§ The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Denis Healey)Two weeks ago this House debated unemployment and resolved by a very large majority to take "all possible effective measures" to reduce it. In that debate I said that I hoped to present a further set of measures within a few weeks, taking account of proposals by the Manpower Services Commission and by the TUC and of other views expressed inside and outside the House. This I now do.
Wherever possible, the Government have been concerned to ensure that measures to reduce unemployment in the short term shall also reduce constraints on growth and employment in the medium term when recovery reaches its peak. I have therefore examined, with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Industry, the scope for improving our industrial base by further expenditure under Section 8 of the Industry Act on schemes for the modernisation and restructuring of important sectors of industry. The £110 million so far earmarked for such schemes is now largely committed. I therefore propose to allocate a further £55 million for new schemes such as printing machinery and nonferrous foundries, and to make available 635 further funds for existing schemes, particularly ferrous foundries. Some £15 million to £20 million of this sum will be spent in the next fiscal year.
On a smaller scale, the Development Commission has told me that it could usefully spend £1 million more than the additional sum allocated to it in September last year, for building small factories in rural areas during the next 12 months or so. I am authorising this expenditure since I recognise that unemployment has affected some rural areas with particular severity.
I told the House in the unemployment debate that we were looking at the possibility of further assistance to stock-building to help industry during the recession in fields where it is possible to foresee future demands with reasonable certainty. I am now pleased to be able to tell the House that the National Enterprise Board is discussing with the industry ways of providing finance for the stockpiling of machine tools of types which are expected to be needed during the recovery. The intention is to devise arrangements which will be a good bargain for the National Enterprise Board and for the industry and will help to maintain capacity and provide employment during the remaining months of the recession. I believe that hon. Members will welcome the rôle which the NEB plans to assume in the field of stock-building.
One of the worst-hit sectors in the recession has been the construction industry, although there are signs that demand is beginning to revive in some parts. We have taken steps in the last two years to provide it with some extra work in the public sector. In considering further measures of this nature I have had to make sure that there is no risk of expenditure slipping into future years. when public spending must be contained so as to permit the movement of resources into exports and investment. We have therefore decided to concentrate on the improvement of public sector housing, which can be started quickly and finished before the end of the financial year 1976–77. We propose to provide £50 million for such house improvement, where the effect on employment and the social benefit will be greater than in any other field of construction.
636 I turn now to the two temporary subsidies for employment which the Government announced last year. The temporary employment subsidy, which was introduced last August for a year, provides £10 a week per worker for six months for an employer who agrees to postpone a redundancy of 25 or more workers. It is now estimated that 55,000 workers will be covered by the scheme. I propose to make two changes.
First, I propose to extend the length of the period of payment. The first firms to use it will very soon exhaust their six months' entitlement. The maximum period of entitlement will therefore be extended from six to 12 months. This means that the 55,000 jobs affected may be preserved for a further period beyond six months. Secondly, I propose to reduce the minimum size of a qualifying redundancy again, from 25 to 10 workers. This is estimated to bring a further 3,000 or so workers within the scope of the scheme.
The gross Exchequer cost of extending the period of payment to 12 months is estimated at £14½ million and the cost of reducing the minimum qualifying redundancy at £1½ million. But there will be savings in unemployment benefit and gains in national insurance contributions and income tax. These will depend on the circumstances of the workers covered by the subsidy, but in aggregate they are likely to mean that the subsidy will have little or no net effect on the public sector borrowing requirement.
Next, I come to the recruitment subsidy for school leavers, through which employers who recruit unemployed school leavers receive £5 per recruit per week for 26 weeks. The scheme is at present limited to those who left school last summer or before, but I propose that it should now be extended to those who left at Christmas 1975. The cost of this will be about £250,000.
