. He is working with over 120 businesses, which employ 5 million workers, as part of the vanguard phase of his plan to ensure that we do not just get people working but keep them working. I understand the challenges that this Government face in fixing the mess that the previous Government made over the previous 14 years, but we cannot undo 14 years of damage in merely 18 months.
Lord Skidelsky (CB)
My Lords, in view of the continuing high level of long-term unemployment, would the Government seriously consider the TUC proposal for a national job guarantee with wage subsidy to employers for up to six months, targeted at the most vulnerable areas? Would they further consider the argument that the TUC has made that such a job guarantee would largely pay for itself by increasing revenues and reducing the spending on welfare?
Lord Katz (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for raising that interesting proposal. I do not know the detail of it, so I would have to take it away. However, that is very much what we are doing with an element of our youth guarantee, as we heard earlier from my noble friend Lady Smith. That is about giving a six-month guaranteed job for young people who have been receiving universal credit and looking for work for more than 18 months. That is the kind of model that we are trying out to tackle that particularly hard-to-get-to and important part of unemployment.