Government Employment Strategy

I do not know whether I would go as far as to say that such people have been left in the lurch, but as a group they are not catered for. There is a lot of talk in Leitch and the Government’s response about co-payment, as is so often the case across Government at the moment. Co-payment is fine in employment, but for a person not in employment, it becomes a non-starter. Another deficiency is that Leitch does not recognise that the starting point for people who have been out of the labour market for 10 or 15 years, as lots of lone parents have, should be the soft skills—building their confidence so that they can move back into work. Then we can move on to the academic or vocational qualifications. There is no real recognition of that in Leitch. It has always been difficult to quantify in contracting, but moving somebody a lot nearer to the labour market is every bit as valuable as getting somebody a couple of O-levels or A-levels, because it improves that person’s employability and willingness and ability to work. In our report on the pathways to work pilots, we made the recommendation, which we repeat in the report, that the Department should retain some of the savings gained from the reductions in benefit payments that result from people moving into work. This time, the Government response makes only a passing reference to that, yet the response to the same suggestion in Freud was extremely positive. The Freud report said that that is the way ahead and where contracting should go, and that the savings made from reductions in benefit payments should be recycled into getting more people into work and added rewards for contractors and providers. The Committee made a related recommendation. Currently, if somebody is in work for 13 weeks, their job meets the Government definition of sustainable employment. We said that the measure should be at least 26 weeks, and Freud says that it should be up to three years. In their response, the Government retreat into saying that it should be 13 weeks, because the evidence is that by the time somebody has been in work for 13 weeks, most of the barriers have been removed. I am sorry, but that is just not true. If single parents who start work could stay in it for 26 weeks, we would meet the 70 per cent. employment target for lone parents tomorrow.