The Manpower Services Commission has been considering what more it could do to employ and train those who would otherwise be out of work. It has proposed an extension to its scheme for job creation. So far £40 million has been allocated to this programme, which should provide 30,000 to 35,000 jobs. If proposals continue to come in at the present rate, the whole of that £40 million will have been pre-empted by bids 637 received by about the end of April and approved by the end of June. The scheme would thus begin to taper off in the autumn, just when there is a particular need to provide extra jobs for those of next summer's school leavers who fail to find other work. Therefore, we have decided to allocate a further £30 million to the programme, as the Commission proposed, to keep it going at peak level until the end of the year. We shall neeed to consider before then, in the light of the latest prospects for employment, how quickly the scheme should be tapered off in the early months of 1977. This extension should permit the creation of some 20,000 to 25,000 extra temporary jobs. The net effect on the public sector borrowing requirement will be small.
These are measures to maintain or create extra jobs while unemployment remains high. I am convinced that they are both necessary and cost-effective for this purpose. But as well as these measures to provide jobs in the immediate future, we must do everything possible to build up the scarce skills which will be in demand when the economy is running nearer to full capacity. The Manpower Services Commission has put forward proposals to provide, from next August, some 30,000 to 35,000 extra training places in industry, at a cost of approximately £55 million. About £45 million of this applies to new first-year apprentice training and the rest to second-year apprentices and to other measures, including schemes for non-craft training of the kind that the engineering industry is considering. Again, the Exchequer cost of this is very largely offset by the savings on benefits for the unemployed, and this expenditure will be a valuable addition to the effort which is already going into providing training in industry.
First-year apprenticeship grants will be available to employers who take on extra apprentices under arrangements to be worked out by the industrial training boards in consultation with the Training Services Agency. I greatly welcome the speed with which the Manpower Services Commission has reacted to current needs, and I am glad to be able to accept these proposals in full.
I know that the whole House is concerned that we should do everything possible to avoid the demoralising effect of long periods out of work on young 638 people just out of school. The further education system should also have a rôle to play in this field. Therefore, I shall be considering with my right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Education and Employment what more can be done to make the best use of the further education system for this purpose during the recession.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland will be announcing the details of a comparable set of measures costing £8 million, of which about £5 million will be spent in 1976–77.
The estimated total cost of all these measures is about £220 million. But less than £140 million of this will be spent during the coming financial year. The large items of expenditure on training and on industry schemes are phased over the next two or three financial years because training is organised by academic years, and industry schemes are partly financed by interest-relief grants spread over a period. In both cases, however, most of their real effect on employment will be felt in the coming year.
Because of the offsets which I have mentioned earlier, the net cost to the public finances is likely to be less than half of the gross cost, or about £60 million, in 1976–77. Altogether, the measures are likely to provide about 140,000 jobs or training places—though not all these jobs will last as long as a year and some may be at the expense of other jobs. Over the coming financial year the net effect on employment should be about half that figure.
I am convinced that this set of measures is the most cost-effective way of providing more jobs as quickly as possible and of improving our industrial capacity without a general reflation of domestic demand, which is widely recognised to be inappropriate at this time, and within the limits on public spending which we must respect if we are to achieve stable prices and steady growth in the upturn. I shall, of course, want to consider in my Budget whether by then there is scope for doing more along the same lines.
§ Sir G. HoweI commend the Chancellor for having accepted the advice repeatedly offered to him from this side of the House to resist any demands for movement towards general reflation, and 639 I ask him for his assurance that he will sustain his will in that respect through the long and testing times that are still to come. I welcome particularly the sums devoted to improvement of facilities for training and retraining.
May I ask the right hon. Gentleman to tell the House the net cost to public funds, taking into account the figure he quoted of £60 million net in the coming year, of all measures of this kind that he has announced since his Budget Statement last year?
Will the right hon. Gentleman join me in repudiating the suggestion in a Labour Party policy document published today to the effect that reflation would in any way be rendered more acceptable if it were accompanied by import controls? Does he agree that that would be a disastrous prescription?
Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us what is the total number of jobs actually saved or created by all the measures he has announced since his last Budget? When he spoke to the House in December, he listed the actual number of jobs saved or created—I think the total came to about 14,000—as opposed to the potential. What is the number actually saved or created—as he would have it—by his measures up to the present time?
Does not the right hon. Gentleman agree that, whatever that figure may be, it will be far smaller than the number of jobs destroyed by the policies operated by the Government since they took office, by huge increases of £25 billion in public spending, by the tax burden which has been imposed to sustain it, by the multi-rate value added tax, by nationalisation and by the measure on which the House voted on Tuesday—the Dock Work Regulation Bill—since all these are measure which are destroying jobs and for which so-called moderate Members on the Government side continue to vote?
§ Mr. HealeyI am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman—I suppose I should be. Long before the Opposition were lecturing us on this matter, however, I was asked by the TUC and the Labour Party conference to resist general reflation at this time.
Since the Budget last year, the net cost to public funds in the coming financial 640 year should be about £100 million, but if the right hon. and learned Gentleman will put down a specific Question, relating it to a particular time scale, I shall seek to give him a more accurate answer.
On the question of import controls, as I told the House in the debate two weeks ago, in our judgment these could not be introduced by the Government on the scale recommended in some quarters without massive retaliation by our trading partners, which could well lead to a world trade war, and there is no possibility that such measures would increase employment on the scale sometimes suggested within the next year or so.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman asked for the total number of jobs created or saved by Government measures since the last Budget. Again, the measures I have announced since the last Budget will ultimately save about 150,000 jobs. The precise number saved so far net, for reasons I have explained in earlier debates, is extremely difficult to calculate at any single point in time.
I must say that the right hon. and learned Gentleman's suggestion that unemployment in Great Britain in the last year has been increased by the Government's spending programme is the literal opposite of the truth. On the contrary, without public spending on the scale that the Government have maintained, unemployment would have been very much higher. The House will be astonished by what the right hon. and learned Gentleman has just said, since we all know that only three weeks ago, on 22nd January, he asked for immediate cuts in public spending and confessed, for the first time, that that would mean substantial increases in unemployment in the short term.
§ Mr. AtkinsonIs my right hon. Friend aware that a great deal of satisfaction will be gained among machine-tool makers at his announcement, except that there will be some surprise that he has not outlined the guidelines which he has put before the National Enterprise Board and that he has made no mention of the figures involved? However, does he not accept that stockpiling should be extended far beyond machine tools and should involve heavy engineering and the re-equipment of the country if it is his purpose to re-tool the whole economy? Is my right hon. Friend further aware that 641 the very small and puff-like will-o-the-wisp announcements which he has made today will not go anywhere near far enough towards safeguarding the jobs which he has undertaken to the House to do?
§ Mr. HealeyI think that my hon. Friend is in some confusion as to whether to congratulate or condemn me. On the question of stockpiling, the details of the National Enterprise Board's scheme are being discussed with the industry and the Department, but the total sum committed is likely to be about £5 million. In the last debate I announced help from the Government for stockpiling steel, which is the most critical element in the whole future of our industry. We gave about £70 million for this. Last year I also announced stockbuilding by the National Coal Board to the extent, I believe, of over £100 million. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Industry is already discussing with other industries the possibility of extending the scone of such stockbuilding schemes.
§ Mr. Peter WalkerIs the right hon. Gentleman aware that in the construction industry, which has 211,000 unemployed, the £50 million—plus improvement grants will provide only 8,000 jobs and that the grants will still be only half the rate they were two years ago? Is he further aware that there will be great disappointment in the West Midlands that it seemingly continues to be discriminated against, despite the trivial amount of assistance it has received in the last two years? Is he also aware that there is about £1,300 million in deferred tax in the industry as a result of his stock appreciation provisions, and that the release of that money for investment would have been a major injection into the economy?
§ Mr. HealeyThe right hon. Gentleman has his own experience of packages to deal with unemployment in the construction industry. I examined very carefully what he did. I discovered that his plans for stimulating the construction industry were drawn up so unwisely that there was a slippage of £120 million from the second year into the third year and of £40 million from the third year into the fourth year, while the way in which he carried out his plans contributed both to the seizure of the economy in 1973 and to the gross inflation of housing and 642 construction prices in that same year. I believe that the Government were right to concentrate on construction schemes which would have an immediate and direct effect of a very large scale, both on employment and on the welfare of those living in public sector housing.
