Unemployment (Hansard, 15 December 1994)

§ 7. Mr. Skinner
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what estimates his Department has made of the costs of unemployment.

§ Mr. Aitken
In 1993–94, the costs of benefits paid to the unemployed in Great Britain is estimated to have been £9.7 billion.

§ Mr. Skinner
The problem with that answer is that the Minister has not taken into account all the lost taxes and national insurance contributions, other benefits that are 1061 paid to the unemployed and the cost of redundancy payments in many cases, which bring the cost of unemployment to a total to £9,000 a year for anyone unemployed. That is why another member of the Cabinet, the Secretary of State for Education, went along to a Select Committee and used that very figure. On top of that, miners who have been thrown out of work and who receive money from the Department of Energy—there are more than 100,000 of them—are not included in the unemployment statistics. The truth is that if the Government got rid of mass unemployment in Britain, they could wipe out the public sector borrowing requirement for next year.

§ Mr. Aitken
The hon. Gentleman is always full of instant solutions and wrong figures; today is no exception. The figure he has quoted is wrong. Successive Governments have declined to make estimates of the kind that the hon. Gentleman has made because they require all sorts of arbitrary assumptions and guesses to be made about the potential earnings of unemployed people and their spending patterns. It is safer to say that the implied costs of an unemployed person are about £3,500. That is why the figure that I gave in my original answer stands.

§ Mr. Garnier
Is my right hon. Friend aware that the costs of unemployment in the constituency of the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) fell last month because the unemployment rate there fell by more than 2 per cent.? Is my right hon. Friend further aware that the cost of unemployment in my constituency has fallen consistently since the general election? What lessons has he learnt from the overall unemployment figures throughout the country?

§ Mr. Aitken
Unemployment is falling all over the country at the extremely satisfactory rate of more than 1,000 a day. The hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) may not be aware of the interesting phenomenon in his constituency known as the "Bolsover diamond"—that is not a reference to the hon. Gentleman when he is in one of his rougher moods but a £35 million investment project under the single regeneration budget, £5 million of which came from the Government, the rest being raised in partnership with the private sector. That project will create nearly 3,500 jobs and train more than 1,000 people. That is the kind of employment advantage that the Government are creating through their excellent policies and the sound Budget of my right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor.