Amendment of the Law

Debate between Ben Gummer and Stephen Twigg

Monday 23rd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is absolutely right to make that point as we seek to understand the reasons for that and find solutions. I will come to that next.

I pay tribute to the employment, enterprise and skills select committee of Liverpool city council and its chair, Councillor Barry Kushner, for undertaking painstaking research that shows the extent of this problem. Their work has revealed that there are currently about 6,500 vacancies in Liverpool, over half of which are agency jobs. The council has identified the Swedish derogation as a major cause of the increase in exploitation. This derogation allows for agencies to employ staff directly and the eventual engager—the employer—to treat workers less fairly than their directly employed workers. Without the derogation, the system would still allow for the use of agency workers, which can still be of real use in various sectors, but the engager would be obliged to give the agency workers the same rates of pay as their permanent staff after a 12-week period in employment. The two local people I met who have been working for years at the same factory, but are paid less than the colleagues they are working alongside, feel like second-class citizens. Reforming this area would make a real difference for them. That is why I am delighted that my hon. Friend the shadow Business Secretary has promised that a Labour Government would end the Swedish derogation for agency regulations—a change that cannot come soon enough.

Other long-term changes need to be made. To tackle the structural problems of a low-pay, low-skilled job market, we need to ensure that entrants to that market have the appropriate skills. As a country, we have failed for far too long in this respect. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has talked about the “forgotten 50%”—the young people who do not get the opportunity to go to university. It is welcome that fewer young people are unemployed, but our youth unemployment rates are still significantly higher than those of countries such as Germany, Austria and Norway that have invested in high-quality technical, vocational and practical education that breaks down the barriers between different sorts of learning.

We need to strengthen devolution within England. That is why the Andrew Adonis review recommended an English devolution Act, a central plank of which would be to devolve powers and funding for skills, and commission 19-plus further education provision based on local decision making. On top of this, city and county authorities should have the power to commission the Work programme in order to get the long-term unemployed back to work. I pay tribute to Liverpool’s mayor, Joe Anderson, and to Liverpool city council for the extraordinary work they have done to promote apprenticeship and work opportunities for people of all ages, but particularly young people.

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a speech of characteristic subtlety, which is why he is no longer on the Opposition Front Bench. He is making some good points about apprenticeships. Does he not regret that the Leader of the Opposition has pledged to end all level 2 apprenticeships across the country on a blanket determination, which will do more damage to people’s ability to learn good skills than any other policy that anyone is proposing in this House?

[Stephen Twigg]

That is not what the Leader of the Opposition has said. I worked on that policy. We want to ensure that apprenticeships are high quality, learning from the countries I mentioned that have a great track record in this area. Our policy is not the policy to which the hon. Gentleman referred.

I appear not to have received the extra minute for the intervention that I think I should have had, Mr Speaker. Should I have that extra minute?

The Economy

Debate between Ben Gummer and Stephen Twigg

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but it is the only one that I will take. I want to give other colleagues on both sides a chance to speak. We have heard a lot about Labour’s legacy, and about where Labour stands, and we get severely misrepresented by the Government parties opposite. We are not denying the deficit. We adopted a plan to halve it over the four years of a Parliament. We have been very clear that we would have made cuts in public spending, that we support some of the cuts that are now being made, and that certain tax increases would have happened under a Labour Government.

The real challenge in this debate is to address the questions of growth and employment. There is no value in cutting public spending as the Government are doing if it damages the prospects for growth. The impact on the economy is that tax revenues go down, unemployment goes up, benefit costs therefore rise and the deficit position gets even worse. My right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor reminded the House earlier about what both the parties that are now in government said when they were in opposition. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) has pointed out that the then Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister, said in July 2008 that

“we are sticking to Labour’s spending totals.”

That was the view on the Conservative Front Bench in July 2008. In fact, my hon. Friend did not quote him in full; the right hon. Gentleman went on to describe those Labour spending totals as “tight”. The views that the current Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer are now expressing are not the ones that they held at that time.

A year ago, in the emergency Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said:

“In this Budget, everyone will be asked to contribute…everyone will share in the rewards when we succeed. When we say that we are all in this together, we mean it.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 167.]

Our motion today welcomes the recent fall in unemployment, and I have heard hon. Members on the Government Benches talk about falls in unemployment in their constituencies, but are we really all in it together? Let us look at the figures.

[Ben Gummer]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Stephen Twigg]

I will not take any more interventions, for reasons of time.

We have seen a small increase over the past year in the number of jobseeker’s allowance claimants. I want to compare two different constituencies in the north-west: my own, and another one just down the road, called Tatton. In Liverpool, West Derby, we have seen the number of JSA claimants rise over the past year by almost 5%. In Tatton, the number has fallen by 4%. [Interruption.] Well, I would love to know who the MP is who can make that much difference in a year. Somehow I doubt that that is possible. There are 4,000 JSA claimants in my constituency, and 1,000 in that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I sometimes think that Government Members underestimate the scale of anger in constituencies such as mine, which went through the experience of living through a Tory Government in the 1980s and have a sense that they are going through exactly the same experience again now.