§ Mr. PardoeI remind the right hon. Gentleman that two weeks ago this House called for all possible effective measures to reduce unemployment, that it is still waiting to hear those measures, and that 70,000 extra jobs in the coming financial year falls far short of what the House called for in that debate. Will he now say that he recognises at last that waiting, as his strategy is, for a world upturn to put the British people back to work is no longer credible? Will he enter into urgent negotiations with the trade unions to provide a really effective package for job creation and selective reflation, as well as a much tougher incomes policy from next August?
§ Mr. HealeyThe hon. Gentleman asks so many times for so many things with such increasing stridency that I am sometimes at a loss to know what he is asking for. I do not blame him for his recent increase in stridency. We all know what lies behind that.
The measures that I have announced at this time will all contribute directly to increases in jobs in the immediate future. Measures of reflation—if by that the hon. Gentleman means reflation of domestic demand—cannot be expected to increase employment for at least 12 months.
§ Mr. NobleMy right hon. Friend has said that he will take all effective measures. Perhaps he recalls that before Christmas he announced a package when he said that he would preserve existing viable industrial capacity. Is he aware of the increase in unemployment, particularly in the North-West and in the areas dependent on traditional industries? Is he further aware that deflation in the economy at the moment is not only damaging our domestic industry but, while restricting exports, nevertheless allowing an increasing penetration of imports? Will he now listen to the TUC, which is a cornerstone of his policy, when it demands selective import controls immediately in order to preserve jobs?
§ Mr. HealeyUnfortunately, unemployment is still increasing in Britain, but it has been increasing faster in recent months in Japan, Denmark and France, and the percentage of the working population out of work is very much higher at this moment in the United States, Germany, France and Denmark than it is here. It is still rising very fast in Germany and France. My hon. Friend must accept the fact that the whole world at the moment is in the grip of the worst recession since the war, partly because, I think, far too many Governments, unlike the United Kingdom Government, underestimated the deflationary effects of the massive increase in oil prices a few years ago.
My hon. Friend can be assured, however, that there are many signs, to which I referred in the last debate, that the upturn has come in many countries. The recession has certainly bottomed out in the United Kingdom, and this is accepted as much by the CBI and the TUC as it is by the Government. It would be a disaster for the Government to repeat the mistake of the Conservative Administration in 1971 of ill-considered reflation. That produced the greatest distortions our economy has ever known and an inheritance from which the Government are only just rescuing the British people.
§ Mr. Donald StewartDoes the Chancellor accept that any measures to alleviate unemployment are welcome but that those which he has announced are far too derisory to make an immediate impact on the problem? Will the right hon. Gentleman consider raising grants for retraining since 40 per cent. of school leavers in Scotland are going into unskilled jobs? Will he consider making an increase in the amount put out for the construction industry, since there is bad housing and there is unemployment in the industry and such a move would assist beyond the contribution which has already been made?
§ Mr. HealeyI am well aware of the special problems faced in many parts of Scotland, although the hon. Member will know that the current recession has hit Scotland a great deal less hard than it has hit many other parts of the country. That is a tribute to much of the work by successive British Governments in helping the regional development of Scotland. As for the precise level of grant 644 for training, all our experience is that this is not a major factor inhibiting the take-up of training places. We have doubled the amount of training in the last two years, and I hope that both sides of the House will be grateful for that. However, the speed at which training can be increased depends on a large number of factors, and payment to those who accept training is only one method.
§ Mr. HefferWill my right hon. Friend accept from me that this package is much better than some of us expected, but that on the other hand it is quite clear that it will not be enough seriously to begin to deal with our problems? Will he again reconsider his attitude towards import controls? Even with what he has already done for the construction industry, this is not good enough. I hope that my right hon. Friend will continue to take into consideration what is said by Labour Back Benchers, by the TUC and by the Labour movement in the country.
