Government Employment Strategy

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs. Anderson, and to be back here. I was a member of the Select Committee throughout the last Parliament, and I have happy memories of Thursday afternoons contributing to these debates. It is excellent to see my old colleague and veteran of the Committee, the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), who must be in her second, if not third Parliament on the Select Committee. It is wonderful that such knowledge and expertise is retained, and I am sure that all its members are grateful for that experience—I see some hon. Members nodding. It is extremely useful to a Committee to have that collective knowledge going back. I am thrilled that we are having this debate this afternoon, because the matter is tremendously important. We have heard many positive ideas this afternoon. In such a debate, there have inevitably been criticisms, but there have also been many constructive suggestions, and it is in that spirit and that vein that I make my remarks this afternoon. The Government told us, rightly, at the beginning of their response that some 2.5 million more jobs have been created in this country since 1997, and many of those will have gone to migrant workers. Some 1.24 million 16 to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training—they are often referred to as NEETs—and we know that, overall within the economy, some 2 million economically inactive people want to work, but do not appear in the unemployment figure of 1.7 million, which came out yesterday. If that 2 million is added to the 1.7 million, around 3.7 million people of working age want a job but do not have one, which is why this debate is so important. I want to start by looking at training and the skills agenda, because I think that is the key issue in the Government’s employment strategy, and I think that they recognise that. The Treasury commissioned the Leitch report towards the end of last year, and we shall see the Government response in due course. Last month, my attention was drawn to an article in one of the magazines that come across our desks by Professor David Ashton of the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the university of Leicester. It was entitled ““Learning and training are two skills not one””. I thought he made an extremely valid point: that when we talk about the issues, we often confuse the equity issues associated with remedial education with training issues that employers need and which are part of a demand-led system. We merge the two together when we talk about this tremendously important area. He said in his article that after"““three decades of training programmes””—" this goes back over previous Governments—"““we still have 15 per cent. of working age adults who are functionally illiterate and 20 per cent. lacking basic numeracy skills.””" That is the backdrop to many of the issues that we are discussing this afternoon. What do we mean by functional illiteracy and functional innumeracy? I will give an example of both. If someone is asked to find an electrician and is given a copy of the Yellow Pages, they could not do so. That is the sort of definition we are talking about. If they went into a supermarket with £5 in their pocket and bought something, they would not know how much change they should receive. Those are two examples from the official literature that defines functional illiteracy and innumeracy. Employers rightly ask why they should be expected to pay for the sort of remedial education that I have just spoken about. Those people have been in the education system and at school for 10 years or more, and employers might ask whether the cost of addressing that illiteracy and innumeracy should go back to the schools from which those people came. It is important to be aware of that issue when discussing training. The Leitch review of skills had quite a lot to say about the work of the Department for Work and Pensions, even though the review was commissioned by the Treasury and dealt largely with the work of the Department for Education and Skills. My attention was drawn to page 124 of the report, where Lord Leitch said that there is no automatic basic skills assessment for new jobseekers when they make their claim. It is done only after six-months stage of being a JSA claimant. Even when Jobcentre Plus identifies basic skills needs, the report says:"““Only 11 per cent of people with identified basic skills needs…complete a basic skills qualification.””" Further on in the report, on page 127, Lord Leitch makes the point that the hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) made so eloquently earlier in the debate. He says:"““Around two thirds of all JSA claims each year are repeat claims, some 1.6 million claims.””" On learning those figures, we should think about what is happening in human terms. The report really says, ““People on JSA go into the labour market and get a job for two or three months before their employer realises that they cannot understand the health and safety instructions on the wall; and that, very sadly, they lose their job, go back to Jobcentre Plus, sign on until they get another job for a couple of months and then they end up out of work again.”” It is subsistence employment—going in and out of the labour market. It is a churn, and we must address the issue more seriously than we have done in the past. On 12 February, the Minister said that there should be a requirement on migrant workers who do not speak English to take steps to improve their English. As far as I understood his announcement, it was to be a requirement—I think that he is nodding at me from across the Chamber. Philosophically, is it such a big leap from, ““We the state are going to do our bit, be on your side and pay you—not a very big amount, but the JSA—every week to help you get a job,”” to, ““Should you not, therefore, as a citizen whom we are trying to help to learn reading and basic maths, work with us, and perhaps be required to do so?”” It is just a question that I pose as much as anything else, but philosophically, given that the Minister made an announcement on 12 February about migrant workers who do not speak good English, I wonder whether it is such a big leap. Perhaps we should consider that issue. On the skills pledge, I received a helpful brief from the British Chambers of Commerce that speaks favourably about the train-to-gain regime that the Government have introduced, and the new qualifications and credit framework, which has not been mentioned this afternoon. The BCC expressed its concern that the regime and the framework will not have bedded down or have been introduced for that long by 2010, when there is the implicit threat that employers will have to provide on a statutory basis the remedial training that I have discussed. I should like the Minister to respond later or to write to me about that issue. The BCC also commented on the sector skills councils, saying that there are rather too many of them and that they could be usefully rationalised. The brief is an important representation.