Orders of the Day — Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 6:53 pm on 19 March 1986.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Michael Fallon Michael Fallon , Darlington 6:53, 19 March 1986

The hon. Member for Greenock and Port Glasgow (Dr. Godman) does not seem to understand that in recent years Scotland has had the second highest GDP in Great Britain, after the southeast and East Anglia. There has been tremendous growth there, which has not been reflected in the north-east and north-west, and if the hon. Gentleman does not understand that, I invite him to visit some of the other regions of our country.

This is a popular Budget, and it has had a good press. It is a people's Budget, and I do not say that in respect of the various alliances and the bits and pieces of good news. Time and again, when weighing up the balance of advantage, one sees that it is a people's Budget, because the Chancellor has favoured individuals rather than institutions. That is as true of the cut in the base rate as it is of the imaginative new schemes for share ownership, capital transfer tax and the relief on giving to charities rather than to the institution receiving it. It is also true of the training measures, where the emphasis is on job clubs, job start, the enterprise scheme, and on the individual trying to get himself into work, rather than on the organisation that might or might not be helping him to do so.

That has to be right, because individuals, after all, are the key to enterprise. It is the individual release of talent and energy, of personal potential, that will create an enterprise culture. It will not be done by politicians, enterprise boards, county councils, development agencies or all the machinery and paraphernalia of the 1960s and 1970s.

Job creation will in the end depend on individuals, and I should like to stress four aspects. First, and most important, there is employment. We can no longer depend in our industrial society on large employers and on job-intensive, internationally mobile investment. Our culture has to rely much less in the employee mentality and much more on the self-starter, the risk taker, the small business man and the new business man. I give a warm welcome to the extension of the enterprise scheme; to the 100,000 places that will be provided by this low-cost, high-value scheme, because 70 to 80 per cent. of those who pass through the scheme are still in business long after the subsidy stops.

I also particularly welcome the extension of the job club and job start scheme nationwide, which restores the link—which I do not think should have been broken, although I understand how Sir Derek Rayner recommended that it should be broken—between the unemployment office and jobcentre. The only way to tackle long-term unemployment is on an individual personal basis, by calling in the individual who is out of work and offering him practical help and a real measure of support.

In placing the emphasis on that kind of support, the Government recognise that this is part of a much more general change in the nature of employment in our industrial culture, which embraces the growth in part-time working, contract working and the huge increase in self-employment. There is a curious paradox in a society with too high unemployment. As the manager of my local unemployment benefit office put it, "There is plenty of work about, but very few jobs." That distinction is still not properly understood in Whitehall, and the implications for the better and more rapid distribution of jobs into work really needs to he followed through.