§ Mr. HealeyI am immensely grateful to my hon. Friend. In saying what he has said he reflects the view of many who, like himself, criticise my general policies. I do not complain on that score. However, I have gone as far as I sensibly and effectively can go at this time with this type of selective measure.
Only selective measures are likely to affect the level of employment in the short term. The argument about what sort of measures should be taken to effect employment in the medium term—after 12 months and in the following years—will be the subject of debate for a very long time.
However, I hope that my hon. Friend will bear in mind the warning I gave in my speech a fortnight ago that the sort of import controls that the officials of one of our political parties—if we are to believe the Press—are recommending—
§ Mr. HealeyOf course I meant the Labour Party National Executive. The right hon. Gentleman would do himself and others a great service by sometimes keeping his mouth shut, although I shall not refer to him in the same terms as my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, North (Mr. Whitehead) used.
645 I understand the points that are put, but I ask my hon. Friend to appreciate that import controls on the scale recommended by junior officials at Transport House would certainly lead to massive retaliations, from which world trade would suffer, and the poorer countries would suffer most of all. The calculation that I have seen them quoted in the newspapers as making, about the effect on employment, is grossly exaggerated.
§ Mr. Maurice MacmillanI join in the general congratulations to the Chancellor for producing some reasonable looking bricks out of the small amount of straw available to him. Will he assure us that the new training proposals will not in any way be at the expense of retraining, including retraining of older men in new skills and young people who are already in work? In view of that, will he do everything he can to encourage employers to release young people for vocational and general education?
Will the right hon. Gentleman consider making at least some of the help he is giving to the construction industry available for public sector housing, to be used to help labour mobility? As he knows, the difficulty in getting people to move is finding them somewhere to live.
Will the right hon. Gentleman look carefully at the potential conflict between his measures to postpone redundancy and the measures he announced, at the beginning of his statement, to modernise equipment—he quoted the example of printing machinery? Ts he aware that there is no point in modernising printing machinery if the present gross scales of overmanning are to continue, because that will merely mean that the machinery will be unused and the orders will go abroad?
§ Mr. HealeyI welcome what the right hon. Gentleman said in the first part of his intervention. I assure him that none of the training measures announced today or on earlier occasions will be at the expense of training young people in work, or training older people. I agree very strongly that it would be highly desirable if employers would agree to release young people in work either by the day or for longer periods, in order to improve their professional qualifications.
I strongly agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the mobility of labour and the relevance to this of public sector 646 housing. In my last package I included a mobility allowance in order to assist in this respect.
On the question of printing machinery, I accept that there are problems of overmanning in this industry. However, they are largely confined to Fleet Street and London and are infinitely less serious in other parts of the country. That is certainly the case in the West Riding, which is where my constituency is situated. However, there is a real problem about antiquated printing machinery in some parts of the country, including my constituency. Some important firms with a valuable past have found themselves faced with serious financial problems because they are not at the moment producing modern equipment for sale not only in Britain but abroad. The measures I have announced will help substantially to improve the export prospects as well as the domestic prospects of the industry.
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. May I appeal to the House? I want to call several more hon. Members, but I ask them to be brief, because a lot of business is still to follow.
§ Mr. Michael McGuireI weclome my right hon. Friend's announcement, although I do not believe that it will do a great deal of good for my constituency. No town in England has felt the cruel lash of unemployment more than Skelmersdale, and in view of our desperate need of a hospital there will my right hon. Friend say whether his proposals for building in the public sector can be extended to building a hospital in Skelmersdale? A big project like that generates more capital and employment than does the building of a number of separate houses.
§ Mr. HealeyI welcome the spirit in which my hon. Friend has commented. I know that unemployment in Skelmersdale, particularly because of recent events, is as high as in any other town in the country. I did not feel able to allocate more money for hospital building because, first, it is not possible to build a hospital within a year and, secondly, the building of a hospital is attended by continuing current expenditure over many years. I was most concerned about construction work and concentrated 647 such money as I felt was available on housing, which is extremely labour-intensive, can be started tomorrow, and can be finished before the time that we expect unemployment to return to normal. The need to free resources for export and investment is paramount.
