Alison McGovern

My hon. Friend is right. When I was in Erdington, my Department for Work and Pensions colleagues and I met the college, Witton Lodge and other community partners. By bringing those people together around a common goal, we can change the fortunes of a place. As I will explain in a moment, that approach is knitted into what we set out in the White Paper in November. I want to mention my DWP colleague Lucy Divers, who has worked as part of the north Birmingham economic recovery board to bring DWP right to the heart of this local community approach. That is the right way to have a partnership where people can bring their different expertise to tackling the ingrained problems of economic disadvantage and unemployment. I met colleagues in Erdington, and we talked through the various challenges. I was struck by the importance of skills and the need to address the skills deficit, but we also need to ensure that young people—Birmingham is quite a young city—have access to the best possible jobs. I want to mention a few ways in which the Government have redesigned employment support to try to bring this new localised approach to enable us to work better with community and third sector partners. The last Parliament saw the biggest increase in economic inactivity in nearly 40 years. We remain the only G7 country with a higher rate of economic inactivity now than before the pandemic. We have a near-record 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness, and, tragically, almost a million young people are not in education, employment or training and many more are stuck in low-paid work. This is an absolute crisis. It is the biggest unemployment crisis in our generation. We know that we have to learn the lessons of the failures of the past 14 years. We cannot keep going in the same direction; we needed to change course. For me, that means localising our services, so we pay attention to the specific features of each place that we are trying to help.