National Insurance Contributions Bill
11:15 am
Jane Kennedy: The reforms are taking place in an economy in which employment itself has grown very strongly. Notwithstanding the debate that is taking place about those not in education or employment, employment among young people has grown strongly. I know that in my constituency, as many of us will who have constituencies where youth unemployment was a serious scourge, it is now virtually non-existent. Therefore, it is within that context that we quite rightly started to look at how we could use the tax and national insurance contribution system to give more assistance to those households to which we were seeking to offer the most help and make the biggest difference, particularly in helping them into work.
The areas of greatest focus now are those people who continue to have difficulty getting in to work—those who have children. A whole range of policy measures were put in place to help families in those circumstances. All those have to be funded, and clearly those are issues that Government need to consider, when taking forward a reform of this nature. Equally, we are doing it in the context of an economy that is continuing to perform well in providing employment opportunities. In that context, you can start to consider making the kinds of decisions that were made in Budget 2007. Had we been in the context of a labour market of 15 or 20 years ago, such decisions would have been much more difficult for the individuals affected.