Contribution
My Lords, on these Benches we welcome the encouragement the Government are giving to improving apprenticeships, reforming jobcentres and investing in the health service to cut mental health and other health problems affecting labour activity rates. The long-term sickness at the end of this Parliament, projected to be 2.8 million, is clearly completely unacceptable, and the social and benefit costs of that will be dire. We need to transform our training, career and employment services. The only problem is that we have been arguing and discussing this for more than 50 years of my political life. It comes up in every generation.
In this sort of debate or Statement, we should have in front of us all the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo, from the Budget debate. She said that
“if Britain were ranked against each of the 50 US states in terms of wealth, it would be last, with Britain’s GDP per capita … below America’s poorest state, Mississippi”.—[Official Report, 11/11/24; col. 1614.]
Our per capital income in this country has not grown for 10 or possibly 15 years; 25 years ago our economy was larger than China’s, and we are now 20% of the size of China. Those are the warning signals, and therefore investment in training is absolutely fundamental to the Government’s growth strategy.
I have six points, which I hope will be helpful, on aspects that I am worried about. First, as I said, we have been struggling with our training, career services and jobcentres for more than 50 years. There have been so many initiatives. Does the Minister accept that it is not going to take one year, nor five years, nor possibly even 10 years? This is a 20-year programme to get this right. It needs investment and long-term planning to achieve comprehensive reform.
Secondly, are the Government worried that there is a huge shortage of resources here? There are a number of schemes in this White Paper devolving to mayors eight trailblazers; we are going to spend £45 million next year. That is just £6 million per region. It sounds like quite a lot of money but in reality it is not, so there is just a slight worry that this is a sticking plaster trying to deal with a long-term problem. Too many of these funding projects are just for one year, when we actually need a long-term plan. The White Paper seeks to bring together the jobcentres and the National Careers Service to transform our training arrangements. This is going to involve a major culture change. Any other organisation undergoing this would be planning for the long term and understand that it is going to take a major effort to achieve it, let alone make an impact. Do the Government realise this?
Thirdly, the youth guarantee is a fine objective, but in the White Paper there is very little mention of the role of further education. This is one sector, outside universities, that has been neglected and underresourced over the last few years, but it is fundamental to all this. Are the Government going to set some objectives and produce a reform of further education?
Obviously, the one priority that the Government have set—quite rightly—is that we must clear the backlog in mental health care and in the health services, but all the evidence is that early intervention is required to get people back into work quickly. Is there a conflict between the long-term need to clear the backlog and having resources to deal with the short-term, immediate need?
Finally, reducing the backlog in the NHS, which is behind a lot of these problems, is going to require real progress in social care. I know that the Government are struggling to come up with their reforms on this, but I repeat that releasing the NHS beds that are being used for social care is absolutely fundamental to providing beds to get people back into the labour market. They cannot get the care at the moment.