Employment Support
Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Maria Miller
I understand the hon. Lady’s commitment to supporting disabled people in her constituency. There is a 90-day consultation period, so that will be completed and then we will talk to disabled employees about their futures. I hope we can continue to keep her up to date on that progress.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
The Minister gave a shambolic reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), in much the same way as she addressed Remploy workers and the House. What are the redundancy costs calculated to be, and what is the impact on businesses which are customers or suppliers?
Maria Miller
It is very difficult to give facts and figures when we are in consultation. That will depend on the outcome of the consultation. I am sure the hon. Gentleman will be able to be furnished with those figures when the consultation is complete.
Jarrow Crusade (75th Anniversary)
Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Chris Grayling
I do indeed. That is an indicator of the priority that this Government place on the north-east. It is a part of the country that, as we all accept, faces real challenges, and we want to do everything we can to help. Moving slightly down the country geographically, I was particularly gratified when the steel plant in Redcar was rescued and put back on the straight and narrow. I am delighted that steelworkers in Redcar are moving back into employment. That is the kind of change that I want to see in the north-east—a resurgence of the manufacturing sector.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Mr Hepburn) for securing this debate. Ellen Wilkinson, who was involved in the march and who was the MP for Middlesbrough East before being the MP for Jarrow, remarked at the time that the private sector investment that brought Jarrow back to its full manufacturing glory happened because there was public-led investment first.
Chris Grayling
I hope that today’s announcements of public funding to provide grant support to manufacturing, research and development, and infrastructure investment not only in the north-east, but in other parts of the country, will play their part in achieving the goal that we all share of growth in the private sector and unemployment coming down in the north-east.
Pensions Bill [Lords]
Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
May I just finish my answer to the right hon. Gentleman?
I am always happy to discuss the matter. There are complications, and there may be some issues about women, too, because contributions are an issue for many women at the moment, so we cannot take these things lightly. I recognise the work that the right hon. Gentleman has done, however, and I am very happy to discuss the issue beyond this Bill, as is the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb). For the purposes of the Bill, however, the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I stay to the point that we are going to equalise the retirement ages for men and women. The only question is, at what point?
Mr Duncan Smith
I am going to make some progress, but I give way to the hon. Member for St Helens North (Mr Watts).
Mr Duncan Smith
As I understand it, the pre-1975 data are very patchy and messy. I do not want to get sucked into this debate now, tempting as it is, and never to get on to the rest of the Bill; I do not think the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues would thank me for that. I recognise the issue and I am happy to discuss it post the Bill, but he will forgive me if I do not go down the road that Labour Members want by adding that in all of a sudden. I am not going to do that; we are going to stay with what we have. I am happy to listen to their concerns and to see whether we can make changes in future, but I do not give any guarantees.
Mr Duncan Smith
To be fair, I want to make a bit of progress, because a lot of people want to speak. If the hon. Gentleman wants to raise something else about the matter, I will give way to him later.
Pensions policy has not been updated accurately to reflect all the increases that I spoke about. I remind the House, however, that we are by no means alone in having to deal with this issue; others are making decisions about it. Ireland has already legislated for the pension age to be raised to 66 by 2014, and the Netherlands and Australia are increasing state pension age to 66 by 2020. The United States is already in that position, and Iceland and Norway are now at 67. Under existing legislation, the timetable for the increase to 66 in the UK was not due to be completed for another 15 years, yet the timetable was based on assumptions that are now out of date. The Pensions Act 2007 was based on ONS projections of average life expectancy from 2004. Those projections have subsequently increased by at least a year and a half for men and for women, so the situation is moving apace. That is why we are taking the necessary decision to look again at the timetable for increasing the state pension age. The Bill amends the current state pension age timetable to equalise men’s and women’s state pension ages at 65 in 2018 and then progressively to increase the state pension age to 66 by 2020. This new timetable will reduce pressures on public finances by about £30 billion between 2016-17 and 2025-26.
