Torsten Bell

The most important fact for my Swansea West constituents is that wages at the end of the Conservatives’ period in office were stuck at the same level as when they came into office in 2010—14 wasted years for my constituents. To respond to the hon. Gentleman’s question about unemployment, I would not use the claimant count at that level because the data is not as robust as it should be. Several hon. Members have, over the course of the debate, talked about increases in the unemployment rate in recent months. Why has the unemployment rate gone up? It is not because employment has come down, but because the inactivity that shot up on the Conservatives’ watch has started to decline. That is what is going on beneath the numbers. Why do Conservative Members not want to talk about their disastrous record on the labour market? It is because they left us as the only G7 economy whose employment rate still had not returned to pre-pandemic levels. They left us with 2.8 million people out of work through long-term sickness, and 1 million young people not in education, employment or training—more than one in eight young people were left on the scrapheap by the Conservatives. Let me turn to the labour market today, which hon. Members have mentioned. Some 200,000 jobs have been created since the Government took office. Pay has outstripped prices, with the strongest real pay growth for years. Let me pause on the question of wages, because for many people, what they get paid is the economy. Here is a fact so staggering that it tells us all we need to know about the failure of the previous Government and the progress made under this one: wages have grown faster in the first 10 months of this Government than they did in the first 10 years of Tory Governments from 2010. That is what a country turning a corner looks like.