Welfare Reform Bill

I take the hon. Gentleman's point, but I want to say a couple of things about former employees of Woolworths. Of the 30,000 people made redundant by the company, fewer than 6,000 have made a claim for benefit. The numbers still on benefit are dropping day by day, so it is clear that the closure of Woolworths was not the catastrophe that it was supposed to have been. In addition, the average staff turnover in retail is 26 per cent. a year, which means that people who leave a job are not always losing it. Staff changes are common in retail: even in the current difficult climate, almost every major retail chain has hundreds, if not thousands, of vacancies across the country. I do not think that it is typical for a retail worker to work for 30 years and have no experience of unemployment, but some 2.5 million people every year make a new claim for jobseeker's allowance. That has been going on for many years: people seem to think that unemployment does not happen any more, but it does. Yet it is also true that 2.5 million people also move into work every year, and that the vast majority of them do so within three months of making a claim. There has been huge activity in the economy in the past few years. At present, slightly fewer people are getting jobs and slightly more are losing them, but that economic activity is still going on. There is still a role for Jobcentre Plus, but the person mentioned by the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) who has worked for one company for 30 years is exactly the sort of person who will benefit from the skilled personal adviser. A lot of advice is given at the initial interview, and it is obvious that a person with a proven track record of work is much more likely to get another job rapidly. I accept that the profile of people who have been unemployed more than 12 months will change. The new arrangements are not in place yet: they will start feeding through only this autumn, and that is another reason why we need specialist provision. However, offering that specialist provision to every claimant from day one would probably treble the bill for Jobcentre Plus. That would not be very good economics.