The impact of the changes on women has been debated enormously, focusing particularly on certain cohorts. All but 12% of those affected will see their state pension age increase by 18 months or less. I recognise that some 1% of those impacted will have a state pension age increase of two years, but it none the less remains the case that those reaching state pension age in 2020 will spend the same amount of time in retirement as expected when the 2007 Act timetable was being drawn up. That is an important factor. There will be no change to the amount of time that they will spend in retirement—some 24 years, on average. In fact, the women who are affected by the maximum increase will still, on average, receive their state pension for two and a half years longer than a man reaching state pension age in the same year.
Mr Duncan Smith
Hon. Members will forgive me if I make some progress. I gave way to the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) earlier, and, although I did not give way to the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop), others want to speak, and I must conclude.
All the changes should be put in the context of our recent Green Paper, which set out plans for fundamental reform of the state pension. They include the option for a single-tier state pension, set above the level of the means test, which would provide a decent foundation income in retirement for many of the next generation, who might otherwise be forced to live in poverty. Importantly, that includes many women and self-employed people who have tended to suffer poorer pension outcomes in the past, particularly women with caring responsibilities. The changes will be very beneficial for them. The Bill is therefore only part of the process, but it is critical as we take the necessary steps for the next generation. I believe that those are responsible choices for Britain, but responsible government is not always easy government. It involves commitment, tough decisions and a willingness to stay the course. We will not change from that—we will stay the course. We must try to secure our children’s future. The tough decisions are enshrined in the Bill, which I commend to the House.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
1. What assessment he has made of the likely effects of the proposed change in the state pension age for women.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
We published a full equality impact assessment as part of the White Paper on our proposals to bring forward the increase of the state pension age to 66, which sets out the effect on women of those changes.
Tom Blenkinsop
The coalition agreement states that the parties agree to
“hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66, although it will not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women.”
Will the Minister explain why he saw fit to U-turn on that promise and to start to increase the women’s state pension age to 66 from 2018?
Steve Webb
If the hon. Gentleman looks at the process of raising the state pension age to 66, he will find that early in 2020, the age will still be 65 and some months. It will not start to rise to 66 until April of that year.
Jobs and the Unemployed
Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)
The House appreciated the passion with which the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) put her case, but if she were being frank she would accept that, in the 1960s, 1970s and, again, in the 1980s, this country faced some difficult economic problems. If she looks back at the history of interventions in the job market, she will see that since 1979 we have tried various options. Indeed, there has been some success in putting people back into work by using employment-market interventions, but I am sure that in her heart of hearts she will accept that we have let many people, particularly during the past 13 years, fall by the wayside.
The people who were getting jobs through Labour’s employment schemes had skills or were in the age bracket of 25 to 49 years old. Many other people became part of that workless group whereby 3 million homes had no adult of working age in work at all. Those people were not seen on programmes, and very few of them were seen at all, so we need to consider a programme that really challenges that situation and looks to provide the help that people need in all aspects of work. Too many schemes have been based on just one benefit: if people were on one particular benefit, there was a scheme for them; and if people were from one age group, there was a scheme for them. However, we need something that captures all the issues and removes all the barriers to employment, so that everybody gets a fair deal from the Government.
There are some encouraging signs in the labour market. The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development’s latest quarterly survey shows for the first time in six quarters a plus 5 figure for the employment intentions of employers: they do intend to employ people. The figures for the south-east are particularly good, showing a strong intention to employ. Equally, Reed in Partnership, an excellent contracting company, has shown that the number of advertised vacancies is up by 5%, so there are some encouraging signs. However, the real question is whether the increase in private sector employment will be enough to deal with the undoubted fall in public sector employment and the likely redundancies there. That is the challenge for the next few years—to ensure that private sector employment increases sufficiently.
