Further action on the January employment figures and Real Help for the Unemployed
January 23rd, 2009 | by Site Admin |As unemployment rises we are increasing the help we give people losing their jobs. Labour believes that the unemployed are people, not statistics and that every time a worker loses their job it is a personal tragedy. Unlike in past recessions with the Tories at the helm, this Government does not believe that unemployment is ever “a price worth paying.”
This month Labour invested an additional £500million to give real help to people who lose their jobs. Other parties consistently oppose giving people more help and would cut back on the support available to people during the downturn.
- We have a choice: we can invest millions in people’s future now or pay billions in a future where people are stuck on benefits.
- Most people who lose their jobs still find work quickly, but our message is the longer you are out of work the harder we will work for you:
- When redundancies are threatened we provide advice and signpost skills support through our Rapid Response service.
- From day one of unemployment we offer a guarantee of financial support, and employment and skills advice.
- The vast majority of those who are unemployed return to work within six months.
- Labour is investing £0.5bn to guarantee more support to every person looking for work for longer than six months. And we will make a range of options available:
- ‘Golden Hellos’ – cash for employers to recruit and train unemployed people.
- Money and support for the unemployed to set up their own business.
- Training to improve skills to get a job.
- More chances to volunteer while looking for a job.
So what about the other parties? Where’s their action plan on jobs and employment?
The Tories – The Tories would do precisely what they did in their home-grown 1990s recession – allow the short term problem of losing your job to become the tragedy of long term unemployment. Half a million people were pushed onto Incapacity Benefit by the Tories in the early nineties recession and left there without any help to get back to work.
Today the Tories are claiming they can help people without spending any money and at a time when they would be making substantial cuts to government back to work help. They opposed the additional £1.3bn that we put in place at the PBR to give people more help to get back to work and they added a further £30m of cuts to this earlier this month. This will mean less help for people who need it most during the downturn.
The SNP – While the training element of this package is limited to England, where Labour is in Government, the rest applies across Britain. Labour is giving real help to Scottish people but we also need the SNP Government to take unemployment more seriously. In the last few months the Government in both Wales and England have been stepping up the help that people losing their jobs get. But despite Scotland having access to more money they haven’t done anything to help – in fact the only time they have shown interest in unemployment was to pick a constitutional fight demanding that job centres should be devolved.
Liberals – New Lib Dem Work and Pensions spokesperson Steve Webb’s first comment in his new role was to condemn Labour for giving more help to the disabled and lone parents because “they will be taking the very jobs the long-term unemployed could have filled.” The Liberals might think we should keep one group of people unemployed so that we can keep job opportunities open for another – we don’t.
The facts on employment figures:
- The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, claimant unemployment, was 1.16 million in December 2008, up 78 thousand on the month, and up 349,500 on the year. The claimant unemployment rate, at 3.6%, is up 0.2 percentage points this month and up 1.1% on the year.
- But it is important to remember that people are still moving off benefit as well as coming on. In December over 230 thousand people left the JSA count.
- There are still jobs available in the economy with 530 thousand unfilled vacancies in the three months to December 2008, an average of 10,000 new vacancies coming up at Jobcentre Plus every working day and many more come up through other recruitment agencies, websites and job pages.
- Thanks to the active system of support we have created most people who become unemployed only spend a short amount of time looking for a new job before they find one. 75% of people starting a new claim leave JSA within 6 months.
- And our wider welfare reforms are helping more people to get off benefits and into work. This week saw the latest yearly figures published which show that in the year to May 2008, the number of people claiming incapacity benefits fell by 47.4 thousand, to 2.6 million and the number receiving lone parent benefits fell 27 thousand to 739 thousand.
Most people who lose their job still find another quickly. We want to reassure people that employers are still recruiting, there are still jobs out there and we will do everything we can to help them into these jobs. Even in these tough times most people get back to work quickly. Across the UK, In the last three months of 2008, 650,000 people left JSA. There are more than 500,000 vacancies right now and 9,000 people coming off benefits every day. But we know that we must do more for those who find it hardest to find jobs.
The worst thing we could do in a downturn is keep people away from the labour market like the Tories did – shuffling them onto incapacity benefits and then writing them off. That’s what happened in the 80s and 90s Tory recessions and led to IB numbers more than trebling from 700,000 in 1980 to 2.6m in 1997. In the early 1990s recession alone half a million people were abandoned on incapacity benefit without any help to get back to work. We will not let that happen again.
That means giving people the skills they need to take up jobs, identifying future opportunities in new sectors and helping people to set up their own business. Labour is working with unions, employers and providers of back to work help in these tough times, and preparing for the future so that we can come out of the downturn sooner and stronger.
Labour is the only party which is in favour of taking action to support jobs and the economy now and offering real help for individuals, businesses and families.
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