§ Sir P. BryanIs the right hon. Gentleman aware that the job creation programme is getting off to a very slow start? Is he further aware that Humberside County Council submitted an application for 44 jobs in October and has only just had it approved? Does that not justify the complaints of the Chairman of the Manpower Services Commission, Sir Denis Barnes, about the slowness with which the Government reacted to the plans for job creation put forward by the Commission at the end of 1974?
§ Mr. HealeyMy right hon. Friend will look into any specific complaints about the programme and I am sure he will consider the point raised by the hon. Member if he is given the details. Applications for job creation schemes were slow to come in, but there is a very large number now before the Manpower Services Commission and the Department of Employment. The money I have so far made available looks like being committed to schemes for which application has already been made. That is why I am increasing the scale of the programme by £30 million, to keep it flowing steadily through to the end of the year.
§ Mrs. HartI welcome my right hon. Friend's commitment to what is essentially no more than marginal short-term assistance to the unemployment problem, but is he aware that I am a little disturbed by his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Atkinson) about the amount to be devoted to stock-building? Is he aware that stockbuilding can not only make a great contribution towards resolving the unemployment problem but can also prepare the way for export success when the upturn comes? Is he aware that the £5 million given to the National Enterprise Board is utterly inadequate and that we would like the figure to be much higher? Does my right hon. Friend realise that the paper, which has unfortunately been the subject of a great deal of Press comment today, has considerable economic authority 648 behind it and that it would be wiser for him not to refer to it as just a paper produced by junior officials at Transport House? Will he refrain from closing his mind, in terms of a medium-term strategy, to the question of import controls and accept that there are two arguments about retaliation? Does he accept that in terms of creating employment as a result of a recovery, import controls might well be absolutely essential?
§ Mr. HealeyI am grateful for the welcome that my right hon. Friend has given to the measures. She is quite right in saying that they will affect employment only in the short term and that their effect will be marginal in relation to the size of unemployment, which we all deplore. However, no other sort of measure can affect employment in the short term. In the medium term—12 months and more ahead—we face a very difficult set of problems, but I believe we can rely on the upturn in world trade to affect employment in the medium term. We have certainly seen an end of destocking and there are some signs of a recovery in stockbuilding. All the surveys suggest that investment, if it does not pick up this year—though some plans may be brought forward—will pick up next year. The question of other action needs to be judged in the light of the disastrous experience of the last Conservative Government, who acted on far too large a scale at the wrong time. We are looking at the possibility of further action in connection with stockbuilding.
As for machine tools, my right hon. Friend will be aware that we have already committed £25 million to a restructuring of the machine tool industry, which will also benefit from other schemes in engineering, such as those for ferrous and non-ferrous foundries and for printing machinery. The NEB Stockbuilding scheme is only one element of the assistance to this industry. There has also, of course, been the transfer of ownership of Alfred Herbert's, which was collapsing under private control. On my right hon. Friend's last point, I shall never close my mind to anything, but, as an American politician once said, one should never keep one's mind too open, otherwise a lot of rubbish will be drawn into it.
§ Mr. Norman LamontIs the right hon. Gentleman aware that we firmly support 649 his resistance to general inflation, but is it not thereby the clearer that these measures will have a very limited effect, because goods cannot be produced without a market and we cannot produce machine tools to produce machine tools to produce machine tools? Is not the real purpose of these measures to prevent an illiterate Secretary of State for Employment from resigning from the Cabinet?
§ Mr. HealeyThe hon. Member's tedious and offensive remarks are quite out of keeping with the general tone of the discussion on these measures. The saving of 70,000 jobs may be a matter of no consequence to the hon. Member but it will be of very great consequence to the 70,000 people who would otherwise be suffering the demoralisation and humiliation of living on the dole.
§ Mr. MacFarquharDoes my right hon. Friend agree that the demoralisation to which he has just referred is particularly high not only among school leavers, but also among men aged over 50, who may see no prospect of any further job? Will he consider measures of financial assistance to firms prepared to take on workers in their fifties who have been through a retraining programme?
