[Mr. Bill Olner in the Chair] — Incapacity Benefit (Nottingham)

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 10:41 am on 16 May 2006.

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Photo of Jim Murphy Jim Murphy Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions) (Work) 10:41, 16 May 2006

Mr. Olner, I have to say that that is the first time that I have been intervened on by the Chairman.

Last, but of course not least, I should mention my hon. Friend Mr. Davidson, who rightly pointed out that I—and almost all my family—grew up in his constituency, in whatever configurations it has found itself in the past few years.

In the short time available to me, I shall not be able to answer all the questions raised during the debate. My officials have written an excellent speech, for which I thank them, but I shall not use much of it. I would rather respond to as many points as I can and save that text for another occasion.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South-West was right to say that I grew up in his constituency. It is the most significant reason for my having energy and determination for my job, especially in respect of the city strategies, the opportunity for people to find work—it was not always there for my immediate family—and the challenges of child poverty. All of us have had different upbringings, and different experiences of income, and of the difference between wealth and poverty. Some have managed to escape poverty, but those who do so must not forget those experiences. Despite the remarkable improvements of recent years, we should remember that too many children continue to grow up in shameful poverty. We need continually to challenge it.

I need no encouragement or additional commitment to get the work done; it gives me the opportunity to restart social mobility. I have spoken about it inthe past, but I was limited in my ability to make the changes essential to driving it. Working at the Department for Work and Pensions gives me an enormous opportunity to help change that cycle of social mobility, but that change has stalled. We could debate why, but it is a generational problem.

The changes in social mobility have come about over the generations, but there are three big drivers of social mobility. The first is the family and the mechanisms that the family employs to support the children; that is partly to do with the culture of work and partly to do with the culture of aspiration. The second is education. Education is a phenomenally important driver of social mobility, particularly early-years education—and even early-months education—pre-school education and support during the first few years of primary education. The third is poverty, especially child poverty. As we know, a child born in poverty is four times as likely to live in poverty in adulthood.

We need to break that cycle of generational poverty, that inherited lack of aspiration. The Department and others are helping to overcome that problem. Although I say that it is a generational problem, we none of us have the luxury to say that the solution is generational. The problem has built up over the generations, but it cannot and must not be solved over the generations. Instead, we have the target dates of 2010 and 2020 for alleviating child poverty and gaining the aspects of full employment of which we have spoken before.

The reason why we have a city strategy—I will respond soon to the specific points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North—is that we have a target of 80 per cent. employment for the United Kingdom. We are currently hovering at just under75 per cent. The employment rate in our great cities of Glasgow, London, Manchester and Liverpool is at or just below 70 per cent. Despite that, the greatest progress in the past nine years has been in the cities with the highest levels of unemployment and the highest levels of economic inactivity.

However, there are still real problems. There are problems not only in Nottingham, as we heard earlier, but in the five cities that we talk of most often—London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. For those five cities even to reach the current national average—not the 80 per cent. target but the national average of 75 per cent.—a further 400,000 people will have to find work .