Inner Cities

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:10 pm on 6 February 1986.

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Photo of Kenneth Clarke Kenneth Clarke Paymaster General (HM Treasury), Secretary of State for Employment 4:10, 6 February 1986

True to form, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott) has gone straight into knockabout politics and completely ignored the substance of the statement to which he is meant to be addressing himself.

The announcement that the Government have made today will be taken much more seriously in Peckham, Chapeltown, Highfields and the other places that I named. The essential part that the hon. Gentleman has missed is that the new initiative will go alongside all the other initiatives, policies and expenditure of this Government in all their Departments. The urban programme administered by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has trebled in money terms and doubled in real terms compared with expenditure when the Labour Government were in power. Spending on employment and training measures through the MSC has doubled since we have been in power. A great deal of that expenditure already goes into those inner city areas. We estimate, as best we can, that £670 million of central Government money goes into inner city areas on environmental, dereliction and employment measures alone.

Within those eight small areas, we shall see what better targeting and concentration of effort can produce. We shall get all the agencies of central Government, local government and the local private sector to work together to produce results.

The new money, in addition to at least £75 million going into those areas under central Government programmes, amounts to £8 million only. We are talking about small areas of cities — Peckham, Chapeltown, Handsworth—with a total population in all of them of about 300,000. I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that £1 million in each of those areas over and above the central Government money already going in, which we are going to target more directly, will have a most significant effect. The hon. Gentleman was misled by the impetuous barracking of those behind him who misunderstood what I was saying. He was quite wrong to seize on that point and to stress it.

The hon. Gentleman talked about other matters, some of which have relevance to what we are talking about and others which have not. I do not think it helps in this area to draw the simplistic connection which he does between riots and employment. Indeed, it is an insult to the inhabitants of inner cities to believe that they react in criminal ways to the problems that they all face.

The question of other ways in which we can improve in particular the position of ethnic minority youngsters who are at a disadvantage in the employment market was seriously considered by the Select Committee on Employment, to which I gave evidence yesterday. It is indeed true that there are various measures of positive action which can be taken to improve the job opportunities of those ethnic minorities. A large part of this initiative will be to try to build up black business skills and to give more management training and more opportunities for self-employment among ethnic minority communities. We intend to tackle the task much more seriously than the hon. Gentleman, who seems disposed to criticise it.