§ Mr. HealeyI recognise that the problem of unemployment bears very heavily on people in every age group and in every sort of situation. It has been generally felt by the House that if priority has to be given anywhere it must be given to young people who, if they find themselves without a job for many months or even years after leaving school, may find their propensity for work damaged for life. It was right for that to be our priority.
§ Mr. Anthony GrantIs the right hon. Gentleman aware that it is absolutely no comfort or consolation to someone unemployed in this country merely to be told that there are more people out of work in Japan and West Germany? Is he aware that in the last 16 months, unemployment has risen by 97 per cent. in development areas and by 118 per cent. in intermediate areas, while in the non-assisted area of London and the South-East it has increased by a disgraceful 159 per cent? Do these figures not indicate that it is necessary to have a completely fresh look at our whole 650 regional policy, in order to encourage mobility?
§ Mr. HealeyIn a rather bizarre and unwelcome way, the figures just quoted by the hon. Member show that the regional policy is working. The impact of unemployment is no longer distributed in the old development areas to the degree that it used to be. I somewhat resent being lectured by the hon. Member about increased unemployment when every policy for which he has voted in the past year would lead to increased unemployment, as the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer finally admitted in a speech a fortnight ago.
§ Mr. CryerWill my right hon. Friend accept a welcome from the Government Benches for the £50 million to improve public sector housing? But what is he doing towards research and development? Is he aware that there is no indigenous television tube industry in this country? All the firms are multinationals. Surely, while we are awaiting the upturn, we should develop our own technology and not rely on imports. Is my right hon. Friend aware that the notion of selective import controls is not rubbish—I am sure he did not mean to say that—and does he not consider that as Socialists, wanting to control the economy in a Socialist way, we cannot depend on the free market entry of imports and controlling the economy internally? I advise him that he is far more likely to receive rubbish from the City than from a Labour Party pamphlet.
§ Mr. HealeyI would not seek to distinguish the precedents in the area to which my hon. Friend referred, but I am glad that he welcomes the construction measures. On the question of import controls and Socialism, there is in some circumstances a case for import controls, and we introduced two selective import controls in the packet in December. But no Socialist would regard it as Socialist policy to export unemployment. At a time when all countries are suffering from heavy unemployment, the risk that an attempt to restrict trade in this country alone to protect employment might be seen as exporting unemployment and lead to retaliation is a very real one. One can see that by the reaction in the EEC to the recent suggestion of import controls in Sweden.
§ Mr. PriorI should like to press the Chancellor on his overseas comparisons. Is he aware that publications by the Department of Employment on 29th January and 10th February show that in the year-on-year figures Britain has a greater percentage increase in unemployment than has any other country, that on the three-monthly figures only Japan has a greater percentage increase in unemployment, and, according to the most up-to-date EEC figures, the only country which has a greater increase is Luxembourg, where the figures went up from 144 to 609? Does not the Chancellor understand, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, Central (Mr. Grant) said, that it is little consolation when the figures for other countries are quoted, but it is no consolation when those figures are quoted wrongly and the people at home are misled by the right hon. Gentleman's figures?
§ Mr. HealeyThe right hon. Gentleman accurately stated the facts in the earlier part of his question but in his final remarks he perpetrated an act to which I am not allowed to refer in Parliament. I can perhaps refer to it as a terminological inexactitude.
It is true that unemployment over the past 12 months has risen faster in Britain than it has in other countries. Nevertheless, in the past three months it has risen faster in Japan and Denmark, and at about the same speed in France. In the last month unemployment rose at least as fast in Germany and France, and, according to French predictions, is likely to continue rising in France through the year. The important aspect is that the level of unemployment is much higher in the United States, Germany and France than it is here at this time, and that in the United States, which has followed the monetary policies currently fashionable on the Opposition Front Bench, it is not expected to fall to the current level in Britain before the end of the decade.
§ Mr. SpeakerOrder. We must get on. Mr. Gow, on a point of order.