Unemployment

Let me make a few brief points. There is a lot of emotion and pain about rising unemployment, for the many reasons that were eloquently expressed by many Members from across the Chamber, including, as the hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) said, my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron). We make those emotional points strongly not because we want to re-fight the class wars of the 1980s and 1990s, but because we want to ensure that we learn to understand the impact of letting unemployment rise unchecked without properly and effectively intervening. I therefore hope that Government Members will not misinterpret me when I say that one of the things that we should learn about—in addition to what happens when whole generations are lost, along with the insult and disrespect that they feel—is what that leads to, in terms of alienation and the kind of behaviours it can drive. When we look at the lessons from the interim report of the official inquiry into the riots, I hope that we will take note of the rising sense of alienation among our young people and ensure that our employment policies specifically address it. I want to ask a couple of questions about the Work programme. It cannot resolve the shortage of jobs, but it can prepare people to be better able to take the opportunities if and when they are made available. It is a matter of great regret to many Labour Members that there is so little transparency about how the Work programme is performing. I hope that the introduction of the wage subsidy, which it seems might be related in some way to the operation of the Work programme, will not mean a double payment to Work programme providers or a double cost to the economy. I hope the Minister can reassure us on that. I hope, too, that he will say something about whether providers continue to see Work programme contracts as viable. Providers in my region are certainly expressing the concern to me that the lack of jobs means that it will not be possible for them to carry on without coming back to have further discussions with the Government about the payment structure and rewards built into the contracts. We need to know just how Ministers see the economic and financial viability of the Work programme in these very different economic circumstances from those in which the contracts were designed and let. The Minister should acknowledge that the payment structure in the Work programme does not reward people only for getting someone a job and keeping them there for two years. There should be interim payments all the way through. When we look at the way in which people are moving into employment, I am particularly concerned that we do not move them just to short-term, stop-go, sporadic episodes of employment, whereby Work programme providers pick up some of the payment and redesign their model to make it sufficiently economically viable for them to keep the contract manageable, but do not deliver the sort of long-term sustainable jobs that I think we all want. Finally, let me support the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith). The Government have tools at their disposal not to make the situation worse. I ask them to look urgently at two aspects of tax credits. The first is about the operation of the rule that, as my hon. Friend said, requires couples to work a minimum of 24 hours. We know that employers are not able to offer more hours in the current economic climate, and that rule is going to drive people out of the workplace. I also ask Ministers to look once again at the operation of the child care element of working tax credit. Aviva has shown us that about 32,000 women are leaving the workplace because they cannot make work pay. That is a false economy, and I hope Ministers will—