At The Times CEO summit last week, Sir John Rose, chief executive of Rolls-Royce, one of our best companies, was reported to have said that we as a country were very self-satisfied about the services boom in the Labour years, but that during that time manufacturing capability and competitiveness were on the slide. He noted that in higher education we are educating 7,000 people a year in media studies, at a time when China is educating technicians and people who will have skills in the nuclear industry. He rightly said that during that period we did not concentrate enough on investment in technical education at the secondary and tertiary levels, and that we need to address that issue if we are to have a future of success in the private sector.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
On Reed in Partnership’s job index, the hon. Gentleman mentioned the figure for growth, on which the organisation comments in its press release, but that growth is predominantly in financial services, accountancy and insurance. The index also states that, compared with February, the figure for this month in charity and voluntary work is minus 30 index points; in construction and property, it is minus 7; in engineering, it is minus 8; in health and medicine, it is minus 19; in scientific, it is minus 6; in social care, it is minus 8; and in training, it is minus 15. In the north-east—my area—the salary index has also fallen, so fewer jobs are being advertised for less money.
Mr Heald
I think the hon. Gentleman is wrong, because the headline figure shows an increase of 5% over the past six months, but he is right about the differences between sectors and regions. He makes an important point, which we should not ignore, and I shall return to it later in my remarks. However, Sir John Rose’s point was also well made. On the question of what needs to happen in this country, the role of apprenticeships should not be ignored, and 50,000 more apprenticeships are welcome, particularly given the good quality of education that they provide in technical areas.
In the latest CIPD survey, there is a lot of criticism of the abilities and work-readiness of our graduates, and there is a lot to be said for schemes such as internships, which get people ready for work so that they can do a good job as soon as they enter employment. I represent North East Hertfordshire, and a good thing about Hertfordshire is that we, as a county, have a series of institutions that are business-facing but educational. Our colleges are business-facing, and our university is well known as business-facing, which means that the county asks businesses what skills they need and our university provides the skilled workers. In terms of the employment service in Hertfordshire, if a graduate who is placed with a Hertfordshire company needs an extra skill, our university will teach them it, and our colleges all feed into that. It is no coincidence that we have the lowest number of NEETs in the country.
Mr Heald
The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point, which is that we are not good enough as a country at preparing people for work. If we look at why we have so many workless families, and why employers are dissatisfied, it goes right back to the beginning—to school. The fact is that 40,000 young people leave school every year in this country who cannot read, write and add up properly. It is not good enough that we do not have the technical people we need in business coming through. This is a failure of the whole system that needs to be addressed. [Interruption.] The hon. Lady chunters, but Sir John Rose is probably one of the most eminent chief executive officers in the country, he is running a company that is a great success story, and he is right to highlight the need to do better on technical education and skills.
Over the years, we have had a range of employment programmes that have not succeeded as well as we would have hoped. A few years ago, the Work and Pensions Committee looked into what contractors can achieve. We did a major report on how the Department for Work and Pensions commissions employment programmes and the role of prime contractors. We were encouraged by the international examples. We looked at what had happened in Australia and visited the Netherlands to look at what was being done there. That seemed to show that contractors were able to provide programmes more cheaply, but also to get better results. Professor Finn, who was advising the Committee, found that Australia was achieving, through “contractorisation”, an improvement of about 10% in job readiness and people’s ability to find placements. In the Netherlands, we were told very strongly that the people who ran these contractor companies were able to specialise provided that they were given enough flexibility in respect of the barriers to employment that there have been and still are.
Looking at the picture overall, I have reached the view that as soon as a person is not working, and we are aware of that, they must be interviewed to find out what the barriers to employment are that they face and start to tackle them. If somebody has basic skills problems, we need to get on to that at an early stage and tackle it—and equally, if somebody needs child care or has a problem with addiction. These are all areas where action is required. In relation to the work capability assessment for incapacity benefit, a lot of people have not been seen for many years, and the on-flow that has been examined so far seems to suggest that many of them are capable of doing some kinds of work, but not necessarily all kinds. Those people need considerable help.
If we are to help people who have the classic problems suffered by those on incapacity benefit—musculoskeletal problems such as back injuries, and mental health problems such as stress, and worse—it is very important to get in with an early intervention. More can be done by employers, the NHS and the system as a whole—including, perhaps, the companies that provide insurance for people who are unable to work—in getting together to see whether they can do more to get this help in quickly. It is not acceptable that somebody of working age who has a back injury and needs physiotherapy has to wait 10 weeks for an appointment whereas if they were seen quickly they could get back to work. I ask the Minister whether it is possible to have liaison and discussion with the NHS, employers and insurance companies to try to do better in getting involved more quickly and stopping some of these conditions becoming chronic in the first place. With back problems, that means physiotherapy; with mental health problems, it may mean talking therapies as well as the drug treatments for depression of the sort that are available these days.
Yesterday, I talked to people at the National Ankylosing Spondylitis Society, who said that all too often they have to wait a long time for the treatment they need to deal with their condition. For people of working age, we need to prioritise their health and have something amounting to a national occupational health approach so that we do not end up with a lot of people who become chronically ill. It is well known that someone who has been out of work with a disability for two years is very unlikely to work again.
I welcome the Work programme. The criticisms that have been made of it are a little unfair, if I may say so. The fact is that the economy has been put into a terrible situation by the previous Government. The future jobs fund is a scheme that has only just started, and it is not as though it is not being replaced by something that is probably better—namely, more apprenticeships. It is a bit disingenuous to describe it as a jobs fund, as though these are permanent jobs, when they are really job placements for six months.
Tom Blenkinsop
Speaking of disingenuous elements, the Government’s amendment refers to
“policies to stimulate private sector employment by reversing the damaging increase planned for employer national insurance contributions”,
which implies that that was a jobs tax. Is it not really the case, particularly for the north-east, as I have been advised by the North East chamber of commerce and the Federation of Small Businesses in the north-east, that the real jobs tax is the VAT increase that the Government have proposed?
Mr Heald
If the hon. Gentleman thinks about when we got 2.5 million extra jobs in our economy in a three-year period, he will recall that it was under the Conservatives in the 1980s. That was done by allowing businesses to have lower taxes and to be less regulated—by really giving them a boost. We need to do something similar to help business and to get off its back. We also need to provide the technical training that Sir John Rose talks about, together with a scheme that helps the workless—the people who have been left behind in the plethora of employment schemes that we have had for the past 30 years.
Mr Heald
If the hon. Gentleman looks back at the mess that this country was in when the Conservatives came into office in 1979 after the Labour years, he will see that it was not an easy period to be in government. He must accept, surely, that if we can improve on what has gone before, that is the best thing to do. We need to listen to somebody who is a thoughtful CEO saying that we need better technical training; to look at the idea of apprenticeships as good-quality training, which we all agree about really; to try to have internships so that our graduates are job-ready; and, on top of that, to have a Work programme that does not leave anyone behind, that is streamlined, and that involves contractors sooner rather than later. Surely that is the wisdom of our time.
Tom Blenkinsop
Interestingly, the majority of men and women on site in the steel and chemical industries in my area are in either their late teens or early 20s, or in their late 40s or early 50s, which suggests an 18-year period when apprentices were not taken on.
Mr Heald
The hon. Gentleman is right that in periods of our history, both sides of industry have not distinguished themselves in supporting apprenticeships adequately. I do not know whether he agrees with that, but now is the time to do the right thing, and to support apprenticeships and technical education. We need a scheme that works on the Work programme side, and hopefully this country can come roaring back from the mess it was left in by the Labour Government.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
13. What representations he has received on his plans for the future jobs fund; and if he will make a statement.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)
I have so far received virtually no direct representations on our plans for the future jobs fund.
Tom Blenkinsop
I thank the Minister for his response. The future jobs fund affirms the right to work, and it has done that for young people in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. Does he share the view of previous Tory Governments that there is a natural level of unemployment?
Chris Grayling
Our job is to get as many young people, indeed people of all ages, as possible back into government—[Interruption.] I mean back into employment. Well, our manifesto did say that we wanted everyone to be part of the task of trying to make things work. We need to get every young person we possibly can back into the workplace, and we need to get as many people as possible off benefits and into the workplace. That will be the purpose of the single Work programme, our apprenticeships plans and of the reductions that we are going to make in taxation on small business employers; and it is the reason we are not going ahead with the Labour party’s job tax, which would have damaged employment in the hon. Gentleman’s area and other parts of the country. Those differences of approach are what the country really needs.