Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:59 pm on 20 March 1986.

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Photo of Kenneth Clarke Kenneth Clarke Paymaster General (HM Treasury), Secretary of State for Employment 3:59, 20 March 1986

I shall look again to ascertain whether all local authorities in south Wales are agreeing to NALGO's demands that they top up the YTS allowance to an unnecessary level. If that is not happening, I cannot understand why local authorities generally in the right hon. Gentleman's area cannot participate in the two-year YTS on the same basis as many other local authorities throughout the United Kingdom. I do not accept that this is a general problem which we are failing to tackle. I believe that, if local authorities, as private sector employment and voluntary bodies, continue to participate, we shall find that the two-year YTS is a desirable and permanent addition to the training and preparation for work of young people.

I began by describing the new workers scheme which will follow on from the two-year YTS. It is an extremely valuable addition to everything we are doing to continue to reduce unemployment among young people.

Our second new programme is a package of measures designed to help the long-term unemployed which we call our restart programme. Ever since we began to work together last autumn, my right hon. and noble Friend the Secretary of State for Employment and I have become increasingly convinced that it is our duty to help those people who are in danger of completely falling out of the world of work. After a year or more of unemployment, despair and disillusion can set in in the mind of an unemployed person. Perversely, employers are reluctant to take on people who have no recent record of work to show that they can hold down a job and cope with the disciplines and pace of work. I have found in my contacts with my opposite numbers in the European Council of Ministers that the problem of long-term unemployment is an emerging problem in all our economies and is obviously one of the most important problems we should tackle.

Our plans, which we have carefully drawn up, are concerned with the social consequences of unemployment and the dignity of those seeking work as well as the creation of jobs. That approach underlines our ambitious plans to help the long-term unemployed. We have deliberately chosen to make a high priority of the 1·3 million people who have been registered as out of work for more than a year. We must not allow them to be left out of the better job market that economic recovery is producing.

We propose a person-to-person approach on an individual basis to each and every man and woman in the United Kingdom unemployed for more than a year.