When the hon. Lady got up to make an intervention, I wondered whether she would take the opportunity to say how much she welcomes the fact that unemployment has fallen by 20% in her constituency—a very good thing. I know she does not want to say that, but I say it for her.
I have to say to that no, we do not regret that. What we have undertaken since we came into power is going to hugely incentivise and improve pension savings and the savings marketplace. The extra vehicles announced in the Budget will rapidly improve that and I believe, all in all, that we will have a much better savings position than we inherited, so I think I have answered that question.
I need to make the point about employment and unemployment. Let me get this right: when we came into power, we inherited a situation where unemployment rose by nearly half a million. At its peak, some 5 million were on out-of-work benefits—1 million for a decade or more—and in one in five households, no one worked. The number of households where no member had ever worked doubled under Labour, from 184,000 in 1997 on an upward trend to 351,000 by 2010. I do not recall Labour Members mentioning those figures, and they avoided them when they were in power.
Correspondingly, since we came to power, unemployment is down 168,000 since the election. The claimant count has fallen by almost a quarter over the last year, which is the fastest annual fall since 1997. Workless households have fallen to the lowest rate since records began, down 450,000—two percentage points—since the end of 2010.
At the same time, we now have record employment: more people in work than ever before, more women in work than ever before and more people in work in the private sector than ever before—up over 1.7 million since the election. Ninety per cent. of the increase over the last year has come from British workers, unlike before, and more than three quarters of the increase since the election is from full-time work, up over 1 million compared with part-time work, which is up only 300,000.
Here is the point: we hear a lot from Labour Members about what they would do if they were in government, but youth unemployment increased under the previous Government by nearly half from 1997 to 2010—up almost 300,000. Now, on what the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary called
“the failure of this government to get young people into work”,
youth unemployment is down 81,000 on the year and is lower than what we inherited. The International Labour Organisation long-term youth unemployment is also down 37,000 on the year. The number of young people out of work and not in full-time education is down 63,000 and the long-term youth claimant count is down 23,900 on the year, having fallen for the last 15 consecutive months.
I remind the Opposition, who are chuntering away from a sedentary position, that under them long-term unemployment nearly doubled in two years, from 400,000 in 2008 to 800,000 in 2010. While they were seeing that rise, they gerrymandered the figures on the claimant count: 80,000 were put on to training allowances so that they came off the measurement of whether they were long term unemployed or not. Even though they were back out of work or back out of training, they went back as though they had just started their claims.
The trend slowed and is now falling. ILO long-term unemployment is down 38,000 this quarter and is down 59,000 on the year. The number on the claimant count for 12 months, ungerrymandered, is down 74,000 on the year—a fall of 17%. That is down, I believe, to so many of the reforms and changes that we have made, improving the labour market and improving the process of getting people back to work. The latest labour market statistics are remarkable and nothing demonstrates more clearly the Government’s success in getting Britain working.