Youth Unemployment

Alok Sharma Excerpts

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the Government was wrong to cancel the Future Jobs Fund that would have created 200,000 jobs for young people; further believes that the Government’s economic policies have slowed economic growth, raised youth unemployment and created the highest graduate unemployment for over a decade; further believes that urgent action is now required to stop a generation of young people being lost to worklessness; and calls on the Government to commission an independent assessment of the Future Jobs Fund to report to Parliament before the Government’s Work Programme is implemented and to evaluate whether a guarantee and requirement of work incorporated into the Programme would bring down youth unemployment in the short and longer term and limit steep rises in welfare payments.

I am glad that we have been able to force the Government to come to the House to debate the employment figures—or, rather, the unemployment figures—published this morning, because those figures will worry families, young and old, up and down the country. The headlines from this morning’s numbers are bad enough—five quarters after the recession ended, unemployment is not going down but up; employment is not rising but falling—but the details are, I am afraid, even worse. Private sector employment is flat, while the number of public sector jobs is falling fast. It is becoming clear that the private sector is not creating jobs fast enough to absorb the redundancies that we know are coming down the line. There are now more women on the claimant count than at any time since 1996.

The consequences for young people are perhaps most serious of all. One in five of our young people is now out of work; the number of unemployed has risen again; we now confront youth unemployment of almost a million—the highest figure on record. That figure is a wake-up call to this Government to get their act together. The question we want the House to debate today is quite simply, what should the Government do next?

As if we needed it, this morning’s figures are, if anything, fresh evidence of the need for a plan B on economic growth. We have rehearsed the debate in the House plenty of times over the past year, and I do not plan to do so again this afternoon. Suffice it to say that the Government are cutting spending too far and too fast. The recession having been over for a year, we would expect to see unemployment now falling fast, and yet it is not. Longer dole queues make the deficit not easier to pay down, but harder. The result is that working families end up paying the price.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman was part of a Government who presided over a record rise in youth unemployment. As his Government’s policies clearly did not work over 13 years, should he not, instead of carping from the sidelines, get behind the policies of the coalition Government, who are offering a fresh start to young people in this country?