Child Poverty Bill

My Lords, I can see some merit in the argument that the noble Lord has put. As someone who has served an apprenticeship, I know that when a person works long and hard in a factory where there are perhaps 300 or 400 workers and redundancy comes along, the one thing that they are not used to is self-employment. They could be tradesmen. By that, I do not mean to be chauvinistic: I mean tradeswomen as well. When I say journeymen, I mean journeywomen as well. When tradesmen and journeymen are faced with self-employment, they do not know how to go about it, because they have always had an employer who looks after the administration of their wages, their national insurance and tax deductions. When we try to help people in poverty and out of work, there is a case for saying, "Look, you’re an electrician. Why don’t you work for yourself?" or "You’re a plasterer. Why don’t you work for yourself"? But it takes training. People do not just go from working for an employer out into the street and just get on with being self-employed. There is more to it than that. The promotion of business, particularly in our poorer areas, will help substantially. I stayed only two miles outside my previous constituency, so I travelled through it almost daily—in fact, I travelled through it coming here. There is a carwash system there. Often, when we talk about people living in areas of higher unemployment, we say, "Ah, they don’t want to work", but that is not particularly true. The carwash system that I walked past is manually operated. We often have sub-zero temperatures. When you get snow down here, it becomes a big national issue; when we get snow up home, nobody talks about it. I see people there working in wet, soaking conditions all day and every day, and in low temperatures. They gladly work hard, and my heart goes out to them. Many of them live in some of the areas where there is deprivation. There is no point in going into those housing estates and talking about socio-economic disadvantage; they will say things like, "We’ve not got any money", or, "We’ve got bad housing". They will say something like, "I’m skint"—which means they have got no money. They will not say, "I’m at a socio-economic disadvantage". I have a wee difficulty with the language. It is all right for the academics reading this, but it is hard for the very people that we want to reach to understand. If you are trying to help people, you should use language that the recipients understand—and, looking at this Bill, I do not believe that we are doing that. On enterprise, I dealt with a lot of asylum seekers. One came in from eastern Europe, and he was not allowed to work, because while you are claiming asylum you cannot have a work permit. Lo and behold, he went to an industrial estate and got a small unit, half the size of this Room, and set up a car valet scheme. He was earning quite a lot of money. I told him, "You’re not allowed to do that". He came to me as the MP and said, "Tell the officials to leave me alone—I’m earning, I’m doing well here". I said, "But you’re not allowed to do that". The point is that he came from a part of Europe where it was part of the culture to become self-employed. It is not that people are lazy in some of the areas that we are trying to help, but self-employment is not in their tradition or their psyche. In Glasgow, there used to be hawkers—I do not know whether they are called hawkers here in London. They were men and women who had wheelbarrows and who went round the doors and sold second-hand clothes; it was honest, hard work. Many of the sons and daughters of those hawkers, because they were self-employed, were not afraid to get into business on their own. But there are people who are afraid to do so. If you can get enterprise schemes and give training and give the skills, that is so important. We must give apprenticeships—we must even give adult apprenticeships. Many of the men and women who are unemployed are unemployed because when they left school no one was looking for an apprentice at that time. They went into unskilled work and became unskilled labourers. Therefore, when they were made redundant, they could not turn their hand to other things. If we had schemes by which we could give adult apprenticeships and give apprenticeships to young people leaving school, that would build up their confidence to such an extent that they would be prepared to get into self-employment. I would not get into the argument about whether self-employed couples do better than couples who are employed. The name of the game is to earn a wage, so that the child can get the benefits that other children get. That is the important thing.