The right hon. Gentleman must accept that although the best position to be in to get a job over the past five or 10 years was to be in employment, people are stuck on low-paid, zero-hours contracts in precarious types of employment. They are not moving on. There is no social mobility or economic progress. We seem to be stuck at the bottom floor when it comes to getting people into employment and that is not the model that we should be using.
I hope that the industrial strategy learns the lessons of the productivity plan. The Select Committee will publish our report into the Government’s industrial strategy later this week, and we hope that it will address some of the matters that the productivity plan does not: a longer-term focus providing more policy certainty; greater collaboration and co-ordination across Government to mitigate the problem of a silo-based approach across Whitehall Departments, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle); and the lack of meaningful metrics, milestones and measurements of success. If it is to work and succeed, the industrial strategy cannot just be this year’s model; it needs to be a thoughtful and well-established cornerstone of an economic and business policy framework, and an economic and business mindset, to increase productivity, compete with the rest of the world, and improve living standards for